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Contents Julie Morrissy 5 Jack Anthony Boniface
6
Deborah Birch 8 Daniel A. Nicholls
10
Graeme Oxby 11 Clare McCotter 12 Attila Hazay 13 James Patterson 14 Barbara Pilcher 15 Aydin Cetinbostanoglu 16 Steve Komarnyckyj 18
Abridged 0_39: The Never Never
Álvaro Herrero Gómez
19
Matt Kirkham 20 Emilia Moisio 21 Maria Isakova Bennett
22
Luc Kordas 23 Gerald Dawe 24 Davide Trame 25 JP Terlizzi 26 Fred Johnston 28 Ruth Gonsalves Moore
29
Gene Barry 30 Matthieu Gafsou 31 Howard Wright 32 Christophe Canato 33 James Patterson 34 Marie-Pierre Cravedi 35 Colin Honnor 36 Graeme Oxby 37
CROWS ON THE WIRE:
Graphic novel available as a free downloadable app for iPads and Tablets from September 2014
Kostas Maros 40 Karolina Kubik 42 Antoine Violleau 43 Fred Johnston 44 Antoine Violleau 45 Stephanie Conn 46 Christophe Canato 47 Dylan Brennan 48 Cover images: Marie-Pierre Cravedi; Aurora Giampaoli; Álvaro Herrero Gómez; Attila Hazay; Graeme Oxby.
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Kevin Graham 38
Editorial
The Anonymist Manifesto
We were always looking up, always into the inverted depths above our heads, always into the sky’s amplified vastness in search of order. It was to the light that we looked, fantasizing about its source. We imagined it as tangible, and thus imagined our own weightlessness that would
We write from the site of the crash. Oxygen masks abandoned at the last second. High from the
bring it within reach of our childish fingers. The light stood for Paradise, a tangible beyond. We
gas, we laughed uproariously as we nosedived into the forest. We sit here, snow as our insulator,
believed ourselves contained within an all-encompassing enclosure, the whole of our universe
playing out the rest of our lives. We identify as vegan but we hunt all day and all night. We kill
cupped in light and the lullaby music of cosmic spheres. We trusted this construction and derived
rabbits and deer, skin them and cook them on our self-started fire. There is a clearing in the woods
from it a simple security. Believing in a physical hierarchy of the heavens and its boundaries
– a cold, open white space. The only sounds are echoes. We have set up cities in every corner,
ensured us of our place. We did not doubt our basic instinct to ascend, to defy our own earthy
behind every tree. I wake up under the bridge over the Mississippi and take a short walk to
weight in pursuit of those imagined heights. They were the sublime architectures of our dreams.
Dinkytown. I turn my head when branches crack and I am at the baseball diamond in Prospect
And so subsequently we have manufactured our own ascent, as evolutional developments
Park, slamming balls over the fence, onto the highway. On what we calculate to be Sundays,
have increasingly equipped us to, and penetrated the upper depths with our materiality, our
we tumble through the Bowery and drink from a litre bottle of wine in a doorway on Queen Street
accessorising inventions, rather than with our minds or souls. We have withdrawn our aspirations
West. We are not leaving here. This forest is our present and we dance in the trees. Cartwheel
from dreams and embedded them in a technological reality of our own creation. And as we build
across the snow until our hands grow numb and red.
our scaffolding the structures of science usurp the structures of a simple faith in the unknown. Bang! Bang! The Machine!
And as we expand, everything expands: the more we discover, the less we understand. The truths we come upon are no longer coddling and finite, but indifferent and ever fleeting, ever expanding, ever alienating. We looked up and trusted with a patient satisfaction in a capsuling dome of light. Now we look up and any notion of truth shoots away from us, through the vagueness of
MANIFESTO OF ANONYMISM
light, then beyond, into infinities of darkness. It is without limitation, and limitlessness is chaos. We cannot trust the chaos. At one time, Utopia reigned above us, looming as the final rung of a
1.
ladder. But now in our post-modernity we know that the world is images and images alone, and
of rules and the misapplication of those rules. The end goal is to learn, not to create.
what is not the chaos of rapid expansion and impenetrable depths is merely surface. With this
2. We accept that thought cannot be articulated through thought. We aim not to rationally
realisation, we are left only with the fractured image of that ladder. The monumental structures We know so much, we know we cannot know. We look for order, for guidance, for the imposition of structure on this tortuous knowledge of chaos. Multiple utopias come at us in the second dimension, on sheet of paper, on screens, as linear blueprints. But the black lines of words and
3. Create with caution. The instinct to create does not presuppose necessity. Art over people.
be reproduced without permission.
4. Objectivity does not exist. That is why #1 Grandad mugs are mass-produced.
Copyright remains with authors/ artists.
these utopias into our own dimension of ruthless spatial inflation, this chaos of blankness, of the
The Chancer Corporation,
madly. We look up and our utopias, our Paradise, dissolve into the vastness like dreams we are in the midst of forgetting. But still, in our existential amnesia, the music of Paradise teases us from the depths of abstraction, ringing even still from that ephemeral mirage of the mind that wavers and dissolves at our analytical approach. The cosmic spheres of Paradise chime against each other, calling to us like sirens of another dimension. This is music is of another truth that pockets itself secretly between the particles of our communicable knowledge, then slips in eternal flight from the reaching grasp of our senses. We do not know Paradise. It was exorcised from our bodies long ago along with our primacy and instinct. But we do know its absence, an anxious gaping hole in our existence. Sometimes we feel it palpitate like a phantom organ, desperately
5. Our names shall not appear anywhere. 6. We want no followers. We are not a movement.
abridged is a division of
materializes around us and, uncontained, is released into our air, warping our vision as it swarms
explore, but to adventure without grounding - to leave everyone as confused as we are.
