the pink sky reflects the bloody earth

This guide celebrates the diversity and innovation of queer individuals in London, both historically and today. Delving into the cultural history of queerness in the capital, this book guides the reader through a welcoming spectrum of bars, clubs, shops, Pride events, charities, saunas and sex shops that cater to the LGBTQ+ community.

Chronic Illness sewage: a decade of bodily decomposition

During the sewage thaw of 2015, in the underbelly of Hollow way, neo fungoid infection spread into an abandoned bookstore in London. Hidden at the back, there was an orifice of c.analisation: a rotten mouth, warty sphincter, tranSSexual organ or cannibalistic skin pore, if not biotech digestion tissue. Opening the hole of the sewage orifice, a monstrous wound created a hungry suction of corporeal implosion, collapsing humanoid bodies into fetishist origami. Mycelial shibari splices connected to the internet by generating microbial AI that mutate humanoid biomorphs away from their digital screens into the escapetrap of our slum, animated within by mouldy manhole. Decade later, the inner membranes of Chronic Illness sewage live off vital traces of hundreds body acts, subterranean floods & bdsm fermentations into posthuman immersive theatrics against the society.

Fungi Media positions performance art of bodily mutations as a form of corporeal philosophy. Examining ecologies of rot and fungal decomposition, it outlines a theory of fungosexuality beyond sexual reproduction and binary gender roles. This theoretical perspective repositions queer sexualities in the context of the original meaning of the term ‘queer’, which is ‘rot’ – and which stands for a fungi-induced process of decomposition. With this, Fungi Media explores the foundational importance of rot for both breaking down and sustaining bodies, relationships and life as such.
The project was developed in a squatted sewage space in London, adopted by the author as a laboratory for mutant performance. The space hosts Chronic Illness events, where Internet-inspired body artists enter an environment populated with fungi. The interventions of human performers are incorporated into the rotten physiology of the space, which itself becomes a live entity. This book involves those events in the analysis of connections between media technologies and primal life processes. It also offers strategies for urban dwelling which transcend normative family life.

Read more at Open Humanities Press– Fungi Media

The first of its kind, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, gathers together a diverse range of 55 poets with varying aesthetics and backgrounds. In addition to generous samples of poetry by each trans writer, the book also includes “poetics statements”-reflections by each poet that provide context for their work covering a range of issues from identification and embodiment to language and activism.

Through her engaged and articulate essays in the Village Voice, C. Carr has emerged as the cultural historian of the New York underground and the foremost critic of performance art. On Edge brings together her writings to offer a detailed and insightful history of this vibrant brand of theatre from the late 70s to today. It represents both Carr’s analysis as a critic and her testament as a witness to performances which, by their very nature, can never be repeated.

“A love letter to artistic research, Seita’s writing celebrates the desire, disorientation, and discovery to be found in feminist practices of reading. A potent reminder of generative passin thatwe can only wish motivated all critical inquiry.” -Gordon Hall

A critical exploration of the creative practice, socio-historical context and cultural impact of multifaceted artist Leigh Bowery. Engaging with Bowery’s key looks and live art through a variety of disciplines and challenging research contexts, Sofia Vranou navigates costuming as a performative strategy that blurs the boundaries between art and life.

Thought-provoking and enlightening, the study investigates his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire as well as his fascination with extremity, hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language, establishing Bowery as a radical figure in contemporary perfromance and queer visual culture.

This funny, playful, rude and serious artist’s book is for anyone who wants an alternative queer and Othered take on the soft and hard power of monarchy. It reveals the discrepancy between its optics and objectives. Homosexual Death Drive plays The Groom of the Stool, or royal arse-wiper. She guides you through Poundbury’s grandiose avenues and lesser-known alleyways. In a bizarre twist, she meets Camilla at Buckingham Palace.

Discover Poundbury’s history, ideology, use of pseudo-tradition, greenwash and social control. Homosexual Death Drive introduces you to some of its people and reveals how they resist royal power-tripping. She argues that Poundbury is currently a death zone that could be redeemed as a postmodern theme park for artists, queers and Others.

Poundbury includes original research, personal reflection, drawings, poetry, experimental writing and AI-generated texts. It is shaped by queer theory, feminism, neurodivergence, and the social model of disability, working class identity, decolonisation, environmental activism and anarchism. Its guiding prnciples are: beauty, intelligence, humor, integrity, the liberation of all beings.

This book is in Italian.

“Italian Performance Art” embarks on the adventure of rendering the unspeakable in performance through text, the revelation of a tension of being in a discursive and communicative mode that is like putting into words Lucio Fontana’s Gesture on canvas or John Cage’s Silence in music. Structured with contributions from leading researchers (Brunelli, Fontana, Frangione, Lupieri, Rossini, Sullo) and a substantial historical and bibliographical apparatus (Fontana, Merega, Rossini), the work is the first publication to comprehensively address the situation of performance art in Italy, offering a comprehensive framework and tracing the main historical reference points. Starting with Futurism, through the action poetry of the twentieth-century neo-avant-garde and Body Art, it defines the most recent relationships between creative gesture and new technologies. The volume includes a collection of theoretical and critical essays and a section of color monographic notes illustrating the work of those artists continuously involved in the field of performance art.

Documentation from an online lecture by Ron Athey on Penetration in Live Art and Video. This lecture formed part of LADA’s 2020 Summer Programme.

Penetration – be it bodily, spiritual or sexual – is a recurring motif in Ron Athey‘s work. In this lecture, which comes as he begins work on a new project, Athey will explore the artistic potential of the contemporary post-porn movement in relation to his practice.

Video documentation of an online artist conversation with  Rosalind Fowler, Isik Sayarer and Eva Knutsdotter  in December 2021. This conversation followed an online screening of BREADROCK, I feel like doing this, a film by artist collective Fourthland (Isik Sayarer and Eva Knutsdotter) and artist and filmmaker Rosalind Fowler.

BREADROCK, I feel like doing this is a visceral homage to cultural history, memory and universal myth.  Melding experimental and ethnographic filmmaking, the work presents a series of staged vignettes drawing on the rituals and artefacts of the Estate’s Bangladeshi, European, Kurdish, Serbian, Turkish, Ugandan and West Indian communities, to create new kinships, myths and culture.

Performance making is a mode of enquiring about culture and a strategy to respond to societal emergencies. Collective acts of thought and expression are an existential urgency as they broaden our understanding of who we are. As the world grappled with lockdowns, fear has permeated our very beings. Notes from Isolation embodies an investigative journey wherein Andrea Pagnes —who, with Verena Stenke, forms the artist duo VestAndPage— explores the essence of existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then shares his notes in distant encounters with artists, poets and philosophers friends who navigate the non-linear realms: Marilyn Arsem, Lois Keidan, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Franko B, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stelarc, Timothy Morton, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, and eventually Ron Athey revisiting a conversation they had a while ago. At last, performance matters: politics and science to dissect, recurring patterns of suffering and pain to surpass, religion, colonialism, and gender fluidity found a voice within the societal crises that COVID-19 accentuated. Multiple remote visions and divergent creative thinking are pooled to inspect reality while caring for humanity, as to perhaps find a way out.

‘They close the glass door behind me and say I cannot leave this area. They gave me a blue protective mask and said I must wear it whenever I exit the room or someone enters it. The mask I have to wear closes my mouth but not my eyes. The border is a transparent glass door. We can look to the other side but not cross over. I let go a quiet steeping in being. Time makes me the process.’ — Verena Stenke.