secrets is a publication that gathers words, and glass summoned by Elena Narbutaitė and Marija Olšauskaitė. It is produced in conjunction with sekretas (Lithuanian for secret), the exhibition by Marija Olšauskaitė at the Grazer Kunstverein, which departs from a recreational activity performed by youngsters in the former Soviet Union. Stealthily, children would enter a courtyard, woods, or plains and place small objects under a piece of glass: flower petals, pictures, a note, golden bottle caps, shells, and other idiosyncratic elements would be organised and composed into a material expression of friend-ship. The pane would then be covered with earth or dust, as a sekretas withdraws from the eye.

With contributions by Elena Narbutaitė, Marija Olšauskaitė, Maria Tsoy, Aleksandra Krivulina, and Tom Engels, designed by Julie Peeters.

Paul Thek’s Italian experiences between 1962 and 1976 left a deep mark on his sensitivity. From his visits to the Capuchin Catacombs to his witnessing of spectacular religious processions, Italy was a catalyst for several key moments in the artist’s career, triggering an elusive reaction in his practice to the trajectories of post-war American art. By reworking the stimuli gathered during his stays in Rome, on the island of Ponza and in Sicily, Paul Thek concocted a baroque response to Pop Art and Minimalism, which were dominant on the art scene of the time.

Texts by Nicola Del Roscio, Peter Benson Miller, Owen Laub, Robert Wilson. Designed by Francesca Biagiotti.

From February 12 to March 6, 2022, Pure Fiction presented an exhibition and performance program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne titled Shifting Theater: Sibyl’s Mouths. The starting point was a collective reading of Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, in which the narrator discovers a collection of scribbled oak leaves scattered in a cave outside Naples.

Contributions by Rosa Aiello, Gerry Bibby, Coleman Collins, Ayanna Dozier, Annie Ernaux, Amelia Groom, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Ellen Yeon Kim, Bitsy Knox, Dan Kwon, Erika Landström, Enad Marouf, Katrin Mayer, Aislinn McNamara, Kamila & Jasmina Metwaly, Luzie Meyer, Vera Palme, Theresa Patzschke, Georgia Sagri, Mahsa Saloor, Elif Saydam, Mark von Schlegell, Simon Speiser, Elaine Tam, C.S. Tolan, Mikhail Wassmer, Anna Zacharoff.

A new revised version of the notebook of the legendary American dancer, artist and choreographer Simone Forti in which she shares her poetry as well as her thoughts on dance, the body, writing, the state of the world. A collection of experimental texts, imagined dialogues, news animations and poetic thoughts on life and politics. The book contains an afterword by Fred Dewey and a postscript by Jackson Mac Low.

Texts by Tina Barouti, Anne-Grit Becker, Natalie Dupêcher. Photographs by Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.

In the fall of 1952, Cy Twombly receives a traveling scholarship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and leaves New York for his first trip to Europe and North Africa. He meets up with Robert Rauschenberg in Casablanca, and the two of them travel to Marrakech and the Atlas Mountains, and then to Tangier. They pay a visit to Paul Bowles in Tétouan and go on day trips with him to nearby villages and Roman ruins. Twombly conducts his first and last archaeological excavation there. Upon their return to Rome in February 1953, Twombly studies and sketches the ethnographic objects and tribal artifacts he sees on display in the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini. These sketches survive in the form of the North African Sketchbooks. Much of the surviving work from this trip consists of photographs taken with a Rolleiflex shared by the artists and sketches made by them, preserved in the archives of the Cy Twombly Foundation and Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio; they provide a unique perspective on Twombly’s lesser-known affinity for Africa’s Mediterranean shores.

The Books and Life of Raymond Roussel is a biographic and bibliographic study of the French author Raymond Roussel (1877–1933). It was researched and written by the art historian Michael Sanchez. The book takes the form of an inventory of every known state of every edition of Roussel’s lifetime publications. Interwoven into this bibliographic data are texts that analyze the relationship between Roussel’s literary procedures, the material construction of his books, and his life. The book also includes a list of primary and secondary literature related to Roussel.