For the Edition Bag, each of the artists and researchers has contributed visual elements – from drawings and scans to photographs and film stills – related to their research and culled from their pages in the If I Can’t Dance online studio.

‘Visible psychic dramas play out in their bodies. It is like witnessing someone dream, but with more consciousness. While observing, it is clear that for some people the experience is not so easy, in contrast to the open curiosity I felt.’ This essay by Susan Gibb provides an account of Myriam Lefkowitz’s La Bibliothèque, presented in the Library of the University of Amsterdam in November 2018

‘When you encounter NASHA, refuse language. Be present and patient with yourself. Instead of trying to explain the work, let the performance work on you. Allow it to build memories, real and imagined. Let it hum through you.’ d.a. carter provides an account of keyon gaskin’s NASHA, presented at Bijlmer Parktheater in Amsterdam on 30 November 2018.

To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice offers a narrative of artist Alex Martinis Roe’s research into a genealogy of feminist political practices in Europe and Australia since the 1970s including: Milan Women’s Bookstore co-operative; Psychanalyse et Politique, Paris; Gender Studies (formerly Women’s Studies) at Utrecht University; a network in Sydney; and Duoda – Women’s Research Centre and Ca la Dona, a women’s documentation centre and encounter space in Barcelona. Drawing from their practices and experiences, Martinis Roe’s research proposes a trans-generational approach to feminist politics. This is further developed as a handbook of twenty new propositions for feminist collective practice formed in collaboration with a network of contributors through experiments with historical practices.

Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers catalogues the trajectory of a cycle of performances of the same name, through which artist Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa attempts to exhaust his interest in the Guatemalan Civil War as a recurring subject of his work. The publication documents the six performances in the cycle via foldout colour posters of each work and an essay by Frédérique Bergholtz and Susan Gibb that describes each performance alongside a reflection on the cycle as a whole.

This brochure provides an introduction to Joke Robaard’s Small Things That Can Be Lined Up, commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, and includes images and scripts from the work’s production and a new essay on Robaard’s practice by art writer Amelia Groom.

Writing Out Loud brings together transcriptions of eight lectures by artist Jon Mikel Euba that were live-translated from Spanish to English during the course Action unites, words divide (On praxis, an unstated theory) at the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem. The lectures were presented on invitation of If I Can’t Dance across the academic year 2014–15. The resulting texts sit within a larger writing-centred project by the artist, ongoing for almost a decade, with the aim of defining a form of praxis that could evolve into a technical theory.

Amateur is the first comprehensive publication about Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s moving-image work and accompanying installations. Developed over the past ten years, these works explore communication and interaction between individuals, often set against the backdrop of a unique public location in order to cast attention towards repressed, incomplete, and unresolved histories. Through the staging of these encounters in film, Van Oldenborgh enables multiple perspectives and voices to coexist, and brings to light political, social, and cultural relationships and how they are manifested through social interactions. The publication is generously illustrated and brings together a wealth of texts by artists, curators, and writers who have been key interlocutors with Van Oldenborgh, and offer in-depth observations and reflections on a work from her oeuvre. Contributors: Nana Adusei-Poku, Ricardo Basbaum, Frédérique Bergholtz, Eric de Bruyn, Binna Choi, David Dibosa, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Avery F. Gordon, Tom Holert, Nataša Ilić, Charl Landvreugd, Sven Lütticken, Anna Manubens, Ruth Noack, Grant Watson.

Snejanka Mihaylova’s book Acoustic Thought is a poetic exegesis of the Gospel of Thomas: an apocryphal gospel found at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945, containing 114 sayings of Jesus. According to Mihaylova, the Gospel of Thomas “is a poem that listens, where the written is not simply the record of a voice but a radically different dimension of cognition that emerges as an acoustic realm in the formation of thoughts”. The book includes new texts written by Snejanka Mihaylova, “A Score for Six Voices” by Lisa Holmqvist, and is illustrated with photographs by Jeff Weber made during a research period at the project space Beirut, Cairo. The English manuscript was first edited by Joe Kelleher.