No part of this publication may
diagrams, it is soon revealed, cannot tame the chaos of the white pages they mark. As we pull empty space signifying all of what is not known that surrounds their constructed manifestoes,
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abridged 0__39
c/o Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry - Londonderry BT48 6PU.
7. Contradiction is our driving force. 8. We do not use the word ‘*********’. We accept all advice from fellow-artists. No art, no advice. (Note: We do not consider journalism to be art.) 9. All art must be read aloud. This includes paintings, sculpture and woodcut. 10. Vanity is not only welcomed, but encouraged. Modesty is the most valued trait.
website: www.abridgedonline.com
11. We understand absolutely nothing about Art.
facebook:abridged zero-nineteen
12. You understand absolutely nothing about Art.
twitter: @abridged030 telephone:028 7126 6946
13. We understand absolutely nothing about You.
email: abridged@ymail.com
14. Change your name in case it should appear somewhere. 15. We do not believe in the enjoyment of Art. 16. Our Art has a stammer. It cannot be cured. Please do not attempt to finish its sentences. It must learn to speak for itself.
inhaling the temporal teasing of music as harmonies slide by our aural faculties, briefly filling and emptying that absence, our sense of a Paradise lacking, and indulging our spiritual nostalgia like a drug. Next: Abridged 0 – 40: Take Me Home.
JULIE MORRISSY
Overleaf: Jack Anthony Boniface, Spaceman, 2015
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of the spiritual are shattered by the implosive binaries of empty surfaces and swallowing depths.
We are anti-education but pro-learning. Art is the opposite of education. It is the acquiring
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Refrain: I can’t help the feeling
‘It must be pointed out that the truth is not like stamped coin issued ready from the mint, and so can be
I can’t help feeling it’s the case
taken up and used’
Bell Labs
Pythia knows
(Bell Telephone Laboratories)
recorded sound does not know what recorded sound knows
the employer of Klüver, Billy
Robert was going to use smell as Jean used smell
Swedish-born
Homage released stink bombs and made smoke out of ammonia and titanium tetrachloride and then caught on
US of A-naturalised
fire and released more smoke
1960 engineer of Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York
wood and metal burned the audience applauded and then descended into the wreckage for souvenirs
an homage a homage
the entire oeuvre of Ballard is based on something like this
March 17 is a ‘nothing’ day
heat and the smell and light
google tells me no day is a nothing day
the cave for the oracle at Delphi was dark and warm and smelled of the below and damp marble and the sea
things, more or less important, happened on every day in some year of history
‘for we do not change place, we change our nature’
multiples of 365 or 366
an idea must be vapour for it can be liquified by the application of pressure alone
i was born ‘near midnight’ my mother is unspecific on the 28th of february in a leap year
an idea must be a stew
Billy worked with Rauschenberg after Tinguely
Marx’s Gallerte
Billy worked with Robert after Jean
a congealed mass of meat and bones with a registered trademark
Oracle originally platonically as an idea was ‘what he described as an interactive environment’
‘After many discussions, the idea boiled down to a sound environment where the sounds came from five AM
Delphi a sanctuary dedicated to Apollo
radios’
Apollo, god of the sun music poetic inspiration archery prophecy medicine and pastoral life who fell in
Klüver, founder of E. A. T.
love with Hyacinth Hyacinth destroyed maybe by the west wind Hyacinth a blood flower spilled maybe by the
Klüver ‘hereby declare[s] [him]self to be a work art’
west wind
and the other engineers from Bell Labs
home of the Pythia
Bill Kaminsky designed and built for Alex Hay low-noise differential amplifiers with 80db gain Peter Hirsch
home of the Delphic Oracle
developed a Doppler sonar for Lucinda Childs Fred Waldhauer designed a proportional control system for
who sat above seams in the earth
moving sound
who sat above the chthonic gas below
Bell Telephone Laboratoires formerly the Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory funded by French government funds
an air-like fluid substance which expands freely to fill any space available including the Pythia
in 1880
unlike vapour it cannot be liquified by the application of pressure alone
50, 000 francs and the Volta prize go to Alexander Graham Bell!
she is choking on her tears
For his invention of the telephone! Pour son invention, la télé-phone!
‘where the temperature, sound, smell, and lights would change as the audience moved through it’
engineers and artists
the Oracle speaks
E. A. T.
the Oracle is not speech
telephone engineers and artists
speech is the expression of or the ability to express thoughts and feelings by articulate sounds
listen, hear, pay attention, be attentive, attend, give ear to, lend an ear to, hang on Pythia’s words;
prophecy is what the ‘before’ + ‘speaker’ the speaker of the event before the event speaks
keep their ears open, prick up their ears, are all ears, pin back their ears, get a load of, tune in, hark,
the speaker of two times whose body is in the before time and whose mind is in the during or the after time
hearken
the Pythia was not articulate
they work with what they know
recorded sound is the speaker of two times the before time and the playing time which can be now or during
they don’t work with what they don’t know
or after or before
the medium
recorded sound was articulate
I can’t help the feeling
the medium
I can’t help feeling it’s the case the truth is not stamped coin issued ready from the mint artists and rocket engineers Billy Klüver might have worked for NASA
DEBORAH BIRCH
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Bell Labs orare Bell labs nicht osme
the old gods
as deep and dark as Jupiter is as sharp as Osiris in silence stares
as sure as flesh stuck with obsidian pares
however icy the hoarfrost on Odin’s blank eye their pantheons jangle at the great far edges a space between them and all of time and between time and the formless gulf beyond that all gods rose from like great men from sleep and sink now down into again
with screaming night terrors
and the sound of something older, darker, sharper, colder,
and the reverse of each
that surrounds them, surrounds man,
again engulfs the essential breach
and as far as reawaking goes
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it shivers out of reach
Opposite: Graeme Oxby: Churchin’ 2014
DANIEL A. NICHOLLS
Saint Teresa’s Heart Claiming it a charism too diamond for the dark they hung her heart out to dry in a glass globe. Scratched and scraped with a life story the walls of its chambers reverberate still. A girl calling out to another inscribes saffron swallows and nival lilies on woodwork no one can unravel. A mystic with inquisitorial breath brimming the nape of her neck etches on stone he has no body but my own immaculate and shining in fields of barley this flesh has flown. A nun crossing night’s cedar soul writes on an acre of snow O my sisters this I had left leaving only entrails filled with stars and garnets. contemplating
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An old woman a wide geranium sky pencils in its margins morning has come all is light and all are inexorably pierced peregrine and moons circling earth’s fine tilth.
