Tenement Press

_{^{Joan Brossa, ‘Homenatge al llibre’ / ‘Homage to the Book’ (1994)

© Mireia Miranda / Fundació Joan Brossa}}

_{El saltamartí / The Tumbler
Joan Brossa

Tenement Press #1
978-1-8380200-1-9
333 pp

£17.50
_{ORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE}Designed and typeset by Traven T. Croves
Edited by Cameron Griffiths
& Dominic J. Jaeckle

Published 15th April 2021

Joan Brossa creates distilled excitement. He is both wise and wild. His poems are surreal and matter-of-fact, playful and minimalist and utterly original. In his ability to make it new, Brossa is an essential modern poet.

Colm Tóibín

In El saltamartí / The Tumbler, traditional poetic stanzas sit side-by-side with a more liberated poetic form—one Brossa referred to as a synthetic poetry—in which he employs a straightforward, everyday language (it is the language of the working classes with which he identifies). Always the innovator, Brossa reinvigorates this language so as to evince an accessible and archly political poetry that demands our critical and creative participation.

Challenging the very notion of an author’s hold over these texts, Brossa invites us to approach these works with a critical autonomy all of our own, and The Tumbler stands a critical study of freedom. The poet places himself as a critic of established power systems, accepted meanings and held conceptualizations of liberty. His movement towards an aesthetic autonomy (a journey we can charter from his early books on) arrived at its final destination in a complete break with language—his visual poetry—and in this collection we encounter this mixture of verse and visual poems for the first time. An examination of poetic license that proves as pertinent today as it did upon its first publication.

^{Joan Brossa, tr. Cameron Griffiths, ‘Preludi’ / ‘Prelude’}

Challenging the very notion of an author’s hold over these texts, Brossa invites us to approach these works with a critical autonomy all of our own, and The Tumbler stands a critical study of freedom. The poet places himself as a critic of established power systems, accepted meanings and held conceptualizations of liberty. His movement towards an aesthetic autonomy (a journey we can charter from his early books on) arrived at its final destination in a complete break with language—his visual poetry—and in this collection we encounter this mixture of verse and visual poems for the first time. An examination of poetic license that proves as pertinent today as it did upon its first publication.

For an excerpt in The London Magazine, see here.

For an excerpt on the Hotel Archive, see here.

Due to the book’s anti-Franco sentiments—and Brossa’s distinct support of the Catalan independence movement—both the first and second Catalan editions of The Tumbler suffered due to censorship. Publishers of the first Castilian translation released only a selection of works from the manuscript due to the political implications of this poetry (leaving out fifty poems in total), and the lion’s share of Brossa’s bibliography remains untranslated. Cameron Griffiths’ new translation is the most extensive English language publication of Brossa’s poetry to date.

^{Joan Brossa, Poema Objecte / Object Poem (1967)

MACBA Collection, Barcelona, © Fundació Joan Brossa}

For the attention of ‘brick & mortar’ bookshops,
order copies of Brossa’s El saltamartí via our distributor,

Asterism Books.}_{These gloriously acerbic, droll, at times political poems offer minimalist conundrums that refute solution anddissolution. Joan Brossa’s brilliantly oblique juxtapositions, micro-observations, and deadpan takes on the quotidian are enigmatic without being obscure. El saltamartí / The Tumbler is protoconceptual pantomime: ‘The words are here, whether you read them or not. And nothing on earth can change that.’

Charles Bernstein

Playful, sharp, unbelievably fresh, ironic and free, Brossa’s poetry translates wonderfully into English as an ode to irreverence, a work of art and a magician’s trick. As the curtain rises the words appear, the wordsmith is here, the wizard is here. Hold tight. Abracadabra.

Irene Solá}

Price Poetry
or The Left Ventricle
in Times of Trouble

_{A refraction of the first popular festival of Catalan poetry at the Gran Price Theatre (Barcelona, 1970) / A radio broadcast commissioned by the Institut Ramon Llull for the 2022 edition of the London Book Fair & the “Spotlight” programme on Catalan literatures.

