SALT

Future Library Publishing Fair @ Open School East, Dec 19

18 December 2015

Small publisher One of My Kind (OOMK) is hosting the small press and zine Future Library Publishing Fair at Open School East on December 19.

The fair is hosted as part of Future Library Residency program, supported by Book Works and Open School East. It will feature over 40 stalls of small publishers, presses, and zines including those by the likes of AND publishing, SALT., PaperWork Magazine, Ladette Space, Girls ClubBanner Repeater and more.

This event also comes with music by “lo-fi/riot grrl/afro punk” band Big Joanie and food by BARBEDOUN.

See the OOMK’s even page for details.**

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SALT. call for submissions

16 November 2015

SALT. is gearing up for its eighth issue, titled (and themed) ‘Noli Me Tangere’ or “touch me not”, with a call for submissions that is open until December 20.

The contemporary London-based feminist magazine, established by four Goldsmiths Fine Art students in 2012, has already published a series of mini manifestos—with themes like Anti-Work’, ‘Salirophilia’‘Pageantry’ and ‘Manifesto’—in what has become an ongoing research project.

Issue 8, ‘Noli Me Tangere’, is the Latin version of the original Greek expression ‘me mou aptou’ (translating to ‘do not cling to me’, ‘do not hold onto me’, ‘ do not approach me’) and are the words that jesus says to Mary Magdelene in John 20:17. The issue’s theme thus becomes that of touch and tactility, among other things.

See the SALT. FB page for details. **

SALT. editor Thea Smith reading at Manifesto issue launch.
SALT. editor Thea Smith reading at ‘Manifesto’ issue launch (2014) @ White Building, London.
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SALT. in conversation @ Tenderbooks, Jun 30

30 June 2015

The editors of London-based feminist magazine SALT. are coming to Tenderbooks for an in-depth conversation from 4 to 6pm on June 30.

Three of SALT.’s editors—Jala Wahid, Thea Smith, and Hannah Regel—will introduce their intentions and process with SALT., discussing past issues (including their Manifesto issue which we recently reviewed) and how the magazine links to their wider artistic practice. While SALT. is a magazine, it is also an ongoing research project, and the editorial acts as a mini manifesto expressing their selected themes, just as the project’s events act as platforms for new debates around the paradigms of contemporary art and feminism.

The event is a Three Letter Words and Tenderbooks one done in collaboration with the ‘Publishing/ Writing’ module, MRes Art: Theory and Philosophy, at Central Saint Martins, and discussion will be followed by an informal Q&A with the audience and with MRes Art’s students.

See event page for details. **

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Dazzle Camouflage @ Rye Lane Studios, Dec 17 – Jan 4

15 December 2014

Taking the sixth issue of SALT. and its manifesto as a starting point, the Dazzle Camouflage group exhibition will run at London’s Rye Lane Studios from December 17 to January 4.

The manifesto disseminated in the feminist magazine’s sixth and latest issue has come across our radar, and we’re glad someone else is giving it the attention it deserves. The group show, which features works by Phoebe Collings-JamesAnn HirschRachel de Joode and Huw Lemmey, takes SALT.’s disobedience as a methodology. The goal is not to dismantle existing power relations, just as it was not the publication’s goal to dismantle language itself, but rather to “negotiate new ways of existing within them disruptively”.

The December 17 opening brings an 8pm performance by artist Beatrice Loft Schulz, starting off the three-week exhibition on the basis of “an investment in embracing the performative potential within these hierarchies, whilst at once making known the paradoxes in doing so” through everything from reality show dating, physically imposing oneself onto objects, or “creating contingent situations from a masculine vocabulary tied up in the miasma of power relations”.

See the exhibition FB page for details. **

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SALT. Issue 6: Manifesto reviewed

5 September 2014

One night a few weeks ago, I sat at a beat-up table in Neukölln across from two friends and said to them in a subdued but resolute tone that if a man raped me, I would castrate him. The two men almost choked on their beers. No one laughed. If they can’t control their dicks, I continued, paraphrasing an essay by Sarah Nicole Prickett, they don’t deserve them. They looked at each other uneasily, thought fleetingly about arguing back, then quietly settled back into their chairs, albeit with a different posture, one more dormantly aware of a part that could be lost. Good, I thought, women have lost so much already.

There has always been an undertone of wild and unwieldy rage to feminism, a bra-burning, misandrous disquiet that alienates those not immediately within its purview. The primary feeling one gets reading SALT.’s recently launched Manifesto issue is of rage, at once focused and untamed, cleverly instrumental and yet unapologetically tempestuous. The thin book, less than 50 pages in total, reads like a punch to the face. Does my rage scare you? it seems to ask. It should.

'let's pretend he's alive' by Kay Law and Giulia Tommasi.
‘let’s pretend he’s alive’ by Kay Law and Giulia Tommasi.

There is no revolution without free love, as Milena Dravic’s character yells from her courtyard in W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, but there is also no revolution without bloodshed, and sometimes the blood shed is of language itself. “What SALT. does, wants to do, and encourages, as a political project, is a wilful misreading of dominant culture to serve our own ends,” write its editors in a manifesto-like editorial letter that precedes the tangle of manifestos that follow. “To wilfully misread is to deliberately defy,” they continue, referring to the “writing out” of feminist work throughout history and at the same time to the very nucleus of revolution, which is nothing if not a wilful misreading of future possibility.

Abandoning the potential of physical violence, perhaps not so much ideologically as logistically, SALT.’s Manifesto turns to language as the site of revolution. “In a climate where traditional modes of articulating refusal through physical action become criminalised or dangerous,” the editors write, “language, and furthermore what can be done with it, becomes the only potent weapon left.” Instead, SALT. turns (or returns) to José Muñoz’s conception of utopia as the acts of failed speech, as the incomprehensible speaking in tongues that epitomises all of history’s witches and all of pop culture’s women under the influence.

'Tongue' by Jala Wahid.
‘Tongue’ by Jala Wahid.

In ‘Notes on Wildness: Towards a Manifesto [1]’, found in SALT.’s Manifesto, Jack Halberstam writes: “The Wild, in this manifesto, will stand for an unrestrained, un-civilised, disorderly, ferocious and anti-colonial relation to thought and to being.” If patriarchy subsists as structural violence, Halberstam continues, the first move, it follows, is to dismantle the structure, to upset the imagined order of language so that the “wild may arrive and touch you, wound you, find your core”.

The wild that Halberstam invokes knots its way through the poems of Vicki Tingle – a savage ode to castration called ‘i dare you to oppress me some more (a think-piece on dick-chopping)’, the quietly devastating ‘Play Pussy and Get Fucked’, and the brilliant ‘GPOY’, which brings the totally faultless line “um excuse me, would like some hetero sex with your oppression? – through Hannah Regel and Freya Field-Donovan’s ‘Parasite Manifesto’ and Eve Lacey’s ‘Manifesto Medusa’, and through the methodical absurdity of Villa Design Group’s ‘VDG Manifesto’.

Contributor Vicki Tingle reading at Manifesto issue launch.
Contributor Vicki Tingle SALT. editor Thea Smith reading at Manifesto issue launch (2014) @ White Building, London.

It abandons the clear narrative structure of language, turning instead to the unrestrained glossalia of writers like Clarice Lispector. They are, as Mali Collins writes in her poem ‘On a Manifesto’, only responding to what the world gives them, which “isn’t that much”. When Field-Donovan and Regel write in Parasite Manifesto “the ways in which we…relate to our futurity resembles a performance of disclosure; a betrayal of good faith. We understand that this seems cruel, and it is,” it is a necessary cruelty of which they speak. It is a quiet, defying one in response to the deafening cruelty women live, echoing the sentiment of a post-it note found towards the end of Manifesto that simply reads: “Her work was to be but one long scream.” **

SALT. Issue 6: Manifesto, edited by Saira Harvey, Hannah Regel, Thea Smith and Jala Wahid, was published by Montez Press in August, 2014.

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