en abîme

My book Beauty, Burning: The Condition of Music is published today by Erratum Press. 

Beauty, Burning: The Condition of Music

Traduzioni, Traduzioni, Tranceduzioni. A workshop at NABA, Rome, 16-17 April 2026.

Organised by Manuela Pacella and Caterina Iaquinta.

‘Auroras: for the Voice of María Zambrano’ is now published in Issue 12 of Socrates on the Beach. 

A text (a record) of reading and writing in conversation, friendship, transcelation and reverb; of Zambrano’s book Of Aurora; of auroras o roar us. 

*

We speak:

Aurora raw.

Aurora aura.

Aurora, roar us.

Before she speaks, I say: For some time now aurora. Aurora roars. Roars the inner hum of writing with you as it becomes written, exceeds words; the hum of my conversations with three friends, which give me life and the need to continue to speak, those far away friendships which have brought me here to speak with you, to you, of you. Of your aurora o roar us. These conversations in transit are the secret of my persistence. They are here, delicate and present like a cobweb, weighed with the liquid load of morning dew. The force of our writing is not solely in what is written but in its auroral state: the anticipation, the restless yearning for it, and its aftertaste, its slow fade-out leading always inevitably in. And in there, all the voices heard and studied for a lifetime and farther, those books that are not temporary objects of an ephemeral reading but sites that host infinite conversations and times, sites that contain people and they ask me, in the voice of the writer of a thousand thoughts in flight, ‘Tell me, do you want to retrace the eternal cycle with us?’

Continue reading: https://socratesonthebeach.com/daniela-cascella

On 26 September I will read Aurore: per la voce di María Zambrano (Auroras: for the voice of María Zambrano) at the Slow Dancing Parties / Dark Fantastic Dreams: Le alleanze dei corpi festival, curated by Maria Paola Zedda in Milan, Italy.

The text is my first attempt at self-translating and inevitably distorting, rewriting myself from English into Italian. It is also the first time I write specifically for reading in front of an audience in Italian.

It is written in conversation with Zambrano’s book of aurora, as an address to the Spanish philosopher and to a small group of listeners.

https://lealleanzedeicorpi.org/eventi-festival#aurora

Aurora ora. Aurora ancora. Aurora rosa.

Da qualche tempo ho aurora. Da qualche tempo ho aurora ora, aurora ancora. Da qualche tempo noi (io, te, e ancora te, un’altra, e con noi María Zambrano, che hai scritto un libro di aurora) ci siamo parlate emergendo ciclicamente dalle notti, esitando prima della luce piena, rincorrendoci e mai incontrandoci se non nelle nostre parole e in ciò che le muove e ci commuove, nel bagliore diffuso oltre un gran cerchio d’ombra che non può mai dimenticare o scindere da sé l’oscurità dell’esilio, del patire, ma che si orienta verso ciò che emerge da qualche tempo aurora. 
Ti dico aurora per la sua presenza ciclica e cadenzata appena al di sotto del tempo, sorreggendo un tempo che è estasi, stasi, incanto. Ti dico aurora perché risuona con tanti residui di testi vissuti qui da anni, i loro battiti dentro. Non può esserci aurora, la sua luce soffusa, senza qualcosa d’impresso nel profondo. Nessuna bellezza, nessuna poesia senza le viscere, mi hai detto una volta. Ho qui il tuo libro dell’aurora. 
Non posso estrarne citazioni, non posso tradurlo perché mi brucia in mano, dunque può esistere solo nelle voci che trasporta e si porta dentro, tanto è vicino al cuore, e allora cos’è che sto trasmettendo?

I am giving the keynote presentation at the Typewriter Against My Knee: Art Writing and Life Writing conference, University of Sussex, Brighton, 19 June.

‘Eros, Rose, Sore’ is now published in  A row of trees, Vol. 6, Issue 1, edited by Patrick Farmer with Kelly Krumrie.

‘Intermittent and Not Always Entirely Audible Conversations’ – where I speak with Kate Briggs about reading, writing, listening, teaching – is now published in ‘A Social Process of Unknowing Yourself in Real Time’: Work on Conversation, edited by Kate Briggs and Laura Haynes, Glasgow, The Yellow Paper Press, 2024.

Gestures: A Body of Work, edited by Alice Butler, Nell Osborne and Hilary White for Manchester University Press, includes my text ‘My Chimeras’ alongside many other contributions which, in the words of the publisher, ‘activate the lens of gesture to offer innovative readings of art and literary works from the 1960s onwards and in transnational contexts. Experiments in art writing and autotheory reflect on the entanglement of the body, gesture and feminist practice. The book proposes that gesture be rethought as a mode of feminist practice that includes art, writing, performance and theory. Mixing disciplines, forms, genres and voices, these contributions and the book’s gestural structure offer a bold intervention into the conventions of critical writing.’

I’ll read from my new book, Beauty, Burning: The Condition of Music, published later this year by Sublunary Editions, at the Symposium of the Whole, organised by Patrick Farmer at the Old Fire Station in Oxford on 1st February.

https://www.sonicartresearch.co.uk/_/6552

I wrote the Preface for Tell Me Stories!, an anthology edited by Manuela Pacella and published this month by Politi Seganfreddo Edizioni. The book collects the contributions to the homonymous column commissioned by Manuela for Flash Art Online between 2020 and 2024, and it is the first volume in Italian which presents contemporary approaches to critical writing that experiment with form, genre, and voice.  

The Preface is the first text I wrote in Italian after fifteen years writing in English. To return to my mother tongue was a revealing experience; it unveiled a number of considerations around voice and cadence which have been haunting my thoughts for weeks now, and which will seep through more writing.

Contributions by: Cecilia Canziani, Valentina Cipullo Callegarini, Giulia Crispiani, Marta Federici, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Valerio Mannucci, Anneleen Masschelein, Manuela Pacella, Alda Palermo, Catherine Parsonage, Luisa Villegas G. con Carolina Chacón Bernal.

About: Kathy Acker, Gloria Anzaldúa, Anna Banti, Dodie Bellamy, Daniela Cascella, Maria Fusco, Kenneth Goldsmith, Juliet Jacques, Jill Johnston, Wayne Koestenbaum, Chris Kraus, Quinn Latimer, Yve Lomax, Maggie Nelson, Ariana Reines, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Georgia Sagri, Rebecca Solnit, Lynne Tillman, Jacob Wren, