The new issue is a celebration of words and their presence in the medium of drawing. In a time of fake news and populism, the word seems to have lost some ground and anti-intellectualism appears to be taking over. It’s more important than ever therefore to praise the written expression in all its forms – whether it’s been rearranged, cut, scribbled or even if it just looks like writing, all of which you can find here. In this issue we show some of Ed Ruscha’s word drawings, which earned him the status of one of the most influential post-war artists. Language similarly became a crucial tool for Sol LeWitt, who wrote out instructions to enable others to execute his drawings. For LeWitt, the idea of the artwork as expressed in words and functions is the essence of a conceptual work. You can read and, if you like, follow the instructions from LeWitt inside this issue of Fukt.  You can also discover the mystery of the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript, get lost in Paula Scher’s sensible typographic maps or Mark Lombardi’s political diagrams and immerse yourself in the Prinzhorn Collection’s remarkable artworks – a collection produced by psychiatric patients. Read interviews with our featured artists such as Stefan Marx, Annie Vought and Suzanne Treister to learn why Marx hates Sundays so much, how Vought makes use of social media in her work, where the idea for Treister’s time travelling avatar came from and much more. Artists: Ed Ruscha, Paula Scher, Simon Evans TM, Sketchbook Project, Irma Blank, Nina Papaconstantinou, Mirtha Dermisache, Ariane Spanier, Suzanne Treister, Karl Holmqvist, Pavel Pepperstein, Ingwill Gjelsvik, Marco Raparelli, Nadine Fecht, Shantell Martin, Katrin Ströbel, Xu Bing, Paula Troxler, Mark Lombardi, Stefan Brüggemann, Sol LeWitt, Pae White, Malgorzata Zurada, Philip Loersch, Stefan Marx, Prinzhorn Collection, Roni Horn, Peter Phobia, Annie Vought, Henri Chopin, Petra Schulze-Wollgast, Thomas Broomé, Meg Hitchcock, The Voynich Manuscript  Softcover, 224pp FUKT Magazine, 2018, reprint 2022

Snagged on red thread is a long poem of protest, power and complicity. Jazmine Linklater articulates how the apparatus of Empire is encoded in the structures we live in: militarised sights set on schoolyards, bargaining arms deals with teenagers, surveilling civic squares, co-opting institutions. And yet Snagged on red thread is compelled to march, to embroider, to bear witness. • ‘What is it to only know the word sweetheart in the language of people being killed in your name? How do we comprehend the paltriness of our gestures against genocide? The speaker of Jazmine Linklater’s Snagged on red thread moves within the intimacies of complicity, not excluding themselves from the we whose taxes fund genocide, or succumbing to individualising games of guilt or absolution. The poem rather weaves then with now – how the “war on terror” normalised the murder of Arabs in the “Western” imaginary for generations. It snags constantly on irresolution, not attempting to tie anything up, but always manages to locate the right enemy.’ – Mira Mattar ‘Snagged on red thread is committed to the act of witnessing, and to witnessing the act of witnessing: “Am I giving the looking / the room demands right?” Linklater tries on, then discards, different ways of looking, none of which are adequate to the horrors the poem describes. In this way it displays an exemplary impatience, with itself, and with those responsible for suffering. How else do you carry on living day-to-day right now? This distraught, tender, vigilant poem responds with answers only too large or too small, and as such it strikes me as truthful: “Try to think geopolitically,” it tells itself, “scoop the ladybird up / with a flyer.”’ – Oli Hazzard Staplebound, 28pp Monitor Books, November 2025

Dark Entries’ fourth excursion into the gothic brings us an article on the use of technology in trying to prove the existence of spirits, an interview with paranormal psychologist Evelyn Hollow, an arcane and hallucinatory playlist, curated by author Richard Cabut, and a gallery of disquieting artworks from Scotland-based artist Fiona Lynn.Staplebound, A5 33pp Dark Entries, 2025

Close to God is the debut pamphlet by Oisín Roberts, combining pieces written for performance over the span of two years. In this pamphlet, Roberts reckons with the self in transition, speaking to his reader in an attempt to recover fragmented memories of childhood, relationships and discovery. Roberts finds transcendence in emptiness; he writes about feeling by getting you to feel something. "Oisín Roberts writes, "The thing I love talking to you about is everything. The thing I like about it is everything." It makes me think about how much I like the everything of Close to God for the declarations vibrating and pausing in the throat, then firing into the air we breathe! A launchpad, a trampoline, a cannon, a bursting seed, Oisín Roberts brings us the extraordinary drama of love and pulse as from the jaws of ancient poets alive in the 21st century!" - CAConrad  Staplebound, Risograph, 125 x 210mm, 32 pp Burley Fisher Community Press, September 2025.

Circles in the Dirt. Mapmaking and Life Diagrams. Contemporary Ritual. Aesthetics and Sources. Learning to Pay Attention. Visionary Art. In addition to teaching studio skills such as papermaking, printmaking, and book arts, Women’s Studio Workshop (WSW) has offered workshops that are more experimental, personal, conceptual, or exploratory in nature, rooted in self-observation, inquiry, listening, embodiment, performance, study, and dreams. Here are a few in their original form as they were published in WSW newsletters and Summer Art Institute catalogs from 1983–1999. Efemmera Reissue No. 8: Workshopping at WSW was created by Emily Larned as part of her exhibition Workshopping, installed at Women’s Studio Workshop from October 3, 2025 – January 23, 2026, Rosendale, NY, curated by WSW archivist Faythe Levine.Staplebound, Fold out, Risograph, 20pp WSW, 2025

Tremble, Fatema Abdoolcarim’s debut collection of poems, is an intimate and involving sequence on fertility and faith. A memoir in verse, these poems relate encounters with the animal other, the uncertain, but always echoing the tender rituals of family, food, prayer. Abdoolcarim thinks through what it means to care – and to mother – at a time where atrocity makes those systems of loving seem out of reach. Tremble traces the sensual and unknown spaces of desire, creating a hopeful lyric in spaces of private and global loss. Tremble, Fatema Abdoolcarim’s debut collection of poems, is an intimate and involving sequence on fertility and faith. A memoir in verse, these poems relate encounters with the animal other, the uncertain, but always echoing the tender rituals of family, food, prayer. Abdoolcarim thinks through what it means to care – and to mother – at a time where atrocity makes those systems of loving seem out of reach. Tremble traces the sensual and unknown spaces of desire, creating a hopeful lyric in spaces of private and global loss.   •     ‘The remarkable poems that make up Tremble record a body’s descent into vertiginous, all-encompassing desire. Abdoolcarim is fearless in her determination not to look away from what is monstrous in our world, yet her writing also reflects what it is to be fully human. The clarity of her image-making eye, her wit, her compassion, and her rage carry us and challenge us to stay with the trouble, to set our ears to the darkness and listen for the beauty in its hollow ring, to allow it to speak to the very limits of our longing. Her words shimmer like a pool of jade at the centre of a black ceramic bowl, a sensual riposte to Hélène Cixous’ imperative: Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.’ – Rebecca Hurst   ‘Fatema Abdoolcarim is the rare artist I would follow anywhere, whose work astounds and moves me across every genre. Tremble is a gift of profound proportions, conveying with her signature brilliant and caring gaze the variable inner and outer textures of life. I hold this remarkable text—its vast and intimate reach—to my chest in gratitude.’ – Gabrielle BatesStaplebound, 44pp Monitor Books, London, Oct 2025

Created by black women artists, this dynamic workbook can help you shift joy from a feeling to a practice. Engage its prompts, reflections, and resources for personal and creative transformation! Compiled by Gabrielle Civil with contributions by Call & Response Artists Gabrielle Civil, Duriel E. Harris, Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle, Rosamond S. King, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Miré Regulus and Awilda Rodríguez Lora.Self published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Women's Center for Creative Work.Designed by MJ Balvanera, Riso-printed by Nadinne Natalia and MJ Balvanera.Softcover, 35pp Co-Conspirators Press, 2024

Softcover, 320pp At Last Books, 2025

Part memoir, part manifesto, part Black speculative novella, The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful blurs boundaries between this world and an imagined future whose overlapping wisdoms make cooperation with our natural environment a central concern for collective thriving. Extending her ongoing musical project Mandorla Awakening, Nicole Mitchell Gantt explores inequity, the musical legacies of jazz, creative music, and intercultural collaboration to guide readers toward an alternative society that disrupts binaries, hierarchies, and western ideas of progress. Paying homage to artists, musicians, and writers who have inspired her, Mitchell Gantt opens channels for artistic proliferation that are integral to the collective survival of our planet.  Nicole Mitchell Gantt is an award-winning creative flautist, conceptualist, and composer. She is a former chairwoman of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and founder of the Black Earth Ensemble. The Mandorla Letters is her first book. Hardback, 272pp Minnesota Press, 2022

The beginnings of the anti-colonial struggle in Jamaica coincided with the childhood and early adolescence of Sylvia Wynter, providing the motivation for this, the first phase of her important body of work. The essays and articles collected here go beyond making an argument against colonialism, but set out to decolonize the nature of the discourse that legitimated the imperial order. At the time of their writing, Wynter was a practicing novelist, an innovative playwright, a scholar of Spanish Caribbean history, and an incisive literary critic with a gift for the liveliest kind of polemics. This intellectual virtuosity is evident in these wide-ranging essays that include an exploration of C.L.R. James's writings on cricket, Bob Marley and the counter-cosmogony of the Rastafari, and the Spanish epoch of Jamaican history (including a pioneering examination of Bernado de Balbuena, epic poet and Abbot of Jamaica 1562-1627).edited by Demetrius L. Eudell Softcover, 650pp Peepal Tree Press, 2022

n this captivating memoir, the first full-length account of life in the Arkestra by any of its members, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts two decades of traveling the spaceways with the inimitable composer, pianist, and big-band leader Sun Ra. Gigging everywhere from the legendary Bed-Stuy venue the East to the National Stadium in Lagos, Abdullah paints a vivid picture of the rise of loft jazz and the influence of Pan-Africanism on creative music, while capturing radical artistic and political developments across Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s. Richly illustrated with more than fifty pages of photographs and posters from Adger Cowans, Marilyn Nance, Val Wilmer, and others, A Strange Celestial Road interweaves the author’s own moving story—his battles with addiction, spiritual development, and life as a working class performer—with enthralling tales of tutelage under Cal Massey, collaborations with the likes of Ed Blackwell, Marion Brown, and Andrew Cyrille, and profound, occasionally confounding, mentorship by Sun Ra. Originally written in the 1990s with the help of Nuyorican poet Louis Reyes Rivera and published now for the first time, with a foreword by Salim Washington, A Strange Celestial Road is not only an autobiography, but a history of a remarkable and under-documented movement in music.   --- AHMED ABDULLAH joined the Sun Ra Arkestra as a trumpeter in 1974 and remained a member for more than twenty years. Born in Harlem in 1947, he became an important figure in the New York loft jazz movement, forming the group Abdullah in 1972, and going on to found the Melodic Art-Tet with Charles Brackeen, Ronnie Boykins, and Roger Blank in the early 1970s and The Group with Marion Brown, Billy Bang, Sirone, Fred Hopkins and Andrew Cyrille in 1986. Abdullah is a co-founder of the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium, has been the music director of Dianne McIntyre’s Sounds in Motion Dance Company, and is currently music director at the historic venue Sistas’ Place in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He has been a music instructor at Carnegie Hall and Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, and teaches at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and an elementary school in central Brooklyn. LOUIS REYES RIVERA (1945–2012) was a Puerto Rican poet from Brooklyn. Known as the “Dean of Nuyorican Poetics,” he led creative writing workshops in community centers and prisons across New York, lectured on Latin and Black diasporic history and literature at New York colleges including Hunter, Boricua, Pratt, and Stony Brook; and was a leader in the 1969 student movement at CUNY, leading to the founding of its department of ethnic studies. Rivera was also a prolific editor, working on books such as John Oliver Killens’s Great Black Russian: The Life and Times of Alexander Pushkin, and a translator of works by Puerto Rican poets Clemente Soto Velez and Otto Rene Castillo. His own poetry collections include Who Pays the Cost (1977), This One for You (1983), and Scattered Scripture (1996), which received an award from the Latin American Writers Institute. SALIM WASHINGTON is a saxophonist, composer, and scholar based in Durban, South Africa, where he is a professor at University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is a co-author, with Farah Jasmine Griffin, of Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis,  John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (2009) and a contributor to Yellow Power, Yellow Soul: The Radical Art of Fred Ho  (2013).

The success of new far-right movements cannot be explained by fear or rage alone – the pleasures of aggression and violence are just as essential. As such, racism is particularly intense when it is erotically charged, migration presenting as a sexual threat to white women being one of many examples. Germany’s strikingly successful right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland is, according to the historian Dagmar Herzog, characterized by this “sexy racism”, with its second main feature being that of an obsessive anti-disability hostility – both elements resonating strongly with Nazism. In The New Fascist Body, Herzog connects her analysis of fascism’s libidinous energy with its animus against bodies perceived as imperfect. Only by studying the emotional and intellectual worlds of past fascisms can we understand and combat their current manifestations. Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her many books include The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany‘s Twentieth Century (2024), Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (2017) and Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (2005). Softcover, 112pp Wirklichkeith Books, Berlin, Oct 2025

The American composer and writer John Cage, born 1912, and the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, born 1928, have emerged as the leading figures of the bourgeois musical avant-garde. They are ripe for criticism. The grounds for launching an attack against them are twofold: first to isolate them from their respective schools and thus release a number of younger composers from their domination and encourage these to turn their attention to the problems of serving the working people, and second, to puncture the illusion that the bourgeoisie is still capable of producing “geniuses.” — Cornelius CardewOriginally published in 1974, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism is a collection of essays by the English composer Cornelius Cardew that provides a Marxist critique of two of the more revered avant-garde composers of the post-war era: Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. A former assistant to Stockhausen and a champion of Cage in England, Cardew provides a cutting rebuke of the composers’ works and ideological positions, which he saw as reinforcing an imperialist order rather than spotlighting and serving the struggles of the working class. The author also provides constructive criticism of his contemporaries Christian Wolff and Frederic Rzewski for utilizing politically progressive content, yet failing to work in a musical form that would appeal to the proletariat. Cardew’s music does not escape his own scrutiny: the book contains critiques and repudiations of his canonical compositions from the 1960s and early 1970s, Treatise and The Great Learning. Complimenting Cardew’s essays are writings by Rod Eley, who contributes “A History of the Scratch Orchestra,” and John Tilbury, who contributes an “Introduction to Cage’s Music of Changes.” Stockhausen Serves Imperialism was initially published in a single edition by Latimer New Dimensions in 1974 and this edition is the first time the book has been published in its original form since. Cornelius Cardew was an English composer and musician. He became well known in the 1960s for his experimental music and as a proponent in the United Kingdom of avant-garde composers such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, and La Monte Young. He was one of the founders of the Scratch Orchestra and an early member of the free improvisational group AMM. Several of his works from this period are considered hallmarks of post-war experimental music. In the early 1970s, Cardew abandoned avant-garde music and devoted his work to the people’s struggle, becoming more directly involved in left-wing activism. His music from this period took the form of class-conscious folksongs that prioritized drawing attention to social issues over formal innovation. Cardew maintained a critical cultural stance throughout his life, later going on to denounce David Bowie and punk rock as fascist. He took an active role in progressive politics as a co-founder of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Part of Britain. He was killed in a hit-and-run accident in 1981 under circumstances that many consider mysterious. 126 pgs, 22 × 14 cm, Softcover, 2020.

Available for pre-order Softcover, 407pp Blank Forms Editions, June 2025 The tenth and final anthology from Blank Forms explores the early electronic work of French composer Éliane Radigue, whose radical approach to feedback, analog synthesis, and composition on tape has long evaded historical and technical interpretation. Combining key texts, newly translated primary documents, interviews, and commissioned essays, this compendium interrogates the composer’s idiosyncratic compositional practice, which both embraces and confounds the iterative nature of magnetic tape, the subtleties of amplification, and the very experience of listening. Among these entries is an in-depth overview by cellist Charles Curtis, a close collaborator of Radigue’s, examining the composer’s earliest experiments with feedback techniques and analog synthesis, her eventual shift to composing for unamplified instruments and live performers, and her unique aesthetic configurations of time and presence. A number of detailed conversations between the composer and researchers Georges Haessig, Patrick de Haas, Ian Nagoski, and Bernard Girard provide crucial insights into her working methods at different points throughout her career. Religious studies scholar Dagmar Schwerk reflects upon Radigue’s profound synthesizer work Trilogie de la Mort (1988–93) in the context of Tibetan Buddhist thought and its history, while texts by musicians Daniel Silliman and Madison Greenstone examine, in notably different ways, the technical characteristics of Radigue’s sound practice. Sketches for unrealized work, contemporary reviews, concert programs, and other ephemera mapping the performance history of Radigue’s early work are presented together for the first time. The anthology concludes with a roundtable discussion between Curtis, Greenstone, and Anthony Vine, untangling the knot of paradoxes at the center of Radigue’s artistic practice to trace the thread of her continued “ethos of resistance.”

Repeater Books, Dec 2024 400pp, paperback Peter Brötzmann explores the heroic life and revolutionary music of the pioneering German saxophonist, and the radical social and political convictions that informed them. Peter Brötzmann is the first ever, full-length, English-language biography of one of the most fascinating and inspiring personalities in the history of Western improvised music – and one of the key artistic figures to emerge from the socio-cultural tumult of the 1960s. Drawing on extensive interviews with Brötzmann and key associates, it traces the German saxophonist’s crucial role as a pioneer of European free jazz, his restless travels and collaborations and his eventual superstardom, examining the life and work of a fiercely uncompromising artist with a reputation for gruff intensity and total commitment. Digging deep into the history and aesthetics of free jazz in Europe and beyond, it provides detailed analysis of music by Brötzmann and other major figures, while positioning Brötzmann’s work – and the wider free jazz milieu – in the context of the revolutionary left-wing, humanist and utopian ideals that inspired and underpinned it. Both intimate and wide-ranging, it tells the story of a man and a music that changed the world.

Letter from Nobody gathers her “pieces performed by title only, without scores,” along with scores inspired by those pieces and derived from other authors' books, and reflections from the namsan concerts. This book may serve as a record of performances, a commentary on scores, a collection of responses to novels and poetry, a set of poems written through performance, or even a book of scores.  lo wie receives letters sent by nobody—sometimes revising them, sometimes writing new ones to be performed spontaneously in everyday life. She traces and refines the marks left by the passage of time. This title inaugurates the Anti-Music Series by Orolo Books—a series of works that seeks to strip away the hardened shell of “music” as a noun, and to explore what might still live within it as a verb, through speculation and practice.Softcover, 112pp Orolo Books, Seoul, 2025 lo wie composes, performs, and writes within everyday life. She wrote Beckett's Typist (2011) and has been organizing the outdoor concert series namsan in Seoul, London, and Berlin since 2014.

Walking tours of Britain's nuclear power stations, exploring the history of the sites they occupy and their social, ecological, and cultural impact on the landscape.The United Kingdom has sixteen nuclear power stations. Most go under the radar, but their presence is enormous, both physically and culturally. They divide opinion like nothing else. Are they relics of a past era, or a crucial part of our futures? Are they cathedrals of science or temples of doom? Atomic Albion is a journey around Britain's nuclear power stations and the country itself. From the Essex marshes to the Anglesey coast, from the Dungeness shingle to the far north of Scotland, Tom Bolton explores how nuclear sites shape the places around them, and enters the impossible world of nuclear power and weapons.Hardcover, 488pp Strange Attractor Press, 2025

Opening the pages of NOW JAZZ NOW will drop you into the ravenous mind of the insatiable Free Jazz and Free Improvisation record collector.  Here are the infamous and rarified recordings that challenged, advanced and, many times, polarized, the orthodoxy of a music defined by beauty, struggle, and the pure essence of inspiration.  Featuring images of albums, singles, and cassettes direct from the authors’ personal archives in all their loving wear and tear, along with Philippe Gras’ exquisite photos of Free Music legends, this is a book for all adventurous lovers of creative sound, whether they be record collectors, avant-garde Jazz enthusiasts, students of radical culture, or simply curiosity-seekers in wonder to this music’s illustrious history and lineage. The three authors, music writer Byron Coley and musician's Mats Gustafsson and Thurston Moore, share a life-long mutual obsession to record collecting with a distinct focus on the recorded history of Free Music. Compiling their personal archives with a long-running discussion and debate of which recordings could be considered within a list of more than one-hundred releases, they have decided on presenting the works in chronologic order, realizing the music to be preternaturally noncompetitive, non-hierarchical, and of equal value. The gleanings of Gustafsson, Moore, and Coley along with the words of legendary musicians Neneh Cherry and Joe McPhee, will enlighten, delight, amuse, and bemuse all who enter their enthralled streams of appreciation, perception, and, most importantly, unbridled respect and regard for a universe of music devoted to the dignity of freedom and the holistic vibrations of spiritual unitySoftcover, 196 x 268, pp 277, fully illustrated  Ecstatic Peace Library, Dec 2025 By Bryan Coley, Mats Gustafsson & Thurston Moore Foreverlogue by Neneh Cherry