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Now available to pre-order at the special price of £10
I made it to the forest-like part of the beach where the eucalyptus and acacia trees could provide enough shade to conduct my first self-taught photography class. My palms were sweating but it wasn’t from the heat. It was from wanting to create something perfect, exactly as I was experiencing it before me. To be able to capture so much more than I could see: the awe, emotion and wonder that accompanied the experience. What is it that photographers do to produce in the viewer a blistering heartache? How does an accidental moment become an eternal imprint in the minds of so many people? How do you capture those moments where time is wrecked, elongated, paused, contorted, wielded into a thousand stories? And what about the necessary self-obliteration that gives way to being completely present in the encounter with a photo; was that something that I could actually bring about? I didn’t know how to capture my unsettled state in that specific landscape. I didn’t know, yet I desperately wanted to convey to someone this moment that they had never lived, but that could liven every boundary of their flesh with scintillating and terrifying familiarity.
Fleshed out on the porous boundaries between memoir and fiction, five interrelated tales – each dedicated to one of the senses – recount what it means for domestic, interpersonal and systemic violence to be the primary component of one’s world. From the nascent queer scene of 1980s postcolonial Cyprus to present-day European metropolises, we follow the unnamed protagonist in her quest to construct meaning in a class and a cultural context that lack any sort of support or analytic tools. Deploying a language that vibrates with synaesthetic sensuality, Georgiou captures a life riven by injustice and its inscription on the senses.
Diana Georgiou is a writer and curator based in London. Her recent writing engages with the horrors of violence and the difficulty of their narration. Attentive to the sonic resonances of language, her textual work also takes the form of recorded sound poetry and performative live readings. Other Reflexes is her debut novel, and was commissioned by Book Works from open submission for the Interstices series, guest edited by Bridget Penney.
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Graphic Negotiations #7 – Sara De Bondt
Wednesday 7 December, 1pm
Online, free (RSVP)
Book Works sees graphic design as crucial to realising artists and writers’ ideas in the final form of the book. While conventionally designers often become involved in the later stages of a book’s production, and with a limited brief, we involve the designer in a collaborative process from the start, with designer, artist and editor working together to create a book that realises the artists’ vision.
Sara is a graphic designer who publishes, researches, and teaches. Her work is typographical and content-driven. She often works with artists, most recently with Benedict Drew, Rosalind Nashashibi, and Jessica Stockholder. Since 2008 she has co-directed the non-profit art and design press Occasional Papers. She has curated several exhibitions, most recently Off the Grid at Design Museum Gent (2019).
She lectures at design conferences internationally. Since 2017, she has been a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale. Sara has taught at numerous art schools including Central Saint Martins and Royal College of Art, London, and is currently lecturer at KASK School of Arts, Ghent, where she is completing her doctoral studies.
For more information or to reserve a place, visit our Eventbrite.
Graphic Negotiations #7 – Sara De Bondt; ; 2022;
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Book Works statement on the recent Arts Council England NPO funding announcement
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We are very pleased to share that we will continue as part of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio. We would like to thank Arts Council England for their ongoing support.
This support, as part of the 2023-26 Investment Programme, recognises the role Book Works has within the contemporary art scene nationally and internationally, the importance of our focus on publishing, and the genuine opportunities offered through our commissions, education activities and through the Book Works studio.
Our approach is collaborative – working with artists, designers, writers, printers, libraries, project spaces and other institutions – both those supported by ACE, as well as those reliant on project funding or other sources of income. Many of our projects have been made possible with the support of these organisations and following the decisions in this funding round, we are concerned about the impact that some institutions and project spaces that we have worked with now face. Whilst we welcome the principle of decentralising funding from London, and the news that ACE have secured an increase in their overall budget, national arts funding has suffered from huge cuts over the last decade. The latest decisions are very likely to impact further on the sustainability of London’s art organisations, and on workers already facing inequality and insecurity resulting from the realities of the current economic crisis.
I would like to also thank all those that we work with: artists, designers, writers and editors, and project collaborators for their work, time and enthusiasm for our projects, and note the invaluable support from our publishing partners during the last two years: DACS, The Mosaic Rooms, Parallel Oaxaca, Focal Point Gallery, Bluecoat, and The Bower. We are very lucky to have the interest and ongoing contributions from Book Works’ Supporters and Readers Club. Special thanks to our Board of Trustees and to the team at Book Works who have invested a huge amount into the organisation, especially towards the success of this application.
Gavin Everall, Director, Book Works publishing
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