Price Poetry features archival recordings,

readings & contributions from

(in order of appearance)...

Ona Balló Pedragosa,

Joan Brossa,

Jon Auman,

Lucy Mercer,

Joan Oliver / Pere Quart,

Stephen Watts,

Diamanda La Berge Dramm,

Dominic J. Jaeckle,

Salvador Espriu,

Agustí Bartra,

Aidan Moffat,

Francesc Vallverdú,

Harmony Holiday,

Gabriel Ferrater,

Stanley Schtinter

& Cameron Griffiths.}

_{^{Pere Portabella, Poetes Catalans (1970), courtesy of Films 59}

A collaboration between the Institut Ramon Llull, Films 59 and Tenement Press, Price Poetry is a work-for-the-radio curated and edited by Dominic J. Jaeckle in response to the London Book Fair’s “spotlight” on Catalan literatures in translation; a special broadcast—a work of collage and sonic assembly—to commemorate and respond to the first Popular Festival of Catalan Poetry, May 25, 1970.

Held in Barcelona’s Gran Price Theatre—and in solidarity with political prisoners incarcerated under the Franco regime—the festival hosted readings by Agustí Bartra, Joan Oliver (Pere Quart), Salvador Espriu, Joan Brossa, Francesc Vallverdú and Gabriel Ferrater to a packed auditorium. Documented by Pere Portabella in his short film Poetes Catalans (1970), these readings and performances as accommodated in this underground assembly are emblematic of the central seat that poetry stakes in a history of Catalan social and cultural movement; they essay a persistent reminder of the ways in which an autonomous poetry underpins the political, playful, and acute dynamics of a people set on articulating forms of freedom in moments of authoritarian rule; and act as a significant document of an engaged avant garde tradition that resonates in our present moment.

Price Poetry employed archival recordings of readings from Bartra, Oliver / Quart, Espriu, Brossa, Vallverdú, and Ferrater as catalysts, inviting contributions, correspondence, and reaction from contempoary poets and songwriters to materials delivered at the inaugural edition of this festival of poetry.}

_{^{© Fundació Joan Brossa}

Since 1969, El saltamartí has not lost even a crumb of its subversive gift and luminous capacity to surprise and arouse the unexpected in the hinge of silence and colloquy. The reader’s anxiety will arise precisely from the apparent obviousness; from the anti-poetic or a-poetic nature that, at first glance, Brossian texts appear to present. It is, in fact, a total rejection of the expressive conventions to which poetry is generally ascribed as a literary genre. The distribution of sentences or phrases in lines or stanzas seems arbitrary and arrhythmic; the poems can appear to lack construction, the themes and images can seem externally trivial or, simply to not exist: in short, the reader may experience some resistance to accepting them as poems.

Pere Gimferrer

In addition to being one of the most interesting and striking poets of his period, Brossa had a sensitivity and a receptive capacity that made him an extremely rigorous and acute reader-viewer. Painting, cinema, music ... all were present in his day-to-day literary activity. He fed voraciously off one or other of these mediums and, from the outset, his critical vision was decisive for many. Brossa has always been a solid reference point; and remains an endearing and comforting presence.

Pere Portabella

A breath of fresh (Catalan) air or a scream? This book, in the original & in this excellent English translation, is both at the same time. It is fresh in the plain openness and open plainness of the language, & a scream of pure delight when you discover that the tumbler of the title is the people, who, despite despotic abuse, will ever land on their feet. This is a poetry all in support of that tumbler, doing its best to help right itself—bluntly, without irony, and with the iron of conviction that freedom is a core value. As Brossa says elsewhere, there are some books that can’t be put down—this work is one of them.

Pierre Joris

Brossa asks us to look, then look again; to think, then think again. Like the flaneur carrying a small mirror through the streets, his glimpse becomes a view. We see the world for a moment—clear, extracted, never magnified and so, large as life. How wonderful that Tenement Press has brought Brossa’s wry, wise, and rueful gaze to new readers.

Anne Michaels

Brossa was one of the most important writers in post-war Europe and transformed the way we think about poetry. This collection is a testament to his continuing ability to move, tease and provoke.