CLARE MCCOTTER
Opposite: Attila Hazay, Santa Lucia, 2015
Aokigahara
And now the forest swallows you like Jonah entering the mouth
Diabolus in Musica
In the dark aftermath of an earthquake and tsunami
of some carnivorous fish:
in Japan, I turn to Neilsen’s Fourth.
the car-park silent with flat tyres
Two kettledrums, tuned
and open maps; your Toyota
to the devil’s tone, battle it out;
misting with lichen and unspoke air.
at long last emerge to the sunlight of the major key of E.
I crank the window with a doorstop and a stretched coathanger;
We seek it out now, scruples gone
take your boots, torch, hard hat,
Black Sabbath, The Inner Light, Purple Haze––or any time
spare keys—make a trail into the heart
a blues player goes walk-about.
of darkness. You whisper kotodama from the sea of trees;
Bring on the tritone, I say. Long ago it sent monks scuttling
join the ghosts whom locals say
from cloister or chapel
were left to die among the stones,
hands over ears.
the knuckled roots, the canopy; Can this be it? The age of starlight twist construction tape around
a small window before the stars
the branches for a trail of breadcrumbs;
go out, one by one.
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I know you’ve cursed me, but I won’t believe it until I see the sign at the edge of the forest— the one that reads: Your life is a precious gift. Please consider what you’re doing.
JAMES PATTERSON
Overleaf: Aydin Cetinbostanoglu, The Little Psychic, 2015
BARBARA PILCHER
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From St. Ernesto ---
Your hands were hacked off at the wrist, They had that slipped round Aleida’s waist As she swayed. These hands now distorted, alien Sheathed in glass and formaldehyde Mother of pearl nails The shadowy knuckles, bumps in snow, The flesh where the arm was severed Turned deep black now, How they cradled Hilda’s head once When she weighed barely a few pounds Your fingers reading the bumps Of her cranium, you inhale The baby smell Sweet as fresh bread, Hair of silk, Her mother nearby, her blouse damp With Rorschach blots
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Of milk.
STEVE KOMARNYCKYJ
Opposite: Álvaro Herrero Gómez, Another’s Eyes, 2015
Poem for Kurt from Adele, Belfast 2014. What kind of heaven is it, made for people like you, starved, untrusting, half burnt by thoughts of poison? Can we still find each other down the Union Street Bar where all my boys kick their heads back with laughter as I spin on my heels? Come on, come and see me
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up on the pole tonight.
MATT KIRKHAM
Opposite: Emilia Moisio, Vieraalla Maalla 06
Loch Súilí
with its palm open holds an island of folded red flowers, bowed heads a halo. The shore is an edge, a border between, water set low in the landscape – every reflection a prisoner between bars of birch. Red flames are forced out of shape by a waft of breeze. I lost the way, but a candle remains – a solitary flare, a call for help, a lone whisper faltering. I try to return: to the path tasting of salt, to a wood full of laughter after tears, to the genesis of light.
Note:
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Loch Súilí: Lough Swilly. Lough pronounced, ‘Loch’. Translation: Lake of Shadows
Opposite: Luc Kordas, A Silhouette of a Chasidic Jew in Williamsburg at Dusk.
MARIA ISAKOVA BENNETT
Love in a Time of Distress
Showy yachts blink like butterflies as relentless Containers edge back and forth along the bay. The cool colours of austerity –
Belonging
Now I am sunk and strong in the morning and in the earth’s damp after the rain, a line of thick haze engulfs the hill, the soaked field and the brown last leaves
Winter White, Lulworth Blue – adorn houses, pert Range Rovers at rest in gated driveways, love in a time of distress.
crowd into my gaze. I breathe the fullness of the sirocco’s silence, the morning that settles in with sky and mud. I am the perspiring hill, I come from the womb of red loam and white-washed stones and bones, I am settled in the frame of swollen-still clouds and leaves that stick to my ground with their slow wrist and fist and mist that grasps the breast. The buzzard beats its hard wings, heavy wings that wait for the relief of a thermal, but there’s no thermal in this calm and they beat on and on, nevertheless.
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Sunk and sure and slow in the air’s depths. In my staring breath.
GERALD DAWE
DAVIDE TRAME
Overleaf: JP Terlizzi, Waiting, 2015
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WHERE THE DARK IS “Though other change, yet will not I remove.”
- Sir Thomas Wyatt: LXXXIV (Songs and Lyrics)
This is where the dark is, A labyrinth of mind and bone, The old torment of water on stone, Streets in winter in their funeral black,
A wrong word and no taking back.
Here is the light in a window Like any other light, but full of love, A door past which furtive lovers move Out of the grab of a mischievous ghost
Who thrives in the dead heart’s frost.
Here is the dividing of friends: Cold music found a lyric and recited A litany for love unrecognised, blighted The laughing tongue. The lock is secured On the half-open mouth, the saving word.
