Leah Whitman-Salkin

Ian Wallace: Leah, thank you for having me in your studio. First off, can you just tell us where you were before you arrived to Amant and maybe just a little bit about yourself?
Leah Whitman-Salkin: I live in Mexico City; I’ve been there for about two and a half years. I’m an editor. My background is in editing contemporary art and theory books, but I’ve recently been more drawn into the world of weird and experimental fiction, and that’s what I’m focused on—primarily with a series that I started called Montana, which is published by Sternberg Press.
Ian Wallace: Your background is as an editor and that’s your primary mode of working and research. During this residency you’re focused on working towards a book, I’m curious to hear a little bit from your perspective about what it means to be in residence at a place like this while working on an editorial project?
Leah Whitman-Salkin: Residencies are really important structurally in my practice. They are moments where I can really dive into research.
The framework of being in residence is having that focus and attention that I think I don’t normally afford myself or can’t normally find in daily domestic life. But it’s also about being very attuned to things and giving life more attention—not taking things for granted. Everything feels a little bit more imbued with meaning and signification. Particularly at Amant, that’s been a big part of it, taking things seriously even in a very light way.
Ian Wallace: Your research here focuses on Montana, this character for whom the series with Sternberg Press that you’re editing is named. Can you just tell us a little bit about Montana? Who was she?
Leah Whitman-Salkin: Montana was a woman whom I met in person when I was 11 years old. I had known about her for a long time before then. She was a friend of my mother’s in the early seventies when they were both in their early twenties. She was a very special and free character.
And she was very much part of our lives, she lived with us for a little bit. She just hung out with us all the time. And when I had just turned 14, she killed herself in her apartment in Las Vegas. I think she was free to the point that she also chose when she didn’t want to keep living.
I named the series after her with no intention of making the series about her, but then decided that I really wanted to find her and not avoid her, or not just have her be a kind of symbol or representative, but let her live a little bit.
She lived in New York in the seventies, eighties, and nineties; this was sort of her home. So I’ve been tracing her, talking to her people, thinking about the legacies of the communities that she was a part of and the worlds that she inhabited.
Ian Wallace: It’s an interesting approach to research, I guess because you’re not dealing with an archive or artifacts or whatever. It sounds like it’s more kind of a process of tracing the presence of this person.
Leah Whitman-Salkin: It’s very much a kind of tracing. Montana as a character and as a human really didn’t want to be known so much. It’s not that she didn’t want to be known, but she was difficult to know in certain ways. In other ways she was very generous and open and had no secrets and was all out there, but it would be a disservice to her to try and create some kind of coherent image or archive or timeline of her life, because I don’t think she really lived in that register of coherence.

Ian Wallace: And how did you come to name the book series after Montana?
Leah Whitman-Salkin: I remember the exact moment when it came to me. I was standing in my apartment in Tirana, where I used to live.
I don’t have children and I don’t have any intention to have children. But as a 14-year-old, when she left, I was like, “If I ever have kids, I’m going to name them Montana.” And that felt really right. That story that I told myself always stuck in my head and when I was starting this series, I was like, “This is kind of a baby, this is this thing that feels very personal that I’m gestating that’s really just me.” And so I felt like, “Well, I’m not going to have a baby and this is the closest thing that I have right now.” It clicked, and then I asked my mom and my sister for permission, because that felt important.
Ian Wallace: You also co-founded a bookshop in Tirana called 28 November. You’re also planning to spend the summer there after you leave here, to run a restaurant. Can you just say a little bit about your connection to Albania?
Leah Whitman-Salkin: I moved to Albania in 2015 on an instinctual whim. Before I moved there, there was an open call to curate the Albanian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which we applied for and then won. I moved to Albania in November 2015 and the Pavilion opened in May 2016. I had just moved there and then was working on the biggest project of my life.
And it was amazing. It was a really beautiful way to get to know the country; it took us all over. It was really intense and beautiful. On the tails of that, Simon Battisti (my then partner and co-curator of the pavilion) and I had a residency in Stockholm. There, we decided that we wanted to open a book space, and that was really life-changing.
We had already rented this really amazing space that was an attic. We couldn’t not rent it; it was in the middle of town right off the main city square directly across from the National Library. For fifty years it was the tallest building in Albania. We started this bookstore that was really more like a community space. Everything was for sale, but nobody bought anything. A big part of that space, which continues, is a bootlegging practice—we scan and print and bind books that we sell.
Ian Wallace: I was wondering if I was allowed to ask about that on record.
Leah Whitman-Salkin: It’s a really big part of our practice. Most of the books we sold became infinitely reproducible and we could do print-on-demand. People would be like, “Oh, do you have this Bruno Latour book?” And then we would print it and bind it.
A big project I started with two collaborators, Doruntina Vinca and Silvi Naçi, is a weekly radical feminist reading group called Radical Sense. We started meeting in 28, and now it’s on Zoom. The three of us edit readers and we read the texts together out loud in a group and then have a discussion. It’s a two-hour meeting; they’re open to anyone who wants to come. We’ve been doing that every Wednesday since 2018.
We have also done translations. People who participate in Radical Sense have translated some of the texts we’ve read, and we’ve published two books of translations now. When I left Albania, I was invited back by a friend, Valentina Bonazzi, who has a space in Tirana, and we proposed to organize an independent book fair.
Now every year for the last two years, we’ve organized a book fair. We’ll do a third one this year. So the bookstore is very much still active, I call it “dematerialized” because we don’t have a physical space anymore, but we’re still going strong. After the residency, I’m going to Albania to the beach to start a restaurant space, as yet unnamed. Hopefully by the end of today it will have a name. It’s on the beach and it’s going to be the best restaurant in the world.
Ian Wallace: I am awaiting my official invitation to come visit.