Cuentos de Cuentas
Carla Zaccagnini

Cuentos de Cuentas brings together six recollections from Carla Zaccagnini’s childhood in Brazil and Argentina in the 1980s that are relayed by a narrator who questions her own ability to adequately remember what happened. Each episode is structured around a specific object—a tent, a jar, a vest, a dollar bill-that is pivotal in enabling secret economic transactions. Ultimately, they bring the reader to ask: How can we really determine value? How can we distinguish what is true from what is false? Zaccagnini’s texts are punctuated by childhood drawings, magazine and press clippings, and photographs from her family archive.

Published by Amant + K. Verlag, on the occasion of Carla Zaccagnini’s exhibition at Amant, 2022.

Inserts in Real Time: Dora García Performance Work 2000-2023
Dora García

Inserts in Real Time chronicles Dora García’s prolific and unique performance practice timelines thus far. The opening flyleaf of the volume presents trees drawn in pencil, each branch bearing a name of a work and the year it was made. The trees are still growing. This visual metaphor underscores a practice that extends through time, thoroughly nourished by authors and artists past and present, the exemplary care of these spaces that have helped the practice root, as well as the intuitive brilliance and conceptual acumen of García herself. The earth is radically feminist, deeply psychological, firmly literary, the clay is red, good-humored, and lightly mystic.

Dora García’s trilogy of films was shown in Revolution, fulfill your promise! (2022) and in Amor Rojo (2023).

Published by M HKA + K. Verlag (2023).

NAN VANT SOLÈY LA
Abigail Lucien

NAN VANT SOLÈY LA, or IN THE BELLY OF THE SUN, in the author’s words, melds “through creative nonfiction, poetry, and the printed image the playful and purposeful self-actualization of a bicultural queer identity while navigating grief as a landscape to address themes of (be)longing, futurity, and place.” Be Oakley, founder of GenderFail, gives Abigail Lucien a verdant full color book field printed in risograph to display a connective tissue of intersex butterflies, letters, their own sculptures, found objects, photographs of ecology, economy, and so much more.

Abigail Lucien was a Studio & Research resident at Amant in Spring 2023.

Published by GenderFail (2023).

Static Range
Himali Singh Soin

“The stamps in this book are lickable,” says the final page of Static Range, which comes wrapped in a poster poem on newsprint called “LETTER TO THE MOUNTAIN.” The poem touches on the CIA’s mission and attempt, during the Cold War, to install a plutonium-powered antenna on Nanda Devi, a patron mountain of the Himalayas in India. The mission failed when the nuclear generator was lost in a strong winter storm. The fallout has resulted in ecological trauma to the region, both phantom and actual. This project, belonging to a larger exhibition of the same name, is an effort to probe and reconcile that history on multiple levels.

Himali Singh Soin was a Studio & Research resident at Amant during Spring 2023.

Published by Subcontinentment Books (2022).

Your Love Is Not Good
Johanna Hedva

In an art world whose function is often predicated on exploitative dynamics and blurry boundaries, Johanna’s characters struggle to love and to make a way for themselves amid it. In a manner that recalls the absurdist Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, Johanna’s characters strive to ‘fail better,’ or die trying. Those efforts are at worst entertaining and at best enlightening.. If no one in life gets out alive, how could your aim be better in regards to the love you would want to give to yourself or others?

The novel is a field to explore the means that whiteness as default distorts the world around it, how queerness can complicate and liberate one regarding desire, and how art’s use value is helping us cope or navigate an uncertain and chaotic world.

Published by And Other Stories (2023)

Transgender Marxism
Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke

The authors of Transgender Marxism advance Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels’s concept of dialectical materialism to a frontier they did not foresee. Trans* people of all variants have always been here but were not widespread for many reasons that negated their existence: racism, sexism, colonization, religion, and more. This book is the first of its kind. It exists to theoretically reveal and wrestle with those reasons for the larger goal of improving the lives of everyone. The means to find these reasons are very simple, even if you are not trans.

Published by Pluto Books (2021).

Choir
Eugene Lim
Long Take - Issue 1

With Choir, Eugene Lim resurrects ghostly and sometimes extreme voices that linger in Sung Tieu’s Infra-Specter exhibition: from the bodies that encountered the discomfort of her metal stools, to the voices gathered on U.S. Army PSYOP tapes in the war in Vietnam that shaped Sung’s thinking, to rants about fossil fuel extraction connected to her new body of work made for the exhibition at Amant (spring and summer 2023). Choir both functions as an autonomous piece of fiction and as an accompaniment to the exhibition.

Long Take is a new triannual series co-edited by Amant and Bushwick-based independent publisher Wendy’s Subway. Annual subscriptions to the series are available for $25 via Wendy’s Subway’s website.

Published by Amant + Wendy’s Subway (Summer 2023).

Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family
Sophie Lewis

Full Surrogacy Now is about the politics of pregnancy as activism and philosophy. It is an overdue, deeply nuanced critique of surrogacy in a late capitalist world that repurposes the gestational labor of pregnant persons (and those adjacent to them) as an extension of the gig economy. Sophie illuminates new networks of interdependence for surrogacy along a queer, abolitionist axis.

Sophie Lewis led our learnshop titled To Build, We Must Destroy: Futures of Care, alongside M.E. O’Brien.

Published by Verso (2022).