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FRED JOHNSTON
Opposite: Ruth Gonsalves Moore, Untitled#02 from series Ordinances and Angels, 2014
My Tyro
Come away with me mother, out of your tongue’s range and help me build a spine to hold your indifferent broadcasts. Lift the veil that is transference and witness me one man, a nomad with ringing ankles randomly drifting in a famine of openness. Open your senses my tyro and see me, one father one son one target; are we not blood? Is there not an unarmed Jesus lurking in your emotional doorway waltzing with seasoned boredom, basking beneath degrees without parchments? Nike’s un-shuffled deck sadly sits with prickly wings; you’ve picked a bitter pedagogue
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to recite to the flock.
GENE BARRY
Opposite: Matthieu Gafsou, Daniel from the series Only God Can Judge Me, 2012-2014 Matthieu Gafsou / Courtesy Galerie C
Lesions, cicatrix; ladders against the sky, a patch of flesh through ripped nylon. Scar mosaic put together from terraces and stars, the murder rooms. * Textures, colours criss-cross and slip. Smears of blue and yellow like tartan on a black cloth as backcloth, the slick and sliding of a drunk coming to. * Lava, slow unconfined fury from the outskirts to the docks. It never solidifies; it fumes and spits, political in the narrowest sense, a recent dead thing, coldly inviolate.
COLLUSION
* Angles refuse to meet with certainty. Multiple hurts amount to a singular grudge. Lucifers, headlights; marooned smokers, cornerboys, barflies gazing at lines in the dirt. * Ashes, then curses, where the devil has been. He was seen running naked ten streets from hell. Someone less well-connected kills out of duty rather than spite. * Sparks in the dark, rowers, silent to the weir and back, pucker and pull the black water until, like most immortal things, invisibly it sighs, relaxes and returns to normal. * Thoughts flow in the opposite direction, a river afraid of the sea. A cracked cup, the cloud-occluded moon is milk spilt on the fur of a grey carpet. High entries and long alleys, the noise of retreat. Aceldama. The heart seeks absence and the mind is scared. The light at the end of the tunnel eventually goes out.
Opposite: Christophe Canato, from the Ricochet series, 2013
HOWARD WRIGHT
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*
L’abbaye du Lieu Dieu
Dragonflies were the first thing then colonnades of silver birch. In land such as this one is always stepping into something or over it though we were lined like cattle toward the abattoir and still delighted to be tugged or spat on by a clump of unkempt heather. I thought I’d disturb an asp. Someone said ‘look!’ and we looked and then there were walls against which ivy and grape clamoured for the courtyard. I was reminded of my old school— post-derelict—in a heaven of scattered Carlsberg cans and roaches; its copper stripped from the walls, its grime-bothered radiators thrown from the highest window like spat teeth. Da said ‘fascinating.’ We all nodded.
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Three fat rolls of wild honeysuckle were pulled from a sundial and my brother dropped a penny down an empty well. It didn’t echo. Our ghosts are always loudest at their least disturbed.
JAMES PATTERSON
Opposite: Marie-Pierre Cravedi/ECAL from the Reunion series
In the bay she tilts angled in sunlight, girder, plate the half-forms like a huge Kraken in sea-life, sea-death with her cargo of liberation and the shadows become the dance of smiles, the voices thunder of the distant wandering rocks the broken moon the polyps writhe speak to them, the waves lap under the white cat with his knife one white loaf small fish and bottle of retsina and she has the look of the woman bored by the sea
The Wreck
her mohair sweater heavy with black Russian his face anguish-lined or hid his face with weathered blue eyes shale on which olive oil has dripped the olive press dark with virgin oil like pink anemones as a fish passes an insect sings in late autumn sunlight until it becomes a black twig. The fan on the ceiling turns above the dry cistern the stars’ black bowl. “And if you offer me this cup, I shall be grateful for black olives, green pimentos and the peach split to its white flesh for we prepare only so much of life as is required.
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Rings of Saturn for a pomegranate, furred peach skin the cranial stone orders its soft flesh as its halves, shaven waves’s fish-scales they take the cup, for what is broken remains unmended and he accepts; for neither knows to which god they go
Opposite: Graeme Oxby, Who is Elvis Presley? 2014
COLIN HONNOR
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dealer in souls”
No Words
I was silent, but my desire was painted
history, so that what’s real
on my face and with it my question,
becomes a kind of enchanted place,
far more warmly than in plain words.
the day no longer the day but a feel
for where the heart becomes a space
Paradiso, Canto IV
into which overwhelming things pour:
let only the most dogged light
beauty as tangible as a tree trunk;
in. The lonely riverbed
love something that waits in store
tinkers with rock and silt;
for anyone willing to take
copper drifts wheel.
a risk on its ideal. Where distance
What was that flash, that snagging dart?
pulls up a chair like a friend
Was is it a bright red crossbill?
returning home, and there is existence
Finding the right word would be start
for the long dead.
but nothing comes close. Because
Yes. Dreams must be let go,
there is only silence interspersed
retreat back into the subconscious,
with what happens.
but something remains of the glow
Little noises that spread their seed
they leave. A tinge, perhaps,
by source alone. And if it can’t
that lodges somewhere safe,
be found imagination roams
below the thing you most adore.
like a ghost in the forest,
Isn’t it precious, this life?
following its nose through shadows,
Look how it opens like a door.