With an outline of this new commission, and trajectory of its instalments, this brochure offers a rich selection of images and texts on this artist’s work and a comprehensive essay by theorist Nikos Papastergiadis.

In this brochure, the project is introduced and its chapters laid out with performance images and commissioned images by artist Babi Badalov, along with the original textual score for *Uncounted by Emily Roysdon.

Gerry Bibby’s first publication is a work of fiction that expands on the use of text in his sculpture, performance, and image work. Evoking William Burroughs’s The Wild Boys and Robert Walser’s The Walk, these “language costumes” pay homage to an unruly tradition of radical and queer literary presences over the last century. Their captivating passages brim with wit, wry observation, and (occasional) disgust, offering viewers “ways out,” even if only while reading. Commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution, The Drumhead follows a two-year collaboration with KUB Arena of the Kunsthaus Bregenz, The Showroom London, CCA Glasgow, and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. The book immodestly distills these institutional encounters into a multipart narrative that delves into the lives and psyches of those in the service industry. Exhaustion and frustration besiege a set of characters and the architecture that barely contains them, all of which are cipher-like in their multiplicity (and duplicity).

The publication focuses on the development of the performance The True Story of John Webber and His Endless Struggle with the Table of Content, and on the working process within D.I.E. Now, the dance company that was established as a result of Cytter’s collaboration with the performers in this piece.

Catherine Wood contributes an essay that situates the performance in the context of the history of international dance; Cytter presents a selection of gestures from the choreography of the performances; and performers Andrew Kerton and Dafna Maimon contribute short essays that offer insight into the different stages of the performance on tour. 

This book focuses on the performative and the human body in Koester’s work, which is based on intensive archival research and characterized by what he calls “narrative knots”—the multitude of stories, facts and references that make up his notion of history. Contributors: Magali Arriola, Frédérique Bergholtz, Martin Germann, Veit Görner, Joachim Koester, Linda Norden, Marco Pasi, Kristin Schrader, Yann Chateigné Tytelman.

Drawing on exhibitions and performances presented by If I Can’t Dance during Edition II – Feminist Legacies and Potentials in Contemporary Art Practice (2006–08), twelve critical thinkers confront twelve artists from the perspective of historical and present-day feminism in art. Accordingly, twelve collaborative essays reflect on the state and importance of feminism for art and show how artists today reactivate the past via visual and conceptual “homage”, exploring current ideas of political mobilization and engagement. Conversation Pieces is a fruitful starting point from which to discuss subjectivity, social roles, and the politics of performance. Contributors: Peio Aguirre & Jutta Koether, Alexandra Bachzetsis & Dieter Roelstraete, Frédérique Bergholtz & Katarina Zdjelar, Binna Choi & Haegue Yang, Vanessa Desclaux & Will Holder, Patricia Grzonka & Stefanie Seibold, Karl Holmqvist & Lisette Smits, Diana McCarty & The Otolith Group, Paul O’Neill & Falke Pisano, Maria Pask & Emily Pethick, Sarah Pierce & Pádraic Moore, Frances Stark & Jan Verwoert.

The Soliloquy of the Broom is a transcript of a conversation between Olivier Foulon and Michael Krebber on their mutual interest in Gustave Courbet. The publication follows from the work Foulon made as part of If I Can’t Dance’s Edition III – Masquerade (2008–10), which focused on the concept of masquerade in relation to painting. In a 16mm film Foulon brought together four paintings of Courbet that are each different versions of the portrait Jo, the Beautiful Irish Girl (1865–66). His film visualizes not only early forms of mass production in art, but also reflects on the concept of a model that is used as a template for a painting that itself then becomes the model for another.

This first publication by If I Can’t Dance was printed on the occasion of its inception in 2005. The book traces the year-long experiment in collaborative curating and extended artistic production of the organization, through the projects of Johanna Billing, Matti Braun, Gerard Byrne, Yael Davids, Mariana Castillo Deball, and the group LIGNA. Contributors: Frédérique Bergholtz, Francesco Bernardelli, Tanja Elstgeest, Annie Fletcher, Roos Gortzak, Emily Pethick, Jan Verwoert.

