The copies arrived two weeks ago but Intimate Infinity/Intimität der Unendlichkeit still feels notional, as it has for so long. “Version of the book that never was” is an epigraph I found necessary – partly because this feels less like my next book than a prequel to my work of recent years: a completion of an arc not allowed to form a circle.
Though “allowed” is too active. The work of book-making is staggering: the number of elements weighed and gauged and honed to a bare one hundred pages, holding in its absences the hundreds of photos I set to one side. One writer compared Intimate Infinity to a train journey: a handful of framed views out of the thousands one sweeps past, unattending.
Now this book feels like a beginning. It’s itself, but also an invitation – to others and to myself – to let the object go on being porous, as many of my favourite works are, embracing accretions and interventions. I’m tipping in images and scraps of what could have been in some of the copies. (I’ve always loved the term “tipping in”.) And for those who want, the book can be a point zero, a bridge to new work of their own. Such collaborations begin in unknowing, and culminate somewhere breathtaking.
A Fair Exchange (2026) grew out of another collaboration begun with Silences Stille Schweigen this spring. I first reflected on archive versus library, preservation versus circulation, when doing my MFA. Contained here is a question about how worth is determined, or a pledge fulfilled.
The artist has made these objects.
The institution has authorised their display.
Visitors determine their value.
This isn’t a gift, but what’s asked for in return is for the viewer to decide.
There’s a delicious tension to not knowing what will be on the plinths when the exhibition closes. Will I be deflated if it ends as it began? Will people’s reasons for not participating change the work’s nature? What bevy of objects might emerge?
I do savour the endless wheel of work that’s material for the next thing, cycling spirals that disperse, then return to a centre. I’ll reunite with Nur and Thembe, two poets from my MFA, to share our new books at Savvy Contemporary on 21st October. There, and in a pair of workshops this month and next, I’ll be strewing offcuts from Intimate Infinity, A Fair Exchange, and a thousand other rough drafts to be intercut with participants’ memories and dreams. I’ve always found the artist book extraordinarily grounding, and I’m genuinely curious to observe what emerges.
That spirit of earthing through making has me excited for my first book fair at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. I’m often making things, then foiled by the weight of practicalities. (I’ll never be deft at PayPal and postal sessions.) So this will be an exhalation, a cache of works readied and shared under the name of Circle&Arc ~ Bogen&Kreis.
At my table, I’ll have copies of Twelve Centuries of Silence; a new broadside of “A City Fades”; copies of Intimate Infinity plain and with additions by hand; a 2027 engagement diary, because I’m always wrangling time.
I received a beautiful email from a Canadian poet last week that has stirred me to make an informal version of Maximum Summer – glad that this book I love has travelled, sad that its life has been brief. Though my copyshop pamphlet is nothing as perfect as Nion Editions’ cobalt, cloth-bound hardback avec cyanotype, it lets the text go on moving.
I’ll be glad to bring this and more to such light as I find in late autumn. “Helligkeit – und etwas in uns gibt nach”, Dilek writes in Intimate Infinity. Donna writes: “‘Stay, thou art so fair,” we say, to everything that blooms and cannot live forever.”
Light’s still here as we feel darkness nearing. As I say, wrangling with time.
Notes
Early copies of Intimate Infinity / Intimität der Unendlichkeit are available online at desirelines and in person at desirelines books, Ferlemann und Schatzer, pro qm (Berlin) and Good Press (Glasgow). The book publishes on November 1, 2026. A first airing is planned at Savvy Contemporary in an event bringing together Thembe Mvula’s Cloud Vigil, Nur Turkmani’s October, and Intimate Infinity.
A Fair Exchange is shown as part of Uncomfortable Truths: Art, Colonialism, and Academic Collections at Humboldt University’s main building on Unter den Linden. As part of A Fair Exchange, epistolary invitations to share one’s own uncomfortable truth are distributed at the exhibition, and an artist book, Confessions of an Archivist, collects thoughts from archivists at academic collections in Oxford and Berlin.
Photofictions: Making Stories by Hand—an interactive workshop bringing an artist-book ethos to translating ideas across media—is part of Across the Page: Connecting British and Irish literary voices through Storytelling and Translation, a literary festival co-organized by the British Council, Centre for British Studies, and Literaturhaus Berlin.
Micropress Circle&Arc+Bogen&Kreis makes its debut at artbook.berlin 2026.
Dates
Exhibition October 5–16, 2026 Humboldt University, Unter den Linden 6, Lichthof Ost, Berlin-Mitte (map), see also Uncomfortable Truths: Art, Colonialism, and Academic Collections. Free admission
Performance/Installation October 21, 7pm Savvy Contemporary, Reinickendorfer Str. 17, Berlin-Wedding (map), with Thembe Mvula and Nur Turkmani. Free admission.
Workshop November 6, 4pm Literaturhaus Berlin, Fasanenstraße 23, Berlin-Charlottenburg (map), see also Across the Page: Connecting British and Irish Literary Voices through Storytelling and Translation. Free to attend with prior registration: email info@literaturhaus-berlin.de.
Book Stand November 20–22 Kunstraum Bethanien, Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin-Kreuzberg (map), see also artbook.berlin 2026. Free admission.