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The branches grafted overhead
Overleaf: Kostas Maros, from the Journey series, 2013
KEVIN GRAHAM
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time zones
He looks at himself, at the turn of the century. He does not see light yet, reflected in the mirror. One, two, three, four, one, two, He moves on the control cabinet. He chews fox tail. He crawls out of the cave. To smell Egypt, To taste, To hear and not to hear when ants cross over his feet. They would rather flap their wings than walk on shit. It’s too loud for the woodpecker .. . .. .. . .. . .. .. .. . .. .. . .. . .. .. .. . ... .. . .. . .. . ... . .. ... . .. . .. . .. .. .... . .. . .. . ... . ... . .. .. . .. . .. So he imagined himself instead Pecking at the clouds. Surprised, are the eagle’s wings when the ants are finally silent, And they dream high. As the century turns, he doesn’t understand much. With a knife, abridged __ p.42
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He slowly cuts his house into slices.
2014 Nomadic Arts Festival 2014, Warszawa/Charciabałda, Poland. Translated by Kimbal Quist Bumstead
KAROLINA KUBIK
Opposite: Antoine Violleau, Ankou from the Halloween, series, 2014
COBBLED ( for Reginald Gray, painter, at Paris)
The hotel is run by Algerian Christians, A postcard Virgin reclines against the cash-register. In the morning, women move from room To room, stooping. Breathy falsetto of vacuums.
No matter where I am, I am always there.
Rain polishes the regrettable palm,
There is no one for breakfast. Now is the time
To make a run for the end of the world
To face yourself. To ignore mirrors.
Walk the cobbles of PĂŠre Lachaise,
The morning opens on immaculate tombs.
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FRED JOHNSTON
Opposite: Antoine Violleau, Faust from the Halloween, series, 2014
Signs and Superstitions
When you broke the wings off the angel, I tried not to mind, for you were only a child, and told myself it was not a sign, but lit a candle none-the-less, watched the white wax drip, on a mild August night, and looked for patterns in the sky, pulsing points of light through a tilted window, I spotted the Plough and the Bear, and wondered why we search for comfort in the stars, when down below the earth offers up her well tread lanes and roads and we know those who have seen it all before can talk us through the path they took at the crossroads, or tell us how they their choice and walked out the door. For days I gathered feathers, wherever they could be found, (no doubt from quilts or pillows or from a passing bird). I looked both ways at crossings, waited for the sound of crashing glass, avoided cats and ladders, absurd, I know, a pagan prayer of sorts, I jumped the cracks,
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crossed my fingers and scattered the jacks.
Opposite: Christophe Canato, from the Ricochet series, 2013.
STEPHANIE CONN
a white ball of corn bobbing to pozole surface an accordion player dribbling drunk on a street in Chilpancingo—green twinkles of damiana-infused mezcal seventeen years from now electric pink quinceañera dresses scrunching in a mist of sweet perfume sky-explosions of Christmas Eve firecrackers like new year bullets banging dryly in the air a fearless boy contorting from La Quebrada before smashing into seawater * scooped or gouged from their sockets they took his eyes away
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and all the things he’d seen the things he might have seen and then they cut off his ears and then they cut off his face
CONTRIBUTORS Gene Barry is an Irish Poet, Art Therapist and a psychotherapist. He has been published widely both at home and internationally and his poems have been translated into Arabic, Irish and Italian. In 2010 Gene was editor of the anthology Silent Voices, a collection of poems written by asylum seekers living in Ireland. Barry’s chapbook Stones in their Shoes was published 2008 and in 2013 his collection Unfinished Business was published by Doghouse Books. He has just finished editing a collection of 100 poems to be published for the Australian/NZ market and is presently editing his 3rd collection. He is the founder and chairman of the Fermoy International Poetry Festival and is presently editing his new collection of poems. Gene also edited the anthologies Remembering the Present in May 2012, Inclusion and The Blue Max Review 2012, 2013 and 2014 editions as part of the Fermoy International Poetry Festival. In 2014 Barry edited Irish poet Michael Corrigan’s début collection Deep Fried Unicorn, fathers and what must be said and The Day the Mirror Called and has edited sonoffred for US poet Michael Clay which will be launched in March 2015. Jack Anthony Boniface, born and raised in Blackpool, after finishing School, moved from the family home to study outdoor studies at St Martin’s in Ambleside Cumbria. Here developing a keen interest in the environment and man’s influence upon it. It was from here he developed an interest in art and how this relationship is shown through visual arts, and went on to study photography at Blackpool and the Fylde College. Jack’s work focuses on landscape and mans relationship to it. Much of his work looks at our perceptions of the world around us, how we change and manipulate land to suit out needs. Our sense of ownership over it and what lie in it under it and on top of it. Jack currently share his time between living in Blackpool and working in London, and is currently working on other personal work in the Blackpool area for a local Arts organisation called Left Coast. Dylan Brennan is an Irish writer currently based in Mexico. His poetry, essays and memoirs have been published in a range of international journals, in English and Spanish. His debut poetry collection, Blood Oranges, for which he received the runner-up prize in the Patrick Kavanagh Award, is available now from The Dreadful Press. Twitter: @DylanJBrennan www.dylanbrennan.org Christophe Canato, a French-Australian, lives and works in Perth, Western Australia since 2005.Born in France, he successfully entered the Beaux-Arts school at seventeen years old. After receiving his DNSEP (comparable to a Master degree in Fine Arts) and a Diploma of Fashion from the prestigious Institut Français de la Mode (French Fashion Institute), Canato has drawn on his background in the Paris Fashion industry. Canato’s visual artist career started with his 1997 winner prize of the Paris Salon de la Jeune Création. Canato’s series Ricochet alludes to stage play of a Shakespearean vein. As single images they are beautiful, enigmatic studio portraits and still lives, but seen together they are reminiscent of an elaborate storyboard for an unseen greater tale. His ambiguous and luscious photographs, lit in the manner of many renaissance paintings, delve into the psyche of childhood, a time when playing is the most important activity and everything is believable; a time when darkness hides all sorts of threats and time itself seems endless. Extract, text by QCP 2014. Aydin Cetinbostanoglu: In 1970 I took my first photograph with the camera which I borrowed from a friend. I opened my first exhibition while I was a high school student in 1973. I studied political sciences at Ankara University Faculty of Political Science between 1974 and 1978. Both my earliest training as well as the turbulent era of economic and social events influenced the way in which we see the today’s photos. In 1975 I won my first photo prize with an Anatolian family portrait in a national