John London

^{Joan Brossa au musée de Céret, 1990
J. Lahousse, © 1990}}

_{Joan Brossa (1919–1998) was born in Barcelona into a family of artisans. He began writing when he was mobilised in the Spanish Civil War and, following an introduction to surrealism by way of the friendship and influence of Joan Miró and Joan Prats, would fuse political engagement and aesthetic experiment through sonnets, odes, theatre, sculpture and screenplay within a neo-surrealist framework. Brossa founded the magazine Dau al Set in 1948 and, during the fifties and sixties, his poetry was increasingly informed by collectivist concerns. His collection El saltamartí (1963) presented a synthesis of themes both political and social, and the subsequent publication of Poesia Rasa (1970), Poemes de seny i cabell (1977), Rua de llibres (1980)—and the six volumes of Poesia escénica (published between 1973 and 1983)—saw Brossa stake his place as a central figure in contemporary Catalan literature.

Cameron Griffiths studied History and English Literature at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. His poetry has appeared in journals in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. He lives with his family in Spain.

^{Joan Brossa, ‘150 Homenatges’ / ‘150 Homages’ (1994)}

^{Brossa’s ‘Preludi’
was read and recorded by Ona Balló Pedragosa for use in an event titled Acció Santos—a Carles Santos tribute act—featuring Barcelona ’92 Olympian Derek Redmond, Daniel Blumberg, Winstanley Schtinter, Billy Steiger, Tom Wheatley, Magí Canyelles & Maria Mollol Moya. Acció Santos was performed at Café Oto, London, on December 17th, 2019 as a part of a complete retrospective of Pere Portabella’s film works, A Worm’s Tail View is Often the True One, organised and curated by Stanley Schtinter.}}

_{^{Five men watching fire crews tackle a night-time blaze

at Riverside Mills, Glasgow (The Glasgow Herald, 1957)}}

_{The Liberated Film Club
Stanley Schtinter, et al

Tenement Press #2
978-1-8380200-3-3
408 pp

£17.50

_{ORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE}

An anthology publication,
featuring contributions from
John Akomfrah;
Chloe Aridjis;
Dennis Cooper;
Laura Mulvey;
Chris Petit;
Mania Akbari;
Elena Gorfinkel;
Juliet Jacques;
Ben Rivers;
Dan Fox;
Sean Price Williams;
Adam Christensen;
Stewart Home;
Stephen Watts;
Tony Grisoni;
Gideon Koppel;
Astra Taylor;
Miranda Pennell;
Gareth Evans;
Adam Roberts;
Tai Shani;
Anna Thew;
Xiaolu Guo;
Andrea Luka Zimmerman;
William Fowler;
Athina Tsangari;
John Rogers;
Shama Khanna;
Shezad Dawood;
Damien Sanville;
& Stanley (& Winstanley) Schtinter.

(Eds.) Stanley Schtinter,
with Dominic J. Jaeckle
& Jon Auman

Published 23rd October 2021}

_{^{Stavros Tornes (1977)}

You know the gig: I really don’t know what the film is, so I’m not sure how what I have to say will help. But it struck me that one possible thing I could do was remind you how in many ways the premise of this event, or these events, is in fact the premise of cinema. The impossible relation implied by the term itself is that you will be in anticipation, waiting for something to come, which despite all pretensions or claims to the contrary . . . will not come. That is the cinema.

John Akomfrah

The Liberated Film Club—running from its birth to its death, 2016 to 2020—would guarantee a wide wing-span for critical conversation. Screening “Liberated film” (a loose category designed to scaffold the show), a guest would be invited to introduce a film; an audience seated to watch it through; but there’d be an interruption to that typical format. Neither the audience nor the guest would have any idea what film would be shown, and this anonymised format would invite broad and antagonistic perambulation on the what, the why and the how of film.

An interrogation of what we do when we sit in a cinema; a reckoning with the kind of posture we should assume when we frame a film for further talk. Playing with the various ways we should consider and reproach the institutions built around all of our cultures of making and the manners and methods of all of our cultures of consumption, the Liberated Film Club was a rare reflection on the act of reflection itself.