Continuities and ruptures between the early Soviet (c.1917) and late state socialist (c.1980s) periods are examined through detailed discussions of a wide range of women’s artistic practices, including Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, Tina Bara, Sibylle Bergemann, Věra Chytilová, Natalia LL, Dora Maurer, the Erfurt Women Artists’ Group, Běla Kolářová, Evelyn Richter, Zorka Ságlová, and many others. Featuring over one hundred images of works ranging from costume sketches and stage maquettes, to photographs and film stills, the book offers a sweeping study of over seventy years of women’s artistic production and is meant for any reader engaged at the intersections of feminist and (post-)socialist art histories.

This experimental children’s book narrates cross-species practices of survival across the Indonesian archipelago, centring the perspectives of local animals such as endangered monkeys, cosmopolitan rats, migrant sparrows and fugitive dogs. Written in the form of a play, its six episodes ground the readers in the animals’ struggles and aspirations as they go about their daily lives and face the consequences of postcolonial erasure, ecological destruction and capitalist expansion. While the stories unfold, their interconnected existences become an archive of uncertainties, where the fate of many different creatures, humans included, is inseparable from each other. As a script for intergenerational transmission, the book thoughtfully combines dialogues, songs and drawings, with contextualising essays and extensive notations. Through these different modes of reading, children and adults alike will learn about cross-species solidarity and rebellious movements, but also about disappearing Indigenous cosmologies, and the brave women who wove cloths around the mountains in eco-political resistance.

Between 1960 and 1966, the French colonial regime detonated four atmospheric atomic bombs, thirteen underground nuclear bombs and conducted other nuclear experiments in the Algerian Sahara, whose natural resources were being extracted in the process. This secret nuclear weapons programme, whose archives are still classified, occurred during and after the Algerian Revolution, or the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). This publication brings together nearly six hundred pages of materials documenting this violent history of France’s nuclear bomb programme in the Algerian desert. Meticulously culled together by the architectural historian from across available, offered, contraband, and leaked sources, the book is a rich repository for all those concerned with histories of nuclear weapons and engaged at the intersections of spatial, social and environmental justice, as well as anticolonial archival practices.

The author’s research on troubadour poetry yields this experiment in thinking ‘near and with’ philosopher and political activist Simone Weil. Moving between the epistolary, poetry, performance and scholarly research, it centres on a new translation of Weil’s 1942 essay ‘What the Occitan Inspiration Consists Of’ that elevates the troubadour concept of love to a practice of political resistance rejecting force in all its forms. Robertson dwells on the transhistorical potential of this concept from the violent context in which it emerged to the troubling conditions of the present. Embracing actualised and suppressed histories, the work testifies to words, friendship and readership as resistance across distances.

Partly a script, partly a personal voyage into the psyche of diseducation, this book happens, has happened and will happen on the 31st of October in a place called ‘The Palace of Melancholy’. In this temporal and spatial loop, the figure of Italian actor, author, director, philosopher, and public persona Carmelo Bene is summoned to hopefully be dismissed once and for all. Bene is looked at by the author reluctantly and yet resolutely through inner voices of dissent, shame and rebellion. He is imagined in gatherings that didn’t happen and read through an epistemology of contradiction. In Giannini’s company and support, Snejanka Mihaylova, Jacopo Miliani, and Arnisa Zeqo probe the walls of the Palace, looking for an exit.

An experiment in book making, which takes up the form of the LP record as a starting point for re-configuring the haptics of the printed book. Presented as a collection of unbound pages inside a gatefold record sleeve, the publication includes a pressed record, as well as written, visual and sonic contributions from scholars, poets, artists, choreographers and DJs. Through the logic of the detail, each contributor imaginatively (re)produces Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack as an archive of personal histories and a universe of intergenerational connections. Held together as an album, it is a performance to be made at home, which invites readers/listeners to feel art’s histories and to be in them with their bodies.