DYLAN BRENNAN
photo competition. On Dec 2013 I won my last award in an international photo competition organised by Thessaloniki Photo Museum (Greece) and Europe Union with my project called “Diary of a village doctor”. My two portfolios were awarded by UNESCO in two different categories Humanity Photo Awards in China in 2014. My two portfolios were chosen for The Other Hundred project and its photo book in Hong Kong in 2013 and 2014. Pic info: On my last day at the Yazidi refugee camp, I was told about a girl who could predict the future. According to the Yazidi caste system, her dad had the rank of a “pir”. The girl reads the fortunes of anyone who comes to her on Wednesday, the sacred day of Yazidis. However, you need to go talk to her on Tuesday to get an answer the next day. I did not have the opportunity to do this as I left the camp on a Saturday. She still kindly accepted to pose for me in front of her tent. Place: Batman / Turkey. Stephanie Conn is a teacher from County Antrim. Her poetry has been widely published. She has been shortlisted for awards including the Patrick Kavanagh Award, highly commended in competitions including the Mslexia Pamplet Competition and selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. She is a graduate of the MA programme in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre, QUB. Stephanie has recently received an Arts Council ACES Award and is working on her second poetry collection. Marie-Pierre Cravedi_was born and raised in Toulouse and currently lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. She received a Bachelor in cinema from La Sorbonne, a Master in Photography from EFTI School, Spain, and a Master in Art Direction, option Photography, from ECAL in 2013. After being the assistant of Alberto Garcia-Alix in 2009, she worked as a freelance photographer. Her work has been projected in the Musée de l’Elysée (Lausanne) in February 2014, published in the British Journal of Photography in November 2013, and exhibited in Festival Manifesto (Toulouse) in September in 2014. She has just won the International Photography Award Emergentes DST in Braga (September 2014). Gerald Dawe’s new collection, Mickey Finn’s Air, was recently published by The Gallery Press. Matthieu Gafsou (CH, 1981) lives and works in Lausanne, Switzerland. After university education (Master of Arts in philosophy, literature and cinema), he studied photography at the School of Applied Arts in Vevey. Since 2006 he participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions and published four books. He received in 2009 the famous “Prix de la fondation HSBC pour la photographie” and was selected in 2010 in the exhibition reGeneration2. Since 2012 he teaches at the University of Art and Design Lausanne (ECAL). In 2014, he had his first solo show in a world-class institution, The Musée de l’Elysée with the Only God Can Judge Me series. Aurora Giampaoli at the age of 13, started her artistic journey, first by attending the High School of Art in her home town in Tuscany, and then by getting a degree in Cinema and Audiovisual Arts at the University of Pisa. During this period, her interest in the language of photography began to grow. She started developing her own personal style by visiting cinema halls and theatres. It was then that she abandoned street photography and decided to refine the art of portraiture. Her lens focuses on the human figure, exploring its complexity by shunning daylight and reshaping reality. This unique perspective gives us a singular view of the human body.
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JULIO CÉSAR MONDRAGÓN
Kevin Graham was featured poet in the summer 2014 issue of The Stinging Fly. Recent poems have appeared in Agenda, The Rialto, Stand and on RTE Radio. He was shortlisted for a 2014 Hennessy Literary Award. Attila Hazay was born in 1976. He comes from eastern Slovakia, from a town called Humenné where he grew up until he finished his high school studies. He started taking photographs in 1998 while on a student internship in Latin America, but his engagement with photography became more intense after year 2004. Four years later, he became a student at the Institute of Creative Photography at Silesian University, from which he graduated with his final thesis “Historical photography techniques in contemporary Czech photography”. He is presently living and working in Prague. Álvaro Herrero Gómez 24, is years from Albacete, Spain. He studied Psychology for 3 years in Murcia´s University, but then dropped out and started studying Photography in Albacete: I´ve learned Photoshop almost by my own (thanks Youtube), because the quality of the photography teaching is really poor (I mean, most of the teachers are the kind of person that you don´t know why he/she has a job). I´m interested in video too, in fact, a friend called Esteban and me won a competition of short films, the Barrax Express (it had to be made in 24 hours), from the Paradiso Movies Festival (Festival de Cine Paradiso), in Barrax. I´d like to evolve in photography and video, and this kind of events are perfect for that.
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Colin Honnor is a widely published poet in numerous magazines in print and online, a former editor of Poetry and Audience, a literary scholar and translator of modern European poetry, he runs a fine arts press in the Cotswolds. Maria Isakova Bennett lives in Liverpool. In the past two years she has had work published in, among others, Prole, Crannog, Boyne Berries, Envoi, Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, Ink Sweat & Tears, Poetry Bus, Antiphon and Abridged. During 2014 Maria was highly commended in the Gregory O’ Donoghue Poetry Competition, shortlisted in the Munster Literature Chapbook Competition, and in July she was awarded first prize in the Ver Open Competition. Maria is a teacher, artist and poet, and in February this year, her first pamphlet, Caveat, was published by Poetry Bus. Fred Johnston born Belfast, 1951, he founded, with Neil Jordan and Peter Sheridan, the old Irish Writers’ Centre and then Galway’s annual Cúirt literature festival in 1986. In 2004, he was writer in residence to the Princess Grace Irish Library at Monaco. Work appeared in the old Honest Ulsterman and more recently in The Spectator, Stand, The London Magazine, and elsewhere. He has twice been a recipient of a Northern Ireland Arts Council Bursary. He also reviews poetry for Books Ireland.
