a MANIFESTO [by Mika Hayashi Ebbesen] in service of AGLOSSAL AURALITY
☄ Reading is aglossal [having no tongue] aurality [relating to the ear]; listening precedes understanding.
☄ Crowded reading prevails; reading is never a solitary act.
☄ Languages coexist, beyond the constraints of linguistic monovocality; do not isolate languages from each other.
☄ The concept of “native speaker” (as a measure) should be banned because the essentialising identarian qualities of this outdated colonial suggestion reinforce delusional precepts [rules for action] that no longer function.
☄ Authenticity is a fugitive practice; monocultural inheritance is not the tote bag of ontic [relating to real being] qualities.
☄ Editing implicates listening to the cry of the material; editing any material is an act of mediation with an incubating future.
☄ Independent arts publishing must aspire to be more than a service industry based on an economy of hype; an impossible task while its valuation continues to be modelled on scarcity and exclusivity.
☄ Personal relationships with the default settings on any word processor must be examined before complaining about lingering linguistic hegemony.
☄ The status quo is background noise filtered out by the brain, it is easy to miss its presence; readers and writers must always attend to that noise which accompanies the sound of reason.
☄ Do not confuse reading with attention; the cognitive process of reading is an acquired capacity, while attention is a variable that signals the articulation of subjectivity.
☄ If belief is fed a diet of ideology marinated in experience and served on a plate of biases, so must attention become a knife that is continually reshaped in service of metramorphosis [matrixial theory] and elaboration.
☄ The power of language is best harnessed with two leashes: humour tied to insight and passion restrained by proficiency.
☄ Publishing is a reproductive act of examining the past (together); not to be confused with distribution logistics.
☄ The choreography of words requires an attunement to spatial boundaries, alignments, flow, and repetition; the scenography (of reading) is inscribed in time.
☄ Translation is a practice of participatory silence in the fellowship with its source material and the pleasure of its circumstance.
☄ Context is an essential component in the formation of an auditorium for living speech; to be heard means to activate the dynamic orality of both writer and reader.
Monthly gatherings will start in January 2025.
Registration details will open on 16 December.
Online sessions will take place from 15–18h CET on the last Sunday of the month. The primary conversational language will be English.
If you have any questions:
mika dot ebbesen at gmail dot com
Workshops will address different aspects of print publishing and its editorial process, production workflows, creating style guides that are able to accommodate for multilingual authorship, the politics of reading, the history of attention, the evolution and codification of languages, and experimental translation.
We will also discuss institutional and personal responsibilities in publishing and the implications of producing historical archives.
Mika Hayashi Ebbesen is a queer Japanese-Norwegian sound artist, researcher, and writer working in the independent arts publishing sector as an editor since 2018. They have made books with clients worldwide, including RAW Material Company, Dakar; IZK–Institut für Zeitgenössische Kunst, TU Graz; S.M.A.K.–Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent; African Center for Cities, Cape Town; Malmö Konstmuseum; Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna; and the Greek Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennale.
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