Adrian Piper: Performing Objects I Have Been, 1972–2018 is a collection of documents from, or potentially relevant to Adrian Piper’s performance Some Reflective Surfaces (1975–76) edited by art historian and curator Rhea Anastas. In this early live piece, Piper dances under spotlights to Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’, additionally staging video feedback and filmed images of herself dancing, and two sound recordings – ‘Respect’ itself, and a voice-over narrative. Some Reflective Surfaces was produced in New York in the Fine Arts Building, New York University in 1975 and then at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1976. The performance has not been staged since. The documents of Some Reflective Surfaces include writings by, and audio transcripts of Piper. The publication is illustrated with photographs of Piper’s performances and other works.

Chroma Lives comprises research of a performative archive project by Erin Alexa Freedman and Lili Huston-Herterich into the group exhibition Chromaliving: New Designs for Living. Taking place in Toronto in 1983, Chromaliving occupied the disused architecture of a former department store and offered audiences a theatricalized vision of contemporary living through a labyrinth-like setting of domestic room displays of artist-made furniture, dressed mannequins, appliances, and interior decoration. Chroma Lives asks how one might reanimate this large-scale exhibition from Toronto’s recent art historical past and suture it to contemporary practices within the city. The publication includes essays by Freedman and Huston-Herterich that provide a history of Chromaliving and of the contemporary exhibition and oral history project they staged to archive this past event. These texts are accompanied by a previously unpublished essay by art historian Rosemary Donegan, which tells the history of Toronto’s vibrant downtown art scene in the early eighties; and generous photographic documentation of Chromaliving and its contemporary restaging Chroma Lives.

Who Touched Me? is a compilation of research by Fred Moten and Wu Tsang, who together cohabit the roles of poet and performance artist. It traces the development of their sculptural performance Gravitational Feel, which was yet to be realized at the time the book went to print. This book introduces the reader to this work in its virtual state, while tracing Moten and Tsang’s lived experience of collaboration through a body of text composed of email correspondence, notes, poetry, fragments of essays, and transcriptions of earlier collaborative work. Together these entwined texts create a new socio-poetic form. To quote from the book’s pages: “The research/experiment is in how to sense entanglement.”

Ueinzz Theatre Company: Cosmopolitical Delay brings together a major new essay by philosopher Peter Pál Pelbart—a member of Ueinzz since its inception twenty years ago—and experiential contributions by other core members of the Brazilian theatre company. The thinkers, actors, philosophers, users of psychiatry, and therapists who make up Ueinzz adopt the theatre as a device “for changing power over life into power for life”. Self-described as a “community of those with no community, for a community to come”, Ueinzz proposes a territory of performance “for all those who feel the world around them is crumbling”. Through personal recollections, fragments of scripts, and philosophical musings, Pelbart rounds out the significance of Ueinzz’s “way of life”. Complementary contributions are by fellow Ueinzz members, including Paula Francisquetti, Leonardo Lui Cavalcanti, Amélia Monteiro de Melo, and the late Iza Cremonine.

Grant Watson’s How We Behave was inspired by an interview of the same title with Michel Foucault, published in Vanity Fair in 1983, in which Foucault asked, why can’t life be the “material for a work of art?” The project by Watson extends this provocation by asking: “If art is expanded to include life practice, then how does the curatorial intervene?” In more than fifty interviews, conducted in New York, São Paulo, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Amsterdam, the project explores how people shape their lives. This publication includes stills of the video portraits, an essay by Watson introducing the notion of the “care of the self”, the original Vanity Fair interview, and interviews with Leo Bersani and Paul Rabinow.

Louise Lawler’s A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture (1979) presents a movie in a regular cinema environment, but without any moving images. The movie accentuates the experience of watching a movie and foregrounds the performative aspects of the practice of an artist who is perhaps best known for her photographs of “arranged” artworks and objects. This publication is the result of extensive research project on A Movie and its 2012 iteration, undertaken by researcher Sven Lütticken and Louise Lawler for If I Can’t Dance. The publication includes a research essay by Lütticken that places A Movie in the context of cultural developments in the 1970s and contemporaneous works by the Pictures Generation, a sequence of images selected by Lütticken from Lawler’s archive, and contributions by art historians Debbie Broekers, Eve Dullaart, and Daniël van der Poel.

