004 → Books
Avenue of the Living / 2023
Art Book published by Big Black Mountain Press
Avenue of the Living is a book that arrives as a parallel work to a film titled Aleph, by artist Iva Radivojević.It unfolds as a dreamscape guided by a prose poem
that weaves through photographs, diary notes and found objects, all of which were collected during the travels and the making of Aleph.
Aleph, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, points to a hidden portal that contains the entire universe. When looked into, this portal unveils everything that ever existed.
In his short story by the same name, Borges writes, “I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; …
I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); … I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; …
I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies.”
In a similar way, the Avenue of the Living acts as a portal, traversing space and time, an all encompassing journey.
Dislocation is one of the themes that runs through Radivojević’s and this book is no different.
Writer Dubravka Ugrešić describes the state of dislocation as having the quality of a dream in which past,
present and future are folded into each other. In this state, places and people never before encountered seem familiar, and places once known feel foreign.
In this dreamscape one travels through languages, and realities, floating from place to place.
The protagonist of this dreamscape is a female nomad, a specter of life.
Edited by Iva Radivojević and Katerina Vazoura
Texts by Toby Lee and Eszter Zimanyi
Design by Studio Lialios Vazoura
Language: English
Pages: 240 pages
Format: 150 x 220 mm, hardback with poster
Edition: 250 copies. The first 100 copies are accompanied by an audio document recorded on a 7" single
October, 2023
ISBN: 978-618-83082-8-2
Purchase Book + Vinyl
UK at Good Press
France at Ravisius Textor
Chicago at INGA
Los Angeles at Now Instant
Athens at Fotagogos + Big Black Mountain
Istanbul at Frankestayn
Nicosia at Mouflon
Signatures, Or The Bass Line Of A Freighter Ship / 2021
Poetry Chapbook published by Bottle Cap Press
These thoughts and writings were notes in the dark,
in between desire and worry, at times resulting from a nightmare, or an overflowing of care.
At some moments, conversations were overheard and at others, blind expectations were projected into the cosmos.
All together these flashbacks, colors, affairs, and displacements are collected here in an order in which they wanted to show up,
to mark an existence, a duration of tiny signatures experienced on and around 503 Lafayette Ave in Brooklyn.