! Women Art Revolution

Research Highlights: Documenting and understanding experiences of backlash currently being received against LGBTQIA+ cultural programming and/or creatives in the UK’s cultural sector from 2020-2025.

All about Chinese feminist Queer diasporic sisters and publications. Pubis Magazine #2

All about Chinese feminist Queer diasporic sisters and publications. Pubis Magazine #1.

Sabrina Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals–where fat bodies were once praised–showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority.
Fearing the Black Body argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. An important and original work, it reveals that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

Sonia Boyce (b.1962) is a groundbreaking artist whose practice is founded on taking creative risks. Unafraid to play against set expectations about how art should behave, her collaborative interactions between audience and performer enable spontaneous and intimate social encounters, resulting in the creation of work that is simultaneously self-aware, visceral and open-ended.

This book is a much-anticipated introduction to the life and work of this extraordinary artist. Touching on her engagement with the work of other feminist artists and her time as a leading figure in the 1980s Black British Art movement, it contextualizes Boyce’s journey from her early pastel drawings and collages to her pivotal shift to film, sound, and performance art. Highlighting her artistic innovation as she experiments with medium to explore and question culture, identity and the boundaries between the public and private spheres in unexpected ways, it celebrates the visionary practice of a truly uncompromising artist.

Por que falamos em arte nordestina ou arte nortista, mas raramente ouvimos a expressão arte sudestina para nos referirmos às produções do Rio de Janeiro ou de São Paulo, por exemplo? Essa pergunta, aparentemente simples, revela muito sobre o modo como o Sudeste foi historicamente alçado, e se impôs à condição de centro normativo da cultura brasileira. A produção artística dessa região costuma ser tomada como “a arte brasileira”, dispensando adjetivos regionais, enquanto as produções do Norte e do Nordeste foram historicamente enquadradas nas margens, exceções ou exotismos dentro desse panorama…

Este livro é composto de narrativas simbólicas construídas por diferentes mulheres, tendo como disparador criativo as memórias e vivências da orla e da cidade de Fortaleza. Suas palavras presentificam a forma como o corpo e a subjetividade feminina constituem historicidades para além das impostas sócio-historicamente. Mergulhar nele é entrar em outros mares.

This publication is in Portuguese (Brasil)

Accompanying a major exhibition opening in spring 2017, this stunning volume offers an unprecedented glimpse across five centuries of historic costume and glamorous fashions worn by members of the Cavendish family, from the eighteenth-century fashion leader Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, to the twenty-first-century supermodel Stella Tennant.

Chatsworth has been home to the Cavendish family and the hereditary dukes of Devonshire since the original Elizabethan house was built on the site purchased by Sir William Cavendish in 1549. A famous historic house in England, Chatsworth is renowned as much for its fashionable history as its majestic dresses and tiaras, its magnificent lace and splendid uniforms as its unrivalled collection of art, its palatial gardens, and its celebrated family dynasty. House Style: Five Centuries of Fashion at Chatsworth takes the reader through images of show-stopping ensembles by the most celebrated designers of the day, from the Victorian era’s Jean Philippe Worth to Alexander McQueen, and also features historic examples of ceremonial, military, court costume, fancy dress, and estate liveries, as well as clothing worn by members of the family to ride, hunt, shoot, and fish. New images of the rare surviving garments and gorgeous contemporary photographs are accompanied by new essays from leading historians and fashion critics. An exclusive invitation into the glamorous world of Chatsworth, this book is a true collectible for Anglophiles, fashion-history aficionados, and those fascinated by aristocratic style.

This book is in Spanish.

Spanish title: GAM: Diez años de transformación cultural

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