Invited as a researcher, Gregg Bordowitz posed himself a guiding question: “Is poetics a relevant term for current art-making, and if so how?” With this incisive query, Bordowitz brings to light insights gleaned over three decades of work across video media, art criticism, coalition-based AIDS activism, poetry, and pedagogic practice, while revisiting the concerns in his own work for freedom, autonomy, and self-determination. The publication assembles poetry, epistolary, and critical texts written by Bordowitz from 2013–14. In addition, it includes poetry and essays by Robert Duncan, a psychoanalytic text by Wilfred Bion, and poetry by Essex Hemphill and Ari Banias.

For I See/La Camera: I, Korczynski took Babette Mangolte’s film The Camera: Je, La Camera: I (1977), and Lucy Lippard’s novel I See/You Mean (1979) as starting points for his research into the relationship between the subjective role of the camera in Mangolte’s film and the simultaneous exploration of text and image in Lippard’s novel. I See/You Mean and The Camera: Je, La Camera: I are situated in the context of feminist strategies of self-portraiture. The publication includes a research essay by Korczynski, a visual essay by Babette Mangolte, and a collaborative text/drawing by Lucy Lippard and Sol LeWitt produced during the development of Mangolte’s novel.

This publication concentrates on Five Sisters, a performance Guy de Cointet developed together with Light and Space artist Eric Orr in 1982. In Five Sisters, the affective well-being of five women is explored as they have changing, restless encounters in their parental home, discussing issues around wardrobe, suntans, health, exotic holidays, work, and painting. The play holds an exceptional place in De Cointet’s oeuvre, as it presents a shift in his attention to the emotional quality of objects towards light and colour. This book is the outcome of an extensive research project around the restaging of this performance with If I Can’t Dance, reflecting the research questions that emerged around the meaning, sources, and context of the original performance and its restaging. Contributors: Marie de Brugerolle, Guy de Cointet, Elizabeth Orr, Snejanka Mihaylova; with an annotated interview by Vivian Ziherl with performers Violeta Sanchez, Einat Tuchman, Adva Zakai, Veridiana Zurita.

Since the late 1970s Matt Mullican has developed a practice of performing under hypnosis that extends from his investigations into representation and subjective projection, and from his efforts to “enter the image” and embody a fictional character, a body of work that offers an exceptional perspective on repetition and renewal in performance practice. This book is the outcome of an extensive research project into Mullican’s hypnosis performances, undertaken within the frame of If I Can’t Dance’s Performance in Residence programme with invited researcher Vanessa Desclaux, and a two-day Class of Masters with Mullican on character construction. Desclaux takes up the question of personification in light of her analysis of Mullican’s hypnosis performances. A selection of Mullican’s photographs and works on paper are reproduced in this book.

This bilingual publication collects twenty-two stories by invited artists and cultural practitioners in dialogue with the work of artist Isidoro Valcárcel Medina. Each story responds to one of eighteen photographs featuring Valcárcel Medina restaging actions previously performed in public spaces of different cities between 1965–93, this time in Madrid in 2011. Across 2012 these photographs were exhibited in a number of institutions under the title 18 Pictures and 18 Stories. At each exhibition three guests were invited to tell a story based on a photograph. During the telling of these stories Valcárcel Medina was available via phone to answer any questions the storyteller or audience might wish to ask. This publication hosts all the interpretations, facts, and fictions that were told, offering a spectrum of approaches to the work of Valcárcel Medina. Contributors: Pierre Bal-Blanc, Koen Brams, José Díaz Cuyás, Juan Domínguez, Nuria Enguita Mayo, Jon Mikel Euba, Esther Ferrer, Dora García, GEACC – Grupo de Estudos em Arte Conceitual e Conceitualismos no Museu, Moosje Goosen, Isaías Griñolo, Myriam Van Imschoot, Miren Jaio, Manuel Martínez Ribas, Emilio Moreno, Aimar Pérez Galí, Esteban Pujals Gesalí, Pedro G. Romero, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Jaime Vallaure, Azucena Vieites, Carla Zaccagnini.

Ritual and Display opens up the productive tension of the terms in its title through a multitude of perspectives including anthropological, artistic, art historical, poetic, performative studies and indigenous. Part One includes texts, archival materials and original translations on feminist rituals, prophecy and magic, while Part Two relates reflections on landscape and rituals of the everyday. All texts were read by If Can’t Dance’s reading group in Amsterdam as part of the artistic programme VII – Ritual and Display (2019–21). With a commissioned interview by Genevieve Hyacinthe in which the scholar shares her in-depth angle on the thematic. Contributors: CAConrad, Steven Connor, Giulia Damiani, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Emily Dickinson, Hannah Donnelly, Silvia Federici, Simone Forti, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Genevieve Hyacinthe, Bhanu Kapil, José Leonilson, Le Nemesiache, Lucy Lippard, Audre Lorde, Ernesto de Martino, Léuli Māzyār Luna‘i Eshrāghi, Pauline Oliveros, Hestia Peppé, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Richard Schechner, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rebecca Tamás, Victor Turner. Artist pages by Kent Chan.

This publication documents and shares the trajectory of If I Can’t Dance’s engagement with ‘Social Movement’ as the field of inquiry for its seventh biannual programme (2017–18). Social Movement: Through the Lens of Performance and Performativity investigates how performance ontologies around bodily experience, affect and the relational better one’s understanding of social movement – and in turn how that understanding expands performance vocabularies. Divided into three ‘directions’ of movement, ‘gathering’, ‘embodiment’ and ‘care’, the selected theoretical and artistic perspectives are culled from our Reading Group material and from guests on our Radio Emma broadcasts. A keynote lecture by performance and social practice scholar Shannon Jackson, delivered as part of the edition’s final presentations, serves as an introduction. Contributors: Giorgio Agamben, Selçuk Balamir, Anne Boyer, Judith Butler, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Nell Donkers, Pascale Gatzen, Édouard Glissant, Ayesha Hameed, Sands Joseph Horwitz-Dijks Murray-Wassink, Shannon Jackson, Rudolf Laban, Gregory Lennon, Audre Lorde, Ros Murray, AnnaMaria Pinaka, Tina Reden, Marjan Sax, Rebecca Schneider, Taka Taka, Simone Weil, Nagaré Willemsen; and postcard insert by Reza Mirabi.

Event and Duration is a collection of texts that offer various perspectives on the notions of ‘event and duration’, and suggest ways that time can be thought and measured otherwise. The selection of texts are drawn from the field of performance studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, science fiction and the visual arts among others, all of which were read in If I Can’t Dance’s reading groups in Amsterdam, São Paulo and Toronto as part of the artistic programme VI – Event and Duration (2015–16). Contributors: Octavia E. Butler, Paul Chan, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Elizabeth Freeman, Amelia Groom, The Invisible Committee, R.D. Laing, Henri Lefebvre, Jota Mombaça, José Esteban Muñoz, Peter Pál Pelbart, Paul B. Preciado; and artist pages by Becket MWN.

Rereading Appropriation came out of If I Can’t Dance’s Edition V – Appropriation and Dedication (2013–14), a theme that looks at the artistic strategy of appropriation through affect, to explore how that strategy is reconfigured by “reciprocal investment” as based on connecting, acknowledging, and being porous to material. The texts consider relations between property and propriety, ownership and authorship, and subjecthood and agency, departing from the 1970s/1980s New York scene of globalizing financial relations to move into other territories of practice and thought. Included here are essays from art history, feminist theory, political economy, anthropology, and artists shared by Reading Groups in Amsterdam, New York, São Paulo, and Toronto, along with new commissions and statements by Reading Group members and artist pages. Contributors: Richard Bell, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Adriana Cavarero, Darby English, Alfred Gell, Corinn Gerber, Isabelle Graw, Bruce Hainley, Emma Hedditch, Melanie Klein, Teresa de Lauretis, Sherrie Levine, Karl Marx, Helen Molesworth, Fred Moten, Adrian Piper, Henrik Olesen, Pauline Oliveros, Craig Owens, Suely Rolnik, Peter Stallybrass, Hito Steyerl, Ian White, Slavoj Žižek; it also includes: essays by Kelly Kivland, Claudia Medeiros, Rachel O’Reilly, Alex Martinis Roe, the São Paulo Reading Group, the Toronto Reading Group, Vivian Ziherl; and artist pages by Christian Nyampeta.