^{John Akomfrah [Top] & Tony Grisoni [Bottom]

introducing the unknown at The Liberated Film Club

at Close-Up Film Centre, London}

Starting out as a pirate DVD/USB company, issuing irregular mail-order catalogues of films otherwise unobtainable (an activity which it maintains), the club ran as a regular event series at the Close-Up Film Centre, London, curated by Schtinter. This anthology is a complete and unabridged collation of these introductions.

For the attention of ‘brick & mortar’ bookshops,
order copies of The Liberated Film Club via our distributor,
Asterism Books.

^{Schtinter, recording an ‘introduction to an introduction,’
Wadi Rum Film Festival (2020)}}

_{^{In which Stephen Watts reads his poem

‘I AM A FILM,’ a coda to The Liberated Film Club,

to Huw Wahl’s camera}

I’m a sucker for genre-defying “What is it?” books, and this one is further enhanced as well as complicated by chronicling a London film club that’s no less eccentric and transgressive in its refusal to stand still and behave reasonably or even (on occasion) coherently. This is plainly an anarchist book designed for insiders, and I’m an outsider—or maybe one could say that this is an anarchist book designed for outsiders, and we’re all outsiders interested in redefining what an alleged inside might consist of.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Screen Slate

Schtinter runs with wolves. His Liberated Film Club was, throughout its brief, perfect existence, the antidote to contemporary cinephilia. It was impious and sexy, mysterious and unsober, a ululatory free zone for refuseniks, a place of magic and mayonnaise. If you never made it to one of its mad, baffling nights, this book is guaranteed to make your loss all the more deliciously unbearable.

Sukhdev Sandhu

Herein lies the Exquisite Corpse of The Liberated Film Club, to align in ways you never would have expected and in order to show you something new.

Matilda Munro, Sight & Sound

There are more and more curators of experimental cinema, which is great; but unfortunately still few experimental curators. Stanley Schtinter offers us a fascinating and liberating example.

Nicole Brenez

Stanley Schtinter confronts us with an inescapable case of “Forced Platonism”: The Idea [ἰδέα], or eidos [εἶδος] and its archetype precede each and every imagistic representation (aka le film du jour). In other words, he has lured us into Plato’s cave, but we are unable to see the shadows cast on the wall by the fire. Stanley compels us to look the other way. Blinded by the glaring, amorphous light of the projector, to our utter dismay we can only join master Socrates’ cry, “Scio nescio!” I know that I know nothing! And so we see, the philosophical implications of The Liberated Film Club’s concept are immeasurable...

Peter Tscherkassky

As someone who screens a great number of films every year, what the Liberated Film Club reminded me of was the missing half of every screening event: a film or any projectionable audio-visual material is only fifty-percent of the deal; The other fifty-percent is how you project it, whether facilitating the mood and the premise of the film or breaking it apart and subverting it, giving the audience the ease they might need for viewing a work of cinema or taking it away to get a more hidden message across. Stanley Schtinter practiced the Art of the Second Half to perfection.This is a book about the allures of presentation and the forgotten art of projection as poetry. Also a book on how every individual in the dark theatre having an impact on the meaning of the film. In the concept behind the Liberated Film Club the fellow seated next to us is as important as Anna Magnani up there.

Ehsan Khoshbakht

This is a chronicle of addiction, written blindfold by the light of a flickering screen to a soundtrack of Russian roulette loaded against prediction.

Brian Catling}

_{Notes on Contributors

Stanley Schtinter has been described as an ‘artist’ by the Daily Mail and as an ‘exorcist’ by the Daily Star.

Shezad Dawood works across film, painting and sculpture to juxtapose discrete systems of image, language, site and narrative, using the editing process as a method to explore meanings and forms between film and painting. His practice often involves collaboration, working with groups and individuals across different territories to physically and conceptually map far-reaching lines of enquiry. These networks chart different geographic locations and communities and are particularly concerned with acts of translation and re-staging.

