ALEX CECCHETTI
Tamam Shud
An Artist’s Novel
Sternberg Press
Commissioned by THE BOOK LOVERS
“I am dead. Homicide, assassination, accident, suicide, the detectives have come up with nothing. The labels in my clothes, my fingerprints, my shoe size, everything has been unstitched, erased, wiped away, blanched, bleached, and consigned to oblivion. As the only clue, in a secret pocket sewn into my trousers, the detectives found a flimsy slip of paper torn from the pages of a book. On that folded bit of paper just two words, Tamam Shud, ‘this is the end.’ Experts, antiquarians, and opium smokers have been consulted, and all agree that these are the last two words in the Rubaiyat, an ancient collection of esoteric poems written by a Persian poet named Omar Khayyam. What the hell do I have to do with poetry, Persia, and hidden pockets? I can’t even sew on a button. My identity is still unknown and not even I remember much. This is why I have decided to investigate my own death.”
The Tamam Shud narrative emerged through a series of episodic performances and an exhibition by Alex Cecchetti at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. For two years the writing process and the artistic process were interwoven, feeding each other as they evolved. The art project and the artist’s novel are linked together as much as the life of the victim is connected to the piece of paper found in his pocket.
MARIE AND WILLIAM: A PERFORMANCE BY ALEX CECCHETTI
103 Pages
English
Softcover, 14 x 23 cm
9788867491568
€ 16
Alex Cecchetti knows that “a story is an object, but one that does not take any space for storage, or not as much as a painting or a sculpture.” Indeed, the story of Marie and William, a performance by the artist, assumes the shape of a book. The content—photography, drawings, and captions—is stylishly arranged on the pages, visually akin to a collage—scanned, not 3D-printed. The story is rendered flat, but like so many stories captured in surfaces, it deals with movement. “Think of a dance manual, or a script made of stills. In fact, does not even know it is a book, it thinks itself to be a record on a turn table.” A MIDI book. MIDI is an imprint of Mousse Publishing directed by Åbäke.
A SOCIETY THAT BREATHES ONCE A YEAR
Alex Cecchetti (2012)
Experimental writing; Black & white
BOOK WORKS, LONDON, UK
Printer ink (publications)
88 pages
Colour soft cover with flaps
Design: Atelier Dreibholz
145 x 225 mm
Edition of 1,000 copies
ISBN: 978 1 906012 32 8
£8.00
A man and a woman begin the project of building an isolated, self-sustainable farm, cut off from civilisation. Against all expectations the first thing they have to confront is the construction of a road, and the constant reminder of the present left behind.
Through a non-linear narrative, the two protagonists drive through the tawdry present, only to realise a future set deeply in the past. Their meagre provisions and inexperience places them at odds with survival, but at one with a mesmerising fiction. Haunted by the spectres of dead rabbits and a prophetic bear the couples utopian dream is delivered in a rapid, dense stream of language as if the text itself wants to return to the pace of present.
A Society that Breathes Once a Year is commissioned as part of The Time Machine, selected and edited by Francesco Pedraglio from open submission. The Time Machine is a project that asks us to forget about archives and embrace the confusion of the present, in order to consciously experiment with all our imaginable histories and expected futures.
Alex Cecchetti is an artist, based in Paris.
A Society That Breathes Once a Year is translated from Italian by Johanna Bishop
April, 2019
On botany and eroticism in three essays and seven poems. Featuring illustrations by Yi Xiao Chen. Published in collaboration with Serpentine Galleries, the print edition includes contributions by Victoria Sin, Emanuele Coccia, Teresa Castro, Alex Cecchetti and CAConrad.
This issue of Mal Journal features an essay by Chloe Aridjis on Mexican flora and its foreigners, a sequence of poems by Bhanu Kapil, an essay on the sex lives of plants by Emanuele Coccia, a sci-fi story by artist Victoria Sin, a personal exploration of the queerness of gardening by Julia Bell, an essay on queer botanics by film critic Teresa Castro, a sequence of botanical nursery rhymes and artworks by artist, poet and gardener Alex Cecchetti, a new poem (and somatic poetry ritual) by CAConrad, an essay by writer and poet Daisy Lafarge asking ‘Can you be a revolutionary & still love flowers?’, excerpts from the Song of Songs and Ovid's Fasti V and Metamorphoses, and illustrations by Australian artist Yi Xiao Chen.
Mal is a journal themed around radical approaches to sexuality, gender and the erotic.
Published both digitally and in print, each issue includes a selection of original essays, fiction and poetry, accompanied by readings with current and future contributors. Mal has previously partnered with ICA London, Barbican Centre, Serpentine Galleries, Mimosa House and Tate Modern.
Project X Projects: Cadavere Quotidiano
Conceived and organized by Paul Becker, Alex Cecchetti
and Francesco Pedraglio.
A Project X Project
Published by Project X Foundation for Art & Criticism, Edited by Shana Lutker
Cadavere Quotidiano is structured as a straight anthology of writers and artists preoccupied with the lumbering nature of the object and its relation to the written word.
With: Ed Atkins, Becky Beasley, Paul Becker, Matthieu Bulte, Alex Cecchetti, Arjuna Cecchetti, Simone Ciclitira, M Dean, Tim Etchells, Johannes Fa, Melissa Gordon, Alex Graves, Bruce Hainley, Nadia Hebson, Fiona Jardine, Allison Katz, Valentinas Klimasauskas, Jesper List Thomsen, Shana Lutker, Nicholas Matranga, Katrina Palmer, Sion Parkinson, Francesco Pedraglio, Heather Phillipson, Kit Poulson, Chris Sharp, David Steans, Joanne Tatham, Luke Williams, Jonas Zakaiti
Cadavere Quotidiano
A daily mourning
A confined stretch of time.
A month.
Everyday a different corpse, a daily cadaver.
Un cadavere quotidiano.
An otiosity. A redundant belief system. A useless limb.
A dead person.
The ultimate abstraction… a subtraction.
So many writers to produce so many texts: obituaries, elegies, eulogies, epitaphs for the daily demised, for expirations, cessations, disappearances, beheadings and defenestrations of ideas, emotions, objects, images and movements.
SOLD OUT
E.R.O.S. Issue 8: Self/Love
Editor: Sami Jallili (ed.)
Publisher: EROS Press
Language: English
Pages:
Size: 18.7 x 12.7 cm
Weight: 348 g
Binding: Softcover
Sally O’Reilly | Daniella Valz Gen | Victor Burgin | Olivier Richon | Joseph Noonan-Ganley | Tim Etchells | Adrian Paci | Philippa Snow | Lara Konrad | Hannah Regel | Naomi Segal | Alice Hattrick | Sophie Calle | Megan Nolan | Alex Cecchetti | Anthony Auerbach | Oisín Byrne | Patrick Coyle | Isobel Wohl | Marine Hugonnier & Michael Newman | Adrian Rifkin | Jessica Worden | Ann-Marie James | Tai Shani | Francesco Pedraglio | Lauren De Sa Naylor E.R.O.S. is the journal of Eros Press. It is published biannually, and dedicated to the subject of desire. It covers a wide range of fields, drawing together often disparate disciplines under the auspices of each issue's theme. Alongside newly commissioned work, E.R.O.S. contains excerpts, reproductions and reappraisals. Eros Press is a London-based independent publisher of periodicals, books and artists' editions. Our publications are initiated by invitations. Commissioning Editors: Sami Jalili Fabian Lang Emma Jones Sharon Kivland Rebecca Jagoe Alice Hattrick