Matt Kirkham’s The Lost Museums (Lagan Press, 2006) won the Strong Prize for best first collection in Ireland. Aged Fourteen My Grandfather Runs Away To Sea won the inaugural Iota iShots competition. Work anthologised in The New North (Wake Forest University Press, 2008) and Landing Places (Dedalus, 2010). 2014 recipient of Arts Council NI ACES award to complete a collection based on the life and ideas of mathematician Kurt Gödel. Poems due in Stand, Spring 2015.
Julie Morrissy’s work has been published on the both sides of the Atlantic. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Dalhousie Review, the Irish Literary Review, the White Wall Review, and has been shortlisted for broadcast on RTE Radio One. Her short stories have featured in The Bohemyth and Dear John magazine. She holds Master’s degrees in Literature, and Creative Writing, and is currently working toward her first poetry collection.
Steve Komarnyckyj’s literary translations and poems have appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, The North and Modern Poetry in Translation. His book of translations from the Ukrainian poet Pavlo Tychyna was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2011. His translation of Vasyl Shkliar’s Ukrainian novel Raven was published in April 2013. His last book of translated poetry, A Flight Over the Black Sea was the recipent of an English PEN award in 2014. He has recently appeared in the Transatlantic Poetry Series of on air readings in an event hosted by Fjords Review. He runs Kalyna Language Press with his partner Susie and three domestic cats.
Daniel A. Nicholls can most often be found declaiming poets and poetry on Twitter (@nomopoetry). His work can be found online at Agenda Poetry, Honest Ulsterman, Open Letters Monthly, Compose Journal, Specter Magazine, and elsewhere. From 2010 until 2012, he was Writer in Residence at The Starving Artist in Keene, NH. He now resides in Arizona.
Luc Kordas is a a fine art photographer interested in portraits, travel and street photography. After a decade of traveling around the world he is now based in New York. Karolina Kubik (b. 1984) visual performance artist and poet. She performs in between definitions, examining the axis between the human body and geopolitics. A crucial element of her performance lies in time and embarrassing situations, which verify the attractiveness of norms and experiences. Based in Poznan, where she works in the University of Arts Multimedia Department. She has participated in projects, collective exhibitions and performance art festivals in Poland and abroad (among others, in Belfast, Berlin, Kaunas, London, Lviv, New York, Istanbul, Jerusalem/Tel-Aviv, Tartu, Zagreb) Kostas Maros found his way to photography in 2011 after he gave up his career as a lawyer. Since then he has been working as a press photographer and as a freelance photographer for various clients. In 2012, during a yearlong travel through Asia and Eastern Europe, he started working intensely on his personal projects supported by photographers like Bruno Barbey, Magnum. Kostas Maros is represented by the photographers agency 13 photo (www.13photo.ch) Clare McCotter’s haiku, tanka and haibun have been published in many parts of the world. She won the IHS Dóchas Ireland Haiku Award 2010 and 2011. In 2013 she won The British Tanka Award. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on Belfast born Beatrice Grimshaw’s travel writing and fiction. Her poetry has appeared in Abridged, Boyne Berries, The Cannon’s Mouth, Crannóg, Cyphers, Decanto, Iota (forthcoming), Irish Feminist Review, The Leaf Book Anthology 2008, The Linnet’s Wings, The Moth Magazine, A New Ulster, The Poetry Bus (forthcoming), Poetry24, Reflexion, Revival, The SHOp and The Stinging Fly. Black Horse Running, her first collection of haiku, tanka and haibun, was published in 2012. Home is Kilrea, County Derry. Emilia Moisio (born Helsinki, Finland 1983) works with commercial and editorial assignments and her personal art projects internationally. Her fine art practice is guided by a post-modernist interest in exploring and questioning the role of photography in society, and consists mainly of conceptual projects strongly focused and founded on using images as a tool to explore, analyze, develop and illustrate the structured framework of thought. Her editorial and commercial work rests mainly on capturing and sharing the small miraculous moments of reality. Her photographs aim to disclose, preserve and turn into memories the minute instances otherwise so easily fleeting past.
Graeme Oxby is a photographer and film maker based in Yorkshire. The KIngs Of England exhibition documents the culmination of two years work photographing Elvis impersonators at competitions, festivals and in their homes. A 2011 survey estimated that there were in excess of 85,000 Elvis impersonators around the world. Impersonating Elvis Presley is a phenomenon spanning ages, cultures and countries. The man known as “The King of Rock and Roll” and often simply, “The King”, is proving immortal. The Kings Of England exhibition documents the remediation of a major element of the iconography of the popular culture of the 20th and now 21st centuries, and of Presley himself, the most photographed man on the planet. The work is three months into a gallery tour of the UK and a bigger selection of the pictures will be published in a book by Bluecoat Press in July 2015. James Conor Patterson is a 25 year old Creative Writing MA at Queen’s University Belfast, who has had work featured in a number of publications including: Cyphers; Wordlegs; Southword; The Weary Blues; theNewerYork; and The Open Ear (Queen’s University Belfast). He will be featured in upcoming issues of Poetry Ireland Review, Southword and Magma. He lives in his home-town of Newry, Co. Down. Barbara Pilcher is a botanist and poet based in Co. Down who also writes and broadcasts on horticulture and wildlife. She has had poems published in various anthologies and magazines and is a member of the writing group at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University.
Antoine Violleau born in 1976 in France, is a self-taught photographer. From his early childhood, his father who was himself a passionate amateur, provided his children with a camera. After studying English at the University and how to teach French as a foreign language, he went to Namibia for a training as a French teacher. Coming back with many images on black and white films, he started to develop them in his dark room while still attending the university. He then went to work as a French teacher in Kingston Jamaica for 4 years and then to Togo as a librarian for 4 years as the head of the library of the French Cultural Center for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Back to France in 2011 he taught English in a professional high school but got fed-up and going through a personal crisis, decided to do what he had always dreamed about: being a photographer. He subscribed to Kelby TV and followed Creative live trainings and started his own company on september 2013. Since then he has done portraits of local artists, photos for primitive art galleries, covering festivals or live shows and he developed personal works like the Halloween series. He draws his inspiration from his love of literature, comic strips, movies and paintings. He has been influenced by David Hockney, Philippe Halsman, the surrealists and William Klein. www.antoineviolleau.com www.facebook.com/AntoineViolleau Howard Wright lectures at the Belfast School of Art. Recent poems have been published in Dark Horse, The Frogmore Papers and The Antigonish Review. Others are up and coming in Agenda and The Reader. My first collection, ‘King of Country’ was published by Blackstaff in 2010. Abridged Personnel: Gregory McCartney: Editor: Has a face on the mirror, a hand on the gun and a ticket to Syria. Susanna Galbraith: Editorial Assistant: Susanna is in her third year of English Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She is currently the Co-Editor of Icarus Magazine and has had poetry published in Icarus, Abridged, and Belleville Park Pages.
JP Terlizzi is a visual storyteller who creates images that are investigations of the inner self. He draws inspiration from his personal experiences and memories to capture moments that convey narratives. Whether the story is a framed moment of intimacy or a poetic interpretation of fading reality, his work is deeply rooted in wonder, memory and dreams. Based in Manhattan, JP’s career spans thirty years as creative director for a boutique agency specializing in retail design. He studied photography at Kutztown University of PA and the International Center of Photography in New York. His work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad. He also finds writing in the third person a little strange. Davide Trame is an Italian teacher of English living in Venice. His poetry collection “Make It Last” was published in January 2013 by Lapwing Publications, Belfast.
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Ruth Gonsalves Moore born 1969, Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh. Ruth now resides in East Belfast. After 18 years working in community development in Northern Ireland often working with artist and through creative mediums, Ruth began to think about developing her own weekend photography hobby into an artistic practice. This was consolidated by returning to college as a mature student and undertaking an undergraduate at Belfast School of Art. Her works draws on her own lived experiences and subject interests often have a strong Northern Irish resonance. Ruth currently is continuing her photographic practice and works part time in arts management. www.ruth-gonsalvesmoore.com
Frequently Asked Questions What is Abridged? Abridged aims to commission and publish contemporary/experimental poetry plus contemporary art freed from exhibition ties and especially commissioned for the magazine. We encourage poets/artists to investigate the articulation of ‘Abridged’ themes. These themes focus on contemporary concerns in a rapidly changing society. We are offering an alternative and complete integration of poetry, art and design. We experiment continually. We also stray into the exhibition format producing contemporary, innovative and challenging work accompanied by a free publication. Where is Abridged from?
I will go there, take me home Curated by Gregory McCartney
We’re based in The People’s Republic of Derry. Or Londonderry. Or whatever you wish. Why call it Abridged? Because we are. You are. Everyone is. It also gives us a completeness to aspire to. People were rather dubious in regard to the name when we first unveiled it. However it’s become quite iconic and serves its purpose as we intended. Who is Abridged? At the moment Abridged is Gregory McCartney and Susanna Galbraith. However the make-up of Abridged is quite fluid and we have worked with various personnel over the years and no doubt will continue to do so. People come and go. The light still flashes. How many issues of Abridged are there per year? Generally there are three issues per year though this can increase with the addition of our exhibition publications and other project magazines. Where can we get Abridged? Abridged is generally available at art galleries and arts organisations in Belfast, Dublin, Derry, Galway. Usually for a limited period as they go very quickly. You can also read a free Pdf of each issue on this website. How and when do I submit material to Abridged? We have a theme for each issue so it’s best to check this website, our facebook page ‘abridged zero-nineteen’ and the usual agencies such as the Poetry Ireland website and the Visual Artists Ireland email-shot and wait for the submission call before sending us material. Does Abridged pay a fee for successful submissions? Sadly we cannot pay fees though all those published receive a copy of the magazine. How long has Abridged been going? Officially since 2004. We like to think there have always been Abridged people though. Why is Abridged numbered as it is rather than dated with issue number as most other publications are? We want the Abridged to be timeless hence the lack of a date to condemn it to the archives. We ahem borrowed Factory
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Records system of cataloguing and added a zero to signify abridgment. Why are there gaps in the list of magazines/projects? Abridged projects are numbered as they are conceived rather than born. Some (for various reasons) don’t make it to existence hence the gaps. We do on occasion revisit projects. For example Abandoned Donegal originated in 2007 but wasn’t born until 2010 therefore it has the 0 – 7 moniker. Where did Abridged spring from? Once upon a time there was a rather bad tempered little poetry magazine called ‘The Chancer’ organised by a ‘Bunch of
Olaf Brzeski Pieter Hugo Adrian Ghenie 8 May - 26 Jul
Chancers’. It detailed Derry’s nigh-time activities and the nefarious going-ons in car-parks and other glamorous locations. It was ahead of its time and lasted probably far longer than it should. It was cheap, cheerful and we’re still proud of it. Some of the launch performances went down in legend. When it finally went to the place where all good magazines go one of the Chancers decided a new approach was required and the Abridged was born. Different name, much the same spirit.
This exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of the John Ellerman Foundation. Image Credit: Pieter Hugo David Akore, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana 2010, copyright Pieter Hugo. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Yossi Milo, New York.
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Cover: Aurora Giampaoli, I pesci, 2015