Chris Petit is an internationally renowned author and filmmaker once described by Le Monde as “the Robespierre of English cinema.” His films include the definitive Radio On (1979) and have been the subject of several foreign retrospectives.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is an artist, filmmaker and cultural activist whose engaged practice calls for a profound re-imagining of the relationship between people, place and ecology. Focusing on marginalised individuals, communities and experience, the practice employs imaginative hybridity and narrative re-framing, alongside reverie and a creative waywardness. Informed by suppressed histories, and alert to sources of radical hope, the work prioritises an enduring and equitable co-existence.

William Fowler is a film historian, writer and musician, and an archive curator at the BFI. His co-authored book, The Bodies Beneath: The Flipside of British Film and Television was published by Strange Attractor Press in 2019. blue thirty-three, by his band The Begotten, is out on Blue Tapes; Wire magazine called it ‘a great noisy slug.’

John Rogers is a writer and film-maker based in London. He is the author of This Other London—Adventures in the Overlooked City (Harper Collins, 2013). He directed the feature documentaries The London Perambulator (2009), featuring Will Self, Iain Sinclair, Russell Brand, and Nick Papadimitriou; Make Your Own Damn Art—the world of Bob and Roberta Smith (2012), London Overground (2016) with Iain Sinclair, and In the Shadow of the Shard (2018). Rogers was psychogeographer-in-residence for Waltham Forest London Borough of Culture 2019. He produces a regular series of videos on his YouTube channel.

Ben Rivers is a filmmaker, born in Somerset, lives in London. He has made over 40 films, with his first feature Two Years at Sea winning the International Critics Prize at 68th Venice Film Festival. Other awards include twice winning the Tiger Award at Rotterdam Film Festival, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists and the EYE Art Film Prize. He was commissioned by Artangel to make The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, shown at the former BBC Television Centre and The Whitworth Museum, Manchester. Most recently he collaborated with Anocha Suwichakornpong on the feature film Krabi, 2562. He co-ran and programmed Brighton Cinematheque, 1996-2006.

Gideon Koppel, “Born in London in 1960, and still looking for a place [he’d] like to die...”

Gareth Evans is a London-based writer, curator, producer and presenter.

Adam Roberts—born in Bogota, Colombia—has made films and videos since the mid-90s. His film Mickey Finn won the Grand Prix du Jury at Angers international Film Festival. His collaborators have included film-maker Jack Hazan, choreographer Jonathan Burrows, composers Kevin Volans & Matteo Fargion, and the dancer Sylvie Guillem. His work has shown at Whitechapel Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Maxi Gallery, Rome, and BFI Southbank. He produced and filmed an unprecedented series of interviews with long-term survivors of HIV (the AIDS Since the 80s Project, now The HIV Story Trust), housed in the London Metropolitan Archives, indexed and catalogued with support from the Wellcome Foundation. With Joanna Hogg he founded A Nos Amours, which has programmed screenings, curated exhibitions, and staged conferences. A Nos Amours has also published a book, the Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook, arising from a celebrated complete retrospective of Akerman's work at London's ICA. An exhibition at Ambika P3 of Akerman's installation work followed. His published writing includes chapters and journal papers, and the book Lamentation—In the Stuart Croft Archive, published by Ma Bibliothèque in 2020.

John Akomfrah is an artist and filmmaker, whose works are characterised by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, temporality and aesthetics and often explores the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside the artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, who he still collaborates with today. Their first film, Handsworth Songs (1986) explored the events surrounding the 1985 riots in Birmingham and London through a charged combination of archive footage, still photos and newsreel. The film won several international prizes and established a multi-layered visual style that has become a recognisable motif of Akomfrah’s practice. Other works include The Unfinished Conversation (2012); Peripeteia (2012); Mnemosyne (2010); Vertigo Sea (2015); Purple (2017); Precarity (2017) and Four Nocturnes (2019).

Shama Khanna is an independent curator, writer and educator from London. They are the founder of Flatness (flatness.eu), a long-running platform for artists’ moving image and network culture invested in curating through a decolonial feminist lens. The project has been described as a ‘digital site of resistance’ (Dr Sylvia Theuri), decentring narratives of the arts and normalcy from the margins of the online. As well as with the artists featured on the site, Khanna has collaborated with numerous publications and organisations including: documenta 14, Athens; NANG, Seoul; Western Front, Vancouver; Microscope, NYC; Art Monthly; Afterall; LUX Scotland; Jerwood Arts; Herbert Gallery; Camden Arts Centre; The Women's Art Library, Goldsmiths; Feminist Review Journal; Chisenhale Gallery; Syllabus; and CCA, Glasgow (all UK). They are currently producing a Flatness book commissioned by Axisweb & Manchester Metropolitan University in partnership with the artist workers' co-operative not/nowhere. Khanna is a lecturer in Curating at the Royal College of Art, a Cultural Tenant at Studio Voltaire Studios, and a proud Trustee of not/nowhere.

Tony Grisoni worked in many different areas of film making before turning to screenwriting. Queen of Hearts (1989) was his award winning first feature directed by Jon Amiel. He has worked closely with a number of directors including Michael Winterbottom, John Boorman, Sean Durkin and Marc Munden, and has co-written with Terry Gilliam, including Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (1998); Tideland (2005) and that ship of fools, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018). Other works include In this World (2001); Brothers of the Head (2005); Red Riding (2009); The Unloved (2009); Southcliffe (2013); The Young Pope (2016); Crazy Diamond (2017); and The City and the City (2018).

Damien Sanville is the founder of Close-Up Film Centre.

Mania Akbari is an internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. Her provocative, revolutionary and radical films were recently the subject of retrospectives at the BFI, London (2013), the DFI, Denmark (2014), Oldenburg International Film Festival, Germany (2014), Cyprus Film Festival (2014) and Nottingham Contemporary UK (2018). Her films have screened at festivals around the world and have received numerous awards including German Independence Honorary Award, Oldenberg (2014), Best Film, Digital Section, Venice Film Festival (2004), Nantes Special Public Award Best Film (2007) and Best Director and Best film at Kerala Film Festival (2007), Best Film and Best Actress, Barcelona Film Festival (2007). Akbari was exiled from Iran and currently lives and works in London, a theme addressed in Life May Be (2014), co-directed with Mark Cousins. This film was released at Karlovy Vary Film Festival and was nominated for Best Documentary at Edinburgh International Film Festival (2014) and Asia Pacific Film Festival (2014). Akbari’s latest film A Moon For My Father, made in collaboration with British artist Douglas White, premiered at CPH:DOX where it won the NEW:VISION Award 2019. The film also received a FIPRESCI International Critics Award at the Flying Broom Festival, Ankara.

Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese/British filmmaker and novelist. She has directed 11 films, including features How Is Your Fish Today (2007) and UFO In Her Eyes (2011). Her fiction She A Chinese received “the Golden Leopard" award at the Locarno Film Festival 2009. She self-produced all her documentaries. Once Upon A Time Proletarian (2011) premiered at the Venice Film Festival. We Went To Wonderland (2008) premiered at the MOMA in New York. Five Men & A Caravaggio (2018) premiered at the BFI London Film Festival. She has had film retrospectives at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2019); Swiss Cinematheque (2010); and Greek Film Archives (2018). Her memoir, Once Upon A Time In The East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, 2017 and A Lover’s Discourse is her most recent novel.

Sean Price Williams is a New York-based cinematographer, known for producing some of the most colourful and thrilling images in independent cinema today. He shoots both film and digital across categories of narrative, documentary, and experimental cinema. Some of Williams’ notable recent credits include Her Smell (2018); Marjorie Prime (2017); and Good Time (2017).

Chloe Aridjis is the author of three novels, Book of Clouds (2009), which won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France, Asunder (2013), set in London's National Gallery, and Sea Monsters (2019), recently awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Aridjis has written for various art journals and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. She stars in Josh Appignanesi’s psychodrama Female Human Animal (2018) and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. She is a member of XR Writers Rebel, a group of writers who focus on addressing the climate emergency, and dreams of a world in which animals cease to be exploited.

