Slouching: A Field Guide To Art and (Un-)Belonging in Europe
Slouching: A Field Guide To Art and (Un-)Belonging in Europe
(I made a book!)
As many of you know, I’ve spent the summer traveling, researching, feeling, drinking, walking, and rambling to put together this little book. I’m so flattered that so many people have asked me about physical copies, so I made a couple dozen!
They’ll ship out of Germany in early November (and ship worldwide!); copies should arrive in North America around the end of November. Each book is 96 pages, full-color, printed on 100 gsm, FSC-certified paper, and I happen to think it is a very, very beautiful object.
Slouching has been made almost completely independently: from the writing to the photography to the illustrations to the countless hours I spent trying to tame the wild beast known as inDesign to the blocky, handwriting font I custom-made for this project. Of course, I couldn’t have made anything worthwhile without my travel companions and proofreaders (thank you Hannah, Gracie, and Ella!).
If you’re a journalist, or literary critic who would like to review Slouching for a print or online publication (or blog or podcast or wildly-successful Tumblr), please contact me for a complementary copy. This project is self-financed and thus limited-run, but if by some lovely coincidence you are a publisher or editor who would like to bring Slouching into the wider world, please reach out!
Slouching is an auto-ethnographic collection of essays, art, and film photography. Made across fourteen countries and twenty-three cities over the course of six months, it focuses on the affective qualities of geography through casual interviews, critical examinations of museums, and personal reflections. The book also considers the author’s role as the recipient of a CIRCE Fellowship, and how political economies of creativity impact not just communities but individuals, defining what it means to be an “artist” or “creative.” Slouching’s central concern is both straightforwardly simple and unanswerably complicated: What is “Europe”? What is an artist? And what role do images play in answering that question?
The essays in Slouching are broad in scope, examining the ideological underpinnings of the IKEA Museum, France’s relationship to its colonial empire, oysters on the half shell, dead horses, anticommunist memory culture in Lithuania, skinned knees, fascist art, eating disorders, stray cats, cocktail bars, and sunstroke. Essays are paired with ephemera, original illustrations, and photographs made for this project. The author assumes the role of the flâneur, combining subjective narration with rhetorical analysis and drawing upon philosophical, sociological, and literary traditions of placeliness.
Paid subscribers can preview the first fifty pages (including an unreleased essay on Versailles) here for the next five days: