raeblodmas

My show “constellations precede us” is now open at @prosopopoeia___ in Vienna ⛲️ running until end of January (perhaps longer) See or message @prosopopoeia___ for opening hours but mostly Fridays and Saturdays thank you all my heart @objet__a and @erdandrea_ and @lukas.ok many more 🦋

For several years Sam Dolbear @raeblodmas has been working on a project on the London Lighthouse, the pioneering centre for the care of people with HIV/AIDS, open between 1986 and 2013 in the building now home to the Museum of Brands in Notting Hill. So far this has involved conducting oral history interviews, collecting ephemera, volunteering (occasionally) in the memorial garden, and transferring an archive of the garden to the LGBTQI+ section at the Bishopsgate Institute @bishopsgateinstitute Between **Wednesday 4 December & Tuesday 10 December**, Sam will be available at the Museum of Brands, to conduct research and have conversations. He’d love to meet with anyone who was involved with the Lighthouse, or had friends, or partners, or lovers, or relatives use the centre. But also anyone interested to speak about the project and its histories. Do feel free to drop in to see Sam, or if you would like to be in touch and arrange a time to meet, email him at audio@maydayrooms.org If you also had anything related to the Lighthouse that you would like to donate to the London Lighthouse Archive, he would also be very happy to hear from you. 🌱 With thanks to Gary Eisenhauer, Sir Ian McKellen, the @museumofbrands, the many volunteers in the garden over the years, among many others

Today on my Substack is an email from Danny Hayward about my book but also about Marina Vishmidt’s practice of pointing. Forever grateful to have received it from Danny. https://open.substack.com/pub/raeblodmas/p/bump-or-mount-an-email-from-danny?r=6gzjc&utm_medium=ios An email that formed the basis for my events at @b_books_verlag and @san.serriffe cc @mabib.liotheque

Friday September 6, 8pm (doors 7.30pm) Amsterdam launch of HAND THAT TOUCH THIS FORTUNE WILL: A Theory and History of Hand Reading after Charlotte Wolff by Sam Dolbear Published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE with a reading by Sam Dolbear & conversation with Amelia Groom Mapping the hand as cosmos as clinic as history as biography, hand reading is a technique suspended between medical and mystical judgement, empirical diagnosis and speculative divination. This book weaves the lives and work of the ‘reader’ and the ‘read’ together in an intricate fabric. The central ‘reader’ is Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986), a friend of Walter Benjamin, Helen Grund, and Ernst Schoen, who after fleeing from Germany’s new regime in 1933, took up hand reading in Paris to make ends meet. The ‘read’ are anonymous acrobats, dancers, and department-store managers, and members of the avant-gardes of Paris and London, from Antonin Artaud to Romola Nijinsky, Marcel Duchamp to Virginia Woolf. Arranged as an index, this book is both a guide to the techniques of hand reading and a critical theory of its history and practice, mixed with Wolff’s later work as a theorist of gender and sexuality. Sam Dolbear was a Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin from 2020 to 2024. His research addresses the life and work of Walter Benjamin and those around him. He has taught and published widely, including, with Esther Leslie, Dissonant Waves: Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the 20th Century (2023). He is a co-founder of the sound and radio collective MayDay Radio. Image originally designed by Ana Cecilia Breña @raeblodmas @knightofcupz @mabib.liotheque

Berlin summer 🪬

Tomorrow night at @b_books_verlag I will present my new book (!) HAND THAT TOUCH THIS FORTUNE WILL: A History and Theory of Hand Reading (After Charlotte Wolff) + free posters!! published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE @mabib.liotheque @ b_books @b_books_verlag Lübbener Str. 14 10997 Berlin Friday, 9 August 2024 from 19:00 With readings, conversations, and drinks after Thank you to @anna.rws & @ka_mnr Insert (also under the photocopier here) by Ana Cecilia Breña @cangrejapeluda Thanks always to @sharon_kivland

HAND THAT TOUCH THIS FORTUNE WILL A History and Theory of Hand Reading After Charlotte Wolff Out now with @mabib.liotheque Huge thanks to @sharon_kivland Insert made by Ana Cecilia Breña @cangrejapeluda Title from a fortune cookie opened by @mathewparkin M. Ty ~ ‘Hand That Touch is a study devoted to friendship, refracted through the portal of the upturned palm. Charlotte Wolff met the world by examining what was written on the hands of the times. What did she read in the landscapes of this intimate organ of touch, and what, through reading, was she fatally unable to see? Through a gentle fragmentation reminiscent of The Arcades Project, Dolbear acts as a thoughtful guide through fascinating and nearly forgotten passages in the European history of palmistry under late capitalism—along with all the political uncertainties and faggy gestures that formed its nimbus. With extraordinary attention to the peculiar experiments in living that have scarcely left a trace in the archive, Hand That Touch gathers the reader around those bars, clinics, and drawn curtains, where, under the shadow of fascist diagnosis, the occult comes palm to palm with the queer past.'

The past month somehow went to PAF > Paris > London > sister's/parents' > Bologna > Prague > Graz > Vienna > Berlin 😮‍💨

Another convolute of the Audio Arcades Project is up!! https://audio.maydayrooms.org/audio-arcades Convolute K: [Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, lung] Read by Oliver Silverman @harpo.marxism Sebas Alarcon @nightb1k3 Ciarán Finlayson @sneezejoy In New York City in July 2023 The audio was initially mastered and edited by Raf Alero @aleroaleroalero ++ please support Raf’s top surgery fundraiser if you feel able++ https://gofund.me/2cd4aa4e Previous readers/contributors include: Eve Richens @everichens Esther Leslie @esther.foggyplace Sean Bonney Melissa Wan Ayesha Hameed @sayeshahameed Jacob Bard-Rosenberg @prolapsarian Isabel Cadenas Cañón Hannah Proctor @hhhnnccnnll Christina Chalmers @kairostina Ciarán Finlayson Mimi Howard Avery Gordon Juliet Jacques M. Ty Lucy Duncan Sharon Kivland @sharon_kivland Caroline Adler @c__a_ Yanik Avila Iracema Dulley @iracemadulley Francis Haselden first video: Oliver reads from [K4,2] "Vast subma­rine fund, in which all cultures, all studies, all proceedings of mind and will, all social uprisings, all struggles are collected in a formless mire" as the camera pans around the room, slowly capturing plant pots, frames, ornaments, models of hands second video: the camera pans down from the window/curtains to a lit-up owl, and the pages of the Arcades Project rustling in the wind. Oliver is reading "transformed and digested. It is of the external world that this unconscious is made. Born of social life, this humus belongs to societies. The species and the individual count for little ill it; only the races and the ages leave their mark" and you can see the laptop in the background with the audio waves registering on the screen. third video: the camera slowly pans on thee screen and then back out onto the book. Oliver continues: "Nothing in the intellect that has not been digested and circulated in the depths. Dr. Pierre Mabille the final video: Ciarán Finlayson @sneezejoy reading from K6,5: "an ingenious improvement had been introduced into the construction of squares. The administration bought them prefabricated, made to order."

Phone got stolen this afternoon on the train platform lol. Bear with me until i sort myself out

Spoke the other day to @isaac_z._b about Simon Guttmann and saw that today is the anniversary of his death, so thought to post some pictures from his archive that I went to see at the Modern Records Centre in Warwick about a year ago. It came to me also as, the other week, I was talking with my mum about people she had met who were born in the nineteenth century, and if I had met anyone who was too. At least someone born around 1910 took me to see the Halle Orchestra in Manchester a few times when I was a teenager, and I thought of her as a friend. We searched her name online and found that, in 2002, she was still teaching piano on the same piano she had bought in 1933. I (obviously?) never met Simon Guttmann but he was born in 1891, and – somehow incomprehensibly – died in 1990, only three years after I was born. He floated around with Walter Benjamin and others in the 1910s-20s, set up a photographic agency in Berlin in 1928 (called Dephot) then another in London (called Report), after he got out of Germany in 1933 – the same year Florence bought her piano and the Nazis came to power. His archive is full of images of post-war leftist struggles: anti-colonial, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-militarist, trade unionist, anti-poverty, women’s movement, gay and lesbian liberation, but then there’s suddenly a copy of his portrait done by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in 1910, and then again, a random picture of Harrison Ford at Notting Hill Carnival in the 1980s. Struck me how much a life can be lived over so many epochs, and how a life can be lived, with age, increasingly, on the left. I don’t know why sharing this but maybe something about the importance of intergenerational friendship and solidarity and how that it can be played out at a distance and not just in person