Varamo Press

18 July 1936, Bayonne. After hearing the news of the Fascist uprising, the Spanish dancer and bailaora Antonia Mercé y Luque, known as La Argentina, suffers a syncope and dies in fateful synchrony with the Second Republic. History, and the artist’s body, have been seized and broken by the event.

In close dialogue with images and historical documents, Isabel de Naverán pursues the reverberations of that shock and how it resonates with collective pain and artistic translations (by Federico García Lorca, Gertrude Stein, Kazuo Ohno and others). How does history affect and move through bodies? How do living bodies carry and pass on cultural legacy and collective memory? What do these complex movements reveal about the present? Wrap, History and Syncope is an affective journey that invites the reader into tracing and revisiting other bodies, to ultimately dance their difference and multiplicity for oneself.

Isabel de Naverán is a writer and researcher. Concern with the passage and use of time is the backbone of her work, which focuses on bodily transmission and the examination of the concept of historical time by way of ephemeral and fugitive practices. She holds a PhD in art from the University of the Basque Country.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures

First edition, June 2024

112 pages, 11 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding

Translation from Spanish: Toni Crabb

ISBN 978-82-693189-3-7

Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

Writing from the body, from nervous impulses, sensations and gestures, but also from our being carried by matter, language and history, Sabina Holzer explores how writing may become ‘a way of singing and slip over into liminal, latent meanings and potentials.’ How to stay close to the body of the word? To perceive some of the multiplicity of our reality and ways of being, she incorporates somatic practices, ecology and new materialism, fables and science fiction in her writing. Allow me to dream a body with you gathers poetic essays and stories that delve into the fine grain of our corporeal entanglements and embeddedness. ‘Would an encounter between you and me be possible without all this?’

Sabina Holzer works in the field of expanded choreography. Her performances, interventions and texts explore the ecologies of human and more-than-human bodies with particular attention to movement and matter. She engages in practices of collaboration, philosophy, ecology, science fiction and poetry.

www.cattravelsnotalone.at

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures

First edition, May 2024

64 pages, 11 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding

Livre d’images sans images by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen borrows its title from a book by H.C. Andersen, also referred to as The Moon Chronicler. The book follows a conversation between a painter and the Moon, where the Moon describes to the painter what she sees on her journey around the world every evening, telling the painter to paint what she describes. “This conversation, as in the now obsolete meaning of the word (‘a place where one lives or dwells’), was the starting point for our work. Using the weather report as dramaturgy, (‘the moon did not show up every evening, sometimes a cloud came in between’), we have created and collected materials from our conversations in the form of recordings, text, voice, drawings, references, found images, loose connections, inspirations and imaginations, in the order they came to us. They are at the same time sources and traces, material and support for new imaginations or events to come.” The work consists of three different media: vinyl, paper and live performance.

Mette Edvardsen is a choreographer and performer eager to explore the performing arts as a practice and situation, also in relation to other media such as books and writing. This work is in collaboration with her daughter, Iben Edvardsen.

www.metteedvardsen.be

Published by Xing & Varamo Press

XONG collection – artist records XX10 (2023)

First edition, September 2023

Recorded and edited by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen

Format white 12’ vinyl LP in cardboard sleeve

Released in a numbered edition of 300 copies, including collector’s edition of 25 copies, each accompanied by a unique poster hand drawn with black marker by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen, 59,4 x 84 cm, folded, signed by the artists

Label Xing www.xing.it

ROT is the catalogue for a community of practices.

ROT is a medicine and a ritual. The prescription for a new therapy.

ROT is a manual without instructions. A map. A party.

ROT touches upon sci-fi doomed scenarios.

ROT works within the ruins of the future.

ROT engages in weird beautification processes.

ROT uses mushrooming as a research method.

ROT hosts essays, stories, poetry, interviews, visuals, recipes, horoscopes and more.

ROT is mouldy.

ROT is glossy and asks to be touched.

With contributions by Adrijana Gvozdenovic, Agnese Krivade, Alix Eynaudi, Anne Juren, Asli Hatipoglu, Carolina Mendonça, Cécile Tonizzo, Coline Gautier, Daniele Gasparinetti, Deborah Robbiano, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Elke Van Campenhout, Ēriks Ašmanis, Eve Gabriel Chabanon, Gary Farrelly, Goda Palekaite, Günbike Erdemir, Jaime Llopis, Jennifer Russo, Jeroen Peeters, Jonas Palekas, Kristin Wiking, Lucia Palladino, Luciano Maggiore, Marko Gutic Mižimakov, Michelle Anay Woods, Muna Mussie, Muslin Brothers, Natasha Papadopoulou, Nina Janela, Norberto Llopis, Paloma Bouhana, Peggy Pierrot, Sandra Muteteri Heremans, Santiago Ribelles Zorita, Sara Manente, Sébastien Tripod, Sina Seifee, Sofie Durnez, Wilson Le Personnic

Sara Manente is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher who promotes collaborative situations in heterogeneous formats. Drawing on the imagery and matter of living cultures and mycelium brought into relation with live arts, her recent projects reflect on the possibility of contamination between pedagogy, research, performance and publication.

