Book Works and Chisenhale were deeply saddened to hear the tragic news about the death of Gboyega Odubanjo and we pass our condolences on to his family and friends at this sad time.

Gboyega had been commissioned by us for a contribution to Ayo Akingbade’s book Show Me The World Mister, which followed the recent and touring exhibition of the same name. Gboyega had contributed to the Chisenhale programme of talks related to this exhibition and on the strength of this work, he was invited to expand this work for this publication.

We would like to invite all our readers and supporters to visit the fundraising page set up by his family to create the Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation, which will continue his legacy by supporting low-income Black writers. You can read his contribution to Show Me The World Mister full on the Book Works website.

Book Works is delighted to announce a new facsimile edition of the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña’s Saborami – an artist book created in the aftermath of the September 1973 military coup in Chile. Combining poetry, journal entries, documentation of artworks including assemblages and paintings, the book was published in Devon, England in an edition of 250 hand-made copies by the artist-led Beau Geste Press. It was one of the first artistic responses to the violence of the fascist junta. The book will be published in early 2024, and you can preorder it now, here.

In recent years, Vicuña has gained increasing renown, including a retrospective at Kunstinstituut Melly (FKA Witte de With, 2019) and installations at the Guggenheim (2022); and Tate Modern (2023). Saborami is one of her most important works, made at a turning point in her life and career, and reverberating through to the present day. Though the book is highly regarded, it has also been hard to access. This new, expanded facsimile edition remedies this oversight, and restates Saborami as a central example of artistic engagement in material and revolutionary resistance.

Engaging obliquely with the legacies of surrealism, contemporaneous experiments in concrete poetry and the British conceptual art practices of the 1960s and 1970s, Saborami is part of an exilic and internationalist tradition. Years ahead of her time, Vicuña outlines an eco-socialist and feminist vision in the face of defeat.

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s original publication and of the coup in Chile, this expanded edition contains a new introduction by art historian and curator Amy Tobin and poet and writer Luke Roberts. It includes rarely seen archival material from Vicuña’s time in London, such as contributions to the feminist newspaper Spare Rib, commentary from BBC coverage, and her role in Artists for Democracy in Chile and other solidarity campaigns.

Saborami: An expanded facsimile edition by Cecilia Vicuña, is edited by Amy Tobin and Luke Roberts, designed by James Langdon, and published by Book Works in an edition of 1,000 copies. This project has been generously supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation, Cecilia Vicuña, King’s College London, and Newnham College, University of Cambridge.

Cecilia Vicuña is an internationally renowned visual artist and poet. Born in Chile in 1948, she lived in England between 1972 and 1975. After a period in Bogota, Colombia, she settled in New York City, where she lives and works today. Her New and Selected Poems were published by Kelsey Street in 2018. At the Venice Biennale in 2022 she won the Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement.

Luke Roberts, author of Home Radio (2021) is Senior Lecturer in Modern Poetry at King’s College London.

Amy Tobin, author of Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation (2023), is Associate Professor in History of Art, and Curator at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge.

Our “book” of the month, with 30% during October, is Helen Cammock’s Moveable Bridge – a 12″ vinyl album of spoken word and song and artist publication in a gatefold sleeve commissioned as part of Beyond Words.

Poverty, politics and survival have been a part of the story of Hull as much as wars, imperialism and trade have shaped the city. As in most cities, and especially ports, contradictions are numerous, and radical political activists and thinkers smatter the history of Hull leaving legacies that are often hard to understand and acknowledge. Cammock has brought together some of the voices that have come out of Hull’s history to ask some questions about what freedom, liberty and openess means for a city, its people and culture, which have been so connected to the building of ships and global trade for centuries, into a visual collage using photography, video, printmaking, writing and performance.

Helen Cammock was born in 1970 in Staffordshire. Film, photography, print, text, song and performance examine mainstream historical and contemporary narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability, throughout her practice. Her works often cut across time and geography, layering multiple voices as she investigates the cyclical nature of histories in her visual and aural assemblages.

Moveable Bridge by Helen Cammock is published by Book Works in an edition of 250 copies. 12” Album with spoken word and songs by Helen Cammock, artist’s publication, 36 pages; in a gatefold sleeve 260mm x 260mm. Designed by Modern Activity.