Reading / Feeling examines affect, a term that delineates a field where the personal and political meet in sensory movements between bodies. A pre-emotional experience, affect constitutes the social and economic relationships that make up the fabric of society. Reading / Feeling considers the meaning of affect in theory and artistic practice through texts by theoreticians, artists, and curators read in If I Can’t Dance’s Reading Groups in Amsterdam, Toronto, and Sheffield as part of the programme for Edition IV – Affect (2010–12). It also includes three new essays, short statements by Reading Group members, and artist pages. Contributors: Sara Ahmed, Rhea Anastas, Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Lone Bertelsen, Gregg Bordowitz, Judith Butler, Jeremiah Day, Gilles Deleuze, Lucien Febvre, Simone Forti, Adam Frank, Andrea Fraser, Félix Guattari, Michael Hardt, Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Jutta Koether, Glenn Ligon, Brian Massumi & Mary Zournazi, Helen Molesworth, Andrew Murphie, Sina Najafi & David Serlin, George Orwell, Emily Roysdon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Baruch Spinoza, Susan Sontag, Jan Verwoert; it also includes: essays by Tanja Baudoin, Emma Cocker, Jacob Korczynski; contributions by Reading Group members Stephen Bowler, Alison J Carr, Belen Cerezo, Jon Davies, Anik Fournier, Victoria Gray, Linda Kemp, Wjm Kok, Janice McNab, Gabrielle Moser, Cecilia Paldino, Andrew James Patterson, Hester Reeve, Julie Swalloa, cheyanne turions, Vivian Ziherl; and artist pages by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy.

(Mis)reading Masquerades focuses on the notion of masquerade from an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together texts shared and read among more than fifty artists, curators, writers, and theoreticians who comprise the If I Can’t Dance Reading Group for Edition III – Masquerade (2008–10) and research projects with the Dutch Art Institute, Enschede and Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. The texts address masquerade through ideas of transgression, gender identity and subversion, gesture, the carnivalesque, the construction of subjectivity, authorship, mimesis, and alterity. New essays by writers and curators from the contemporary art field accompany introductions to thematic groupings of texts by Reading Group participants. Reprints: Giorgio Agamben, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Homi K. Bhabha, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, René Girard, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Fernando Pessoa, Peggy Phelan, Beatriz Preciado, Joan Riviere, Dieter Roelstraete, Suely Rolnik, Peter Stallybrass & Allon White, Michael Taussig; commissions: Lars Bang Larsen, Steven ten Thije, Yann Chateigné Tytelman; artist contributions: Giles Bailey, Diana Duta, Pricila Fernandes, Tzvika Gutter, Rana Hamadeh, Bitsy Knox, Rachel Koolen, Serena Lee, David Lehman, Seda Manavoglu, Anna Okrasko, Susana Pedrosa, Barbara Phillip, Linda Quinlan, Eva Schippers, Marnie Slater, Lee Welch, Camilla Willis & Annie Wu, Yen Yitzu & Veridiana Zurita, Timmy van Zoelen; introductions: Alena Alexandrova, Yael Davids, Teresa María Díaz Nerio, Marianne Flotron, Flora Lysen, Martine Neddam, Vanessa Ohlraun with Hadley & Maxwell, Wendelien van Oldenborgh & Steven ten Thije, Cecilia Pelaez, Rebecca Sakoun, Mounira Al Solh