Book launch
Boklansering: Being a Chair. Essays on Choreographic Poetry
Janne-Camilla Lyster is a writer, dancer and choreographer. She has published poetry, novels, essays and plays.
Imagine words approaching a dance eyes closed or sleepwalking, words adrift beyond what can be envisioned beforehand, prompting writer and reader alike into a zone where time multiplies, where bodies grow footnotes and paper skin, savour the taste of language, attune their ears to the wavelength of blue. In a string of brief essays on her practice of writing choreographic poetry and scores, Janne-Camilla Lyster offers reflections on time, memory and the senses, on translation, punctuation and rhythm, on mistakes and crevasses, on the impossible and yet other things. What does it take to enter another form of existence, say, a chair?
Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures, 2023
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer
Litt om Varamo Press: Varamo Press embraces the unexpected and values the arbitrary circumstances in which writing comes into being. Snatching, wording, printing, it gives a paper form to various kinds of literature that have a fleeting life elsewhere.
Varamo Press is an artist-run, independent publishing house founded in 2018 by Mette Edvardsen and Jeroen Peeters. It takes inspiration from César Aira’s character Varamo, a clerk whose chance encounter with a trio of publishers in a bar inspires an unlikely collaboration that yields a masterpiece of experimental literature. ‘The time had come to reap the benefits of his inveterate, impractical habit of holding on to every piece of paper that came into his possession. He need only copy his notes out, string them together somehow, and allow them to form a book.’
In 2022 Varamo Press launched the series Gestures, small format books that come with a grey cover and a unified design. The series experiments with the essay genre and provides a platform for shorter texts we’d like to make available for wider readership and unexpected encounters. Gestures include commissioned essays as well as translations, reformulations and yet other alternative editions of existing material.