Athina Tsangari is a Greek director and producer. Her first work in cinema was in a small acting role in Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991). She went on to produce work by Linklater, as well as that of Yorgos Lanthimos. She is best known for directing the feature films Attenberg (2010); Chevalier (2016); and Benaki Museum (2013).

Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London, UK. Trans: A Memoir (2015), was published by Verso, and her most recent book, Variations (2021), was published by Influx Press. Her short fiction, essays and journalism have appeared in numerous publications, and her short films have screened in galleries and festivals worldwide. She hosts the podcast Suite (212), which looks at the arts in their social, cultural, political and historical contexts.

Anna Thew is a painter turned filmmaker, writer and performer. Her work has been screened and celebrated literally everywhere.

Adam Christensen is a London-based artist who makes performance, video, fabric and text works, and performs with the music project Ectopia, which was Wysing Arts Centre’s band-in-residence in 2016. He has previously performed and presented work at Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art; Copenhagen Baltic Triennial; as well as Almanac; David Roberts Art Foundation; Southard Reid; Institute of Contemporary Arts (London); Hollybush Gardens; Goldsmiths CCA (London).

Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan, 1989/2009); Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute, 1996/2013); Citizen Kane (bfi Classics series, 1992/2012); Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books, 2006) and Afterimages: on Cinema, Women and Changing Times (Reaktion Books, 2019) as well as three co-edited collections of essays. She made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen, including Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1980). With artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis, she made Disgraced Monuments (1994) and 23 August 2008 (2013).

Astra Taylor is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and activist. Her films include Zizek! (2005); Examined Life (2008), and What Is Democracy? (2018). Her books include The People’s Platform (2014) and Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone (2019) and, as co-editor, Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America (2011). She is a Fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation for her work against predatory debt.

Dennis Cooper is the author of nine novels as well as numerous books of poetry and non-fiction. He has made two feature films in collaboration with artist Zac Farley, Permanent Green Light (2018) and Like Cattle Towards Glow (2015). His most recent publications are a novel, The Marbled Swarm (2011) and four works of fiction composed of animated gifs, most recently the gif novel Zac’s Freight Elevator (2016) and a short gif fiction collection, Zac’s Coral Reef (2018). Cooper has written the works of French theatre director and choreographer Gisele Vienne since 2004, and has recently completed his tenth novel, I Wished. He is currently working on Room Temperature, his third film with Farley. He lives in Paris and Los Angeles. See also, denniscooperblog.com.

Stewart Home, author, is the only person on earth who is visible to the naked eye from outer space. He really does burn that brightly. The London Review of Books has praised Home by saying: “I really don't think anyone who is at all interested in literature has any business not knowing the work of Stewart Home.” However, this notorious egg bagel eater prefers to liken himself to “a proletarian comedian with Tourette's spewing obscenities.” Home much prefers standing on his head and reciting sexually explicit passages from his work at public events to courting the literary establishment, but nonetheless Home has recently published Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & the Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema (2018); and, previously, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010); Sixty-Nine Things To Do With A Dead Princess (2002); Slow Death (1996); and The Easy Way to Falsify Your Credit Rating (2005), to name but a few.

Dan Fox is a writer, filmmaker and musician living in New York, USA. He is the author of the books Limbo (2018) and Pretentiousness: Why It Matters (2016).

Miranda Pennell originally trained in contemporary dance and later studied visual anthropology. Pennell has produced a body of award-winning film and video work that explores forms of collective performance, whether dancers, soldiers or fight directors. Her most recent moving-image work uses colonial archives as the starting point for investigations into the colonial imaginary. Pennell’s films include You Made Me Love You (2005); Tattoo (2001); Fisticuffs (2004); Why Colonel Bunny Was Killed (2010); and The Host (2015).

Elena Gorfinkel is a senior lecturer in film studies at King’s College London and the author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s (2017). Her criticism appears in Sight & Sound, Art Monthly, and Cinema Scope, among other publications.

Tai Shani is a Tutor in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art. Shani's multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography, and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. Shani recently published Our Fatal Magic (2019)—a work of feminist science fiction that anticipates a post-patriarchal future.}