Published by Varamo Press

First edition August 2023

136 pages, 22 x 30 cm, perfect binding

Graphic design by Deborah Robbiano

Imagine words approaching a dance eyes closed or sleepwalking, words adrift beyond what can be envisioned beforehand, prompting writer and reader alike into a zone where time multiplies, where bodies grow footnotes and paper skin, savour the taste of language, attune their ears to the wavelength of blue. In a string of brief essays on her practice of writing choreographic poetry and scores, Janne-Camilla Lyster offers reflections on time, memory and the senses, on translation, punctuation and rhythm, on mistakes and crevasses, on the impossible and yet other things. What does it take to enter another form of existence, say, a chair?

Janne-Camilla Lyster is a writer, dancer and choreographer. She has published poetry, novels, essays and plays.

www.jannecamillalyster.no

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures

First edition, May 2023

56 pages, 11 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding

Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

Lesson on Gravity is a slice of Anne Juren’s ongoing artistic research into ‘fantasmical anatomies’. ‘What happens when our sense of ground, orientation and support is lost? What are the risk and the promise of detaching ourselves from the pull of gravity?’ As this apocryphal Feldenkrais lesson embraces moments of intrusion and fragmentation, poetry and flights of fancy, it shows how language is alive, embodied and liquid. It also invites the reader to treat the book itself as a body, an unruly tongue sticking somewhere in its folds and creases.

Anne Juren is a choreographer, dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner. In 2021 she finished her PhD at Stockholm University of the Arts with the project Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies.

www.wtkb.org

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures

First edition, March 2023

68 pages, 11 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding

Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

As a stretch of land cultivated for crops to grow, a field evokes sensuous associations of smells, turned soil, exposure to weather. In a sense, fields ground our entire sedentary civilization and the cultures it gave rise to. At the same time, the field is where bodies fall in battle, the site that hosts the perishing of things.

Interweaving strands of autobiography with mythological and cultural tropes, Julien Bruneau explores the field as a metaphor rich with meaning and possibility. How do we inhabit fields and their furrows? How in turn do their history and imagination traverse us? As if it were a dance on the page, Fields invites the reader to encounter, think and feel our entanglement with space and places.

Julien Bruneau is an artist working with dance, presence, drawing and writing. His interest lies in the dynamic interplay between interiority and the collective.

Published by Varamo Press, Brussels/Oslo

First edition December 2022

128 pages, 12 x 19 cm, sewn perfect binding

Graphic design by Thomas Van Herck

In the high-octane essay And Then Comes the Chorus, Jon Refsdal Moe pursues the imagination of theatre opened up by Alfred Jarry when he slipped an ‘r’ into a profanity as he exclaimed ‘Merdre!’ on stage. ‘What matters is that the words became flesh and that this flesh exploded right in the world’s face. What matters is that literature stood up at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre on December 10, 1896 and cried FUCK! and all hell broke loose and the world has never been the same since.’

Jon Refsdal Moe is a writer and dramaturg from Oslo. He has written two novels, one doctoral dissertation, several essays and a lot of criticism. He was artistic director of Black Box teater in Oslo from 2009 to 2016 and is now professor of dramaturgy at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures

First edition November 2022

20 pages, 11.0 x 16.5 cm, stapled

Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

Skies is a practice that emerged when Edurne Rubio and María Jerez found themselves working in isolation during the creation process of their performance A Nublo in 2020. A dialogue in pictures capturing the skies above Madrid, Brussels and many other places, it is now a book and document of a particular time that invites others to reminisce as they read the clouds and ponder invisible worlds that haunt the aether. It comes with an essay by Augusto Corrieri on theatre and cosmos.

Edurne Rubio is a visual artist. Her work leans towards the documentary and starts out from orality and storytelling.

María Jerez creates work at the intersection of choreo graphy, film and visual art. With her work, she wants to open up spaces of possibility through the encounter with what is foreign to us.

‘Human beings embody whatever they meet, and it’s all there when you work whether you want it there or not.’ Practice is like the dust that accumulates, and revisiting fragments of essays and talks on choreography Jonathan Burrows ended up embracing the haphazard and the mess, moments of unfocus and focus, harnessing them in pithy formulations and scores, adding room and punctuation and line breaks in the process so readers can hear the rhythm as he writes his dance on writing dance.

Jonathan Burrows is a choreographer, who has worked for many years in collaboration with the composer Matteo Fargion, with whom he continues to create and perform work. He is the author of A Choreographer’s Handbook (Routledge, 2010) and is currently an Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures

First edition October 2022

Second edition September 2023

80 pages, 11 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding

Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

Drawing on his experience in the field of contemporary dance, Jeroen Peeters discusses principles, methods and practices that contribute to an understanding of dramaturgy as an experimental, collaborative practice and a material form of thinking.

   Written from practice, this book reflects a particular history of collaboration and conversation with dance-makers such as Martin Nachbar, Meg Stuart, Vera Mantero, Sabina Holzer, Lisa Nelson, Jennifer Lacey, Chrysa Parkinson, deufert + plischke, Eleanor Bauer, Philipp Gehmacher and many others.

   Phantasmal archaeology, unfolding material, literal and physical reading, crafting method, articulating process, witnessing and performing not-knowing, naming and ritual destruction, conceptual landscapes, symbolic waste, internal fictions and foreign objects – they may all play a role in creation and in exploring the unfamiliar in pursuit of making sense.

   And then it got legs is an invitation to think along or against, to discuss those ideas with others or explore them in the studio, and eventually to imagine and devise one’s own methods of research, observation, reflection and creation.

Jeroen Peeters is an essayist, dramaturg and performer working across the media of writing, not-writing, performance and publication. He writes about art and matters such as ecologies of attention, material literacy, readership, commoning and sustainable development.

Published by Varamo Press, Brussels/Oslo

First edition September 2022

Second edition April 2023

168 pages, 14.5 x 21 cm, sewn perfect binding

Graphic design by Thomas Van Herck

A performance text by Jozef Wouters, The Soft Layer traces and proposes visions and words that enfold the historic building of Dar Bairam Turki in Tunis like a cloak. How can we imagine possible futures for such a place and the community inhabiting it, beyond nostalgia and the spectres of the past? Several voices muse in three languages (Tunisian, French and English) on renovation and history, destruction and cleansing, the limits of science-fiction and the soothing quality of aloe vera.

Jozef Wouters is a Brussels-based scenographer and theatre-maker who develops work in collaboration with his Decoratelier. A workplace for set designers and artists, Decoratelier also provides room for cross-disciplinary ventures and social experiment.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures

First edition May 2022

48 pages, 11.0 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding

Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

Moments Before the Wind is a heterogeneous collection of notes on scenography that offers a glimpse into the poetics and artistic practice of Jozef Wouters. These reflections on space, scenography, art making and institutional critique have developed over the years as they were written out loud in various contexts. Now settling on the page among built and unbuilt spaces, they’re an invitation to the reader to think along or against, and think up space for oneself.

Jozef Wouters is a Brussels-based scenographer and theatre-maker who develops work in collaboration with his Decoratelier. A workplace for set designers and artists, Decoratelier also provides room for cross-disciplinary ventures and social experiment.

Published by Varamo Press, Brussels/Oslo

First edition September 2020

128 pages, 14.2 x 19.0 cm, sewn perfect binding

Edited by Jeroen Peeters

Graphic design by Filiep Tacq

A short text or a long line written by Mette Edvardsen for Etcetera magazine (June 2018) on an invitation to elaborate on her approach to text, writing and speech from a choreographic point of view. Held by a cardboard cover, the text is here published on its own as a very slim book.

Mette Edvardsen is a choreographer and performer eager to explore the performing arts as a practice and situation, also in relation to other media such as books and writing.

Published by Varamo Press

First edition February 2020

4 pages, 17 x 24 cm, stapled

Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

‘My desire is to make a piece with nothing.’ This quest inspired the performance artist Mette Edvardsen to make a series of solo works, from Black to No Title and We to be to oslo. The trail of booklets, postcards and ephemera published in their margins provided writer Jeroen Peeters with a particular lense to look into Edvardsen’s detailed world. The encounter yielded three collections for Mette Edvardsen, essays that honour the literary tradition of composing with fragments and loose ends in search of something. Trying to do as little as possible so that a sense of something else might occur – what’s the space of reading such writing?

Jeroen Peeters is an essayist, dramaturg and performer working across the media of writing, not-writing, performance and publication. He writes about art and matters such as ecologies of attention, material literacy, readership, commoning and sustainable development.

www.jeroenpeeters.work

Published by Varamo Press

First edition February 2019

88 pages, 12.5 x 17.7 cm, sewn perfect binding

Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

This publication brings together the texts from the pieces Black (2011), No Title (2014), We to be (2015) and oslo (2017) created and performed by Mette Edvardsen. These pieces have been developed using language as material, looking into the relationship between writing and speaking, between language and voice. Mette Edvardsen is working on the verge of the visible, considering choreography as writing.

Mette Edvardsen is a choreographer and performer eager to explore the performing arts as a practice and situation, also in relation to other media such as books and writing.

www.metteedvardsen.be

Published by Varamo Press

First edition February 2019

Second edition April 2023

128 pages, 17 x 26 cm, sewn perfect binding

Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer