Intertitles , livre ebook

Intertitles
An anthology at the intersection of
writing & visual art edited by Jess
Chandler, Aimee Selby, Hana Noorali
& Lynton Talbot
*Reader discretion advised.
This book contains language that some readers may
fnd disturbing, including reference to sexual and emotional
abuse, physical violence, murder and drug use.*inter**titles*Editors’ Preface Adina Blowtorch
Foreword by Isabel Waidner / What if?
ix / xv Adam Christensen
77
Shh
Fatema Abdoolcarim About the Body and
21 Likeness / Thank You For
Your Honesty
still-face Sophie Collins
Victoria Adukwei Bulley 85
39
CORONA DAZE
LET’S SIGN SCIENCE CAConrad
/ WRITING AUDIO 93
DESCRIPTION AT THE ULSTER
MUSEUM / DINNER PARTY Six Poems
Bebe Ashley Rory Cook
45 105
Undone in the face The Letter
Anna Barham Jesse Darling
53 115
I NOTICED THAT BLACKSPACE
DELPHINE SEYRIG WAS Anaïs Duplan
ONE OF THE ACTORS IN 121
THE FILM PULL MY
DAISY (DIRECTOR ROBERT Fuck / Tupac
FRANK , 1959) Inua Ellams
Paul Becker 137
61
spring
In this regard, excerpt of Olamiju Fajemisin
how to ensure a proper ft to the 143
weapons, particularly the
MARCHING BOOT in the year Soft Blues
2013: / equal to the chords, in Johanna Hedva
the wind (string theory) / 153
Wave Form Walks the Earth /
The Destroying Angel Second Sun Syndrome
Elaine Cameron-Weir Caspar Heinemann
67 177
Frau Welt AR TICULATIONS
Sophie Jung Flo Ray
185 331
MADEMOISELLE eat clean ass only
LA MARCHANDISE / on venus
Sharon Kivland P. Staf
223 343
About being scared Point of View /
Tarek Lakhrissi It’s Too Heavy Alone
239 Alice Theobald
353
Images TK or
‘An acknowledgment that Blackbirds
it is impossible to move Jesper List Thomsen
forward’ / ‘ Q ’ di Quadro or 361
My Body, Her Refrain
(It Comes Back) Afterword by Vahni Capildeo
Quinn Latimer ccclxxvii
249
Image Descriptions
Tracklist / Biographies
Complicity, Fetish, Agency Acknowledgements
Ghislaine Leung Note on Title Cards
265 ccclxxxi / ccclxxxvii / cccxciii
/ cccxci v
Value Subtracted:
A Poetics of
Access and Interference
Jordan Lord
277 We Could See You
Coming / All Red / This Voice
Adaptation / loose insert
Dasha Loyko Laure Prouvost
313
Title Cards
Beamers Matthew Stuart & Andrew
Charlotte Prodger Walsh-Lister
323 * **curtains*We Could See You Coming
these printed words could see you reading
see you reading
So great you’re here reading
You’re the frst one to read these words
You’re the only one who read this tooday
You’re the only one who opened this book today
You’re the only one who these words wanted to be read
You’re the only one really welcome
these words always wanted you to read them
You are the only one they really wanted you to read
You’re the frst you to read these worse in this voice
the frst one
these printed words think you are so interesting you know*fade**in*Editors’ Preface
Jess Chandler, Aimee Selby, Hana Noorali
& Lynton Talbot
In May 2019, Hana and Lynton were working on an exhibition that would
open that October at the David Roberts Art Foundation, London, as p art
of its annual Curators’ Series. CalleThe Sd eason of Cartesian Weeping ,
the exhibition was to consolidate, put into practice and stress-test s ome
of the thinking they had been developing around the role of language in the
visual arts and its use as a material by artists. Particular focus was pl aced
on developing a shared praxis with artists who considered language its elf
as the building blocks of immaterial architectures, spaces that might s
imultaneously provide shelter from and repel certain forms of institut ional
domination or co-option.
The exhibition also aimed to address a contradiction at the hear t of
our cultural institutions and territories for art: that while they ofer efective
spaces to voice political dissent and to platform activism, in occup ying
those spaces we simultaneously sustain many of the problems that art
intends to critique—unpaid labour, unethical corporate partnerships,
structural racism. Rather than refuse such a space altogether, artists were
invited to consider how language might be used to build environments that
can facilitate more discrepant forms of knowledge production to e vade
the relentless market capture of ideas, language and sociality that defnes
our current political climate. This would be a kind of critical disarmament
in which language and discursive modes might be harnessed to reorient ,
retell or reimagine our relations to the institutions and territorie s that
stratify us. The critical impulse of this project is one that also drove the
Intertitles inquiry.
Although divergent in approach, the work produced within The Season
of Cartesian Weeping could be broadly characterised as poetry. Though
multifarious in nature, the oppressive structures identifed in the project
were understood as symptomatic of increased capitulation to neoliberal
market forces and a technocapitalism that not only resists but, increasingly,
casually co-opts forms of refusal and counter-hegemonic modes of being.
The exhibition tested the assertion that the commandeering of language
back from the violent ways in which neoliberalism fnds expression in
our speech is a crucial form of resistance to the infrastructures that frame
our experience and codify our behaviour in the world. Poetry, in thi s
sense, might be a critical force in building another space for encounters
with art.
At the same time, Jess had recently established Prototype, building
on the work of its precursor, Test Centre, to explore more deeply the int- er
play between poetry, writing and the visual arts. Prototype’s commitm ent
to providing a space for interdisciplinary publications, in a publishing
environment so restricted by the demands and structures of its marketing
and distribution systems, posed an equivalent response, its own f orm
ixof resistance to market forces, asserting the importance and fe asibility
of an alternative publishing model whose existence was conceived in direct
response to the needs of artists and writers.
It was in this context that Prototype frst extended the invitation to
collaborate and we began our early conversations around our shared ideas.
With the addition of Aimee, who had previously edited the volAumrt and e
Text (2009) and who is an editor of art books and exhibition catalog ues,
we found an ideal balance of perspectives, combining publishing, editorial
and curatorial expertise, each with our own interests, tastes and concerns.
We began to discuss the possibility of a publication and posed quest ions
to each other about the relations between language, poetry and art and how
an exploration of this might land on a page in a way that could illuminate
their confuence in useful ways.
Together we developed a specifc point of entry; namely, that p oetry
can be understood as a counter-hegemonic force within culture, as well as
the question of why, at this specifc moment in time, writers are increasingly
wanting their work to circulate in the visual art arena and artists are in - creas
ingly working with language to realise their ideas. The book would rec-og
nise poetry as a communal tool for resisting our own unwilling inscription
into processes of domination. It would recognise that even if poetr-y some
times utilises the language of marketing an PRd , of rhetoric and polemic, it
does so in a way that self-refexively critiques these frameworks and remains
an essential expression of emancipatory politics. We would attemp t to
articulate the intersection of these procedures, not by inviting ekphrastic
poets or artists who write as part of their creative process per se but b - y invit
ing writers and artists in any capacity who are interested in the pot ential
of language to constitute new spaces of encounter outside the normative
and increasingly contested structures available for our cultural engagement.
As a team of editors we developed our proposition: that language i s not
only capable of reimagining and constituting such a space, but essent ial
to the task.
During the process of making this book, in February 2020, the University
and College Union brought a nationwide strike action that incorpora ted
74 universities over 14 days in protest at the failed marketisation of education.
The action disputed greater workloads for less pay, signifcant ethnic and
gender pay gaps, the increased casualisation of work and reduced emplo yer
contributions to pensions. This was closely followed by the onset of the
Covid-19 global pandemic, which fully exposed the categoric failure of free
market capitalism to respond to the real needs of people. The pandemic
only served to highlight the injustices and social inequities that have been
hiding in plain sight for decades in accordance with an economic ideology
that increasingly came to look like nothing but a death sentence to the poor,
the elderly, the vulnerable, the sick and the homeless.
During the summer months, George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin,
a Minneapolis police ofcer, while his fellow ofcers watched and actively
prevented others from intervening. This ignited some of the largest pr otests
in US history as well as global protests in the name of the Black Lives Matter
movement. Simultaneously, this raised a complex conundrum: at a time
xwhen our voices and bodies were critical in making ourselves hear d
publicly, being and speaking in public during the Covid-19 pandemic was a
serious danger to public health. People were galvanised around the po-ssi
bility of imagining something diferent, and a staggering array of resources,
literature and techniques were shared among communities on- and ofine
with regard to supporting the cause in more fugitive ways, speaking to the
efcacy of collective action, imagination and open communication.
Context loomed large over our inquiry then, and it continues to d o
so as we remain in lockdown at the time of writing. In Simon