Live Art Bookshop: ABSCISSION Launch

Join us for the launch of ABSCISSION, a book by performance artist, educator and researcher Dani d’Emilia.

Borrowing its title from the botanical process through which plants shed leaves, fruit or flowers, the book investigates release as an ecological technology of care and relational reconfiguration across different bodies. Dani engages their experiences of hysterectomy and non-binary mastectomy as entry points into wider questions of transformation, queerness and more-than-human kinship, inviting readers to move from overwhelm towards wonder with radical tenderness.

Through performance documentation and visual works spanning seven years, as well as critical and poetic writing, ABSCISSION considers how we might navigate endings, identity, metabolic intimacy and planetary crisis beyond the binaries that shape dominant ways of understanding ourselves and the world. Designed by David Caines, the book also includes writing by Vanessa Oliveira Andreotti, Panamby and Joseph Morgan Schofield.

The evening will feature a presentation by Dani offering images and insights into the artistic and research process behind the book, followed by a conversation with co-editors Joseph Morgan Schofield and Sam Amsler and an audience Q&A.

Copies of ABSCISSION will be available to purchase at the event and through the Live Art Bookshop. The event is supported by Musagetes and is part of the Future Ritual Festival, where Dani will also facilitate a workshop on Wed 25-Thurs 26 November.