Welcome to this episode of our rile* books podcast series featuring a conversation between Tessel Veneboer and Mckenzie Wark about her new book 'Philosophy for Spiders, on the Low Theory of Kathy Acker' published september 2021 by duke university press.

Tessel is a phd researcher at the university of ghent, her research ‘The queer potential of fragmentation: sexuality and identity in Kathy Acker’s work’ couldn’t be a better frame to talk to our guest, scholar and writer, Mckenzie Wark. Mckenzie is Professor of Media and Culture at Eugene Lang College at The New School and author of several books, including Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century, Reverse Cowgirl, and Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Her correspondence with Kathy Acker was published as I’m Very Into You. 

Quoting her: “The book contains elements of memoir and criticism, but is neither.” Instead, offering a comprehensive reading of Kathy Aker’s published and archived works, Mckenzie finds in Acker not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender, but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy’s purview. 

There are feminist Ackers, punk ackers, queer ackers, kink ackers, avant-gard ackers. In the conversation, they talk about Mckenzie’s proposal to add a Trans Acker to this web as well. Furthermore they talk about the intentions of the book, the why of the low theory, trans-lit, and what Sarah Schulmann calls the growing my-Kathy genre.

The episode features sound from Useless Movement (dub version), a track by Terre Taemlitz and Laurence Rassel, as well as readings by Mckenzie from the book. You can get a copy of the book at www.rile.space, or at our Brussels based store from the end of september on.

Sometime before all closed down last year, Rachel Levitsky came by rile*. We ended up recording a reading from her poetry collection Neighbor (2020, 2009 - Ugly Duckling Press). The second part of the show is a remote recording by Adrian Bridget from his self-published novel Treatment (2019). The novel consists of around 40 Treatments as chapters. Here's a few of them.

Rachel Levitsky came out as a Lesbian in 1984 and as a poet in 1994. In between those two events, she wrote fact sheets and polemic for street actions demonstrating for LGBT and Women’s Liberation, Women’s Health, and against the state negligence of the AIDS epidemic. Since becoming a poet, she’s published three book length collections, Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003), NEIGHBOR (UDP, 2009, 2020) and the poetic novella, The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem, 2013). In 1999, she founded Belladonna* which is now Belladonna Collaborative, a matrix of literary action promoting the writers and writing of the contemporary feminist avant-garde.

Adrian Bridget is a writer and publisher. He is the author of the collection TEXTS THAT SHOULDN’T BE READ OUT LOUD. His first novel — Treatment — was published in 2019. He lives and works in London.

Music clips by O Yuki Conjugate. Edited by Sven Dehens.

Listen back to the audio launch of This Container Edition 08 (2020), hosted by Stefan Govaart and Chloe Chignell. The audio was originally released during The School For Temporary Liveness (2020) in our online reading room (www.rile.space/readingroom).

This Container is a magazine gathering experimental writing from artists working with choreography. With additional music by Mike Ratledge, Odete and O Yuki O Conjugate.

Bringing together thirty authors variously invested in dance, performance and/or choreography; This Container is a zine for texts produced through and alongside dance, performance and choreography. Some write more than dance; others dance more than write. Some practice choreography explicitly; others implicitly. However varied the authors gathered here may be, the expansive field of performance produces all kinds of texts that deserve public recognition, a readership, and an infrastructure for feedback and editing. This issue is another attempt at making this possible.
 
With contributions by: Paula Almiron, Jani Anders Purhonen, Simon Asencio, Mélanie Blaison, Oda Brekke, Juan Pablo Cámara, Laura Cemin, Matt Cornell, Stina Ehn, Emma Fishwick, Lucija Grbic, Sara Gebran, Andreas Haglund, Hugo Hedberg, Alice Heyward, Madlen Hirtentreu, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Nikima Jagudajev, Sonjis Laine, Yoojin Lee, Denise Lim, Theo Livesey, Naya Moll, Caterina Mora, Rhiannon Newton, Zander Porter, Lena Schwingshandl and Stav Yeini.

We are thrilled to release this conversation with Vava Dudu, Alberto García del Castillo and Geo Wyeth, hosted by Marnie Slater. The conversation centers around the publication of the first anthology of poetry by fashion designer, musician, painter, and Paris icon Vava Dudu, published by Tabloid Press in 2020. Vava’s poems are culled from language she prints and publishes on garments, as well as song lyrics from her electro-punk band La Chatte.

The publication brings together texts translated from French to English by New York artist, musician and educator Geo Wyeth, and edited by Castilian writer and curator Alberto García del Castillo. The book was completed in residency at the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (BOZAR), as part of the public program accompanying a retrospective exhibition of Keith Haring.

Vava Dudu (born August 2, 1970 in Paris) is a multidisciplinary French artist of Martinican origin. In 1998, she worked with Fabrice Lorrain after graduating from the Parisian fashion school Fleuri Delaporte. Marilyn Manson, Bjork, Neneh Cherry, Kate Moss, Lady Gaga and John Galliano are clients and the Galliera museum exhibits their models. With her group La Chatte, she performed in the program Des mots de minuit. She created the motifs and music for the Courrèges fashion show in 2019.

This recording was originally released in August of 2020 with Montez Press Radio.

In the past fifteen years, Krõõt Juurak has developed a series of practices and performances that do not necessarily take place in a theatre or a gallery, at a predictable time or space, but rather come to existence as performative conditions through certain other triggers. 

Krõõt Juurak and Galerie (Adriano Wilfert Jensen & Simon Asencio) discuss her newly published monograph Animal, Family, Bad Mood Audience and Sleeping Bad Mood. The conversation provides an insight into Juurak’s singular body of work including Bad Mood, Autodomestication, Performances for Pets and Scripted Smalltalk.

Brought to you by rile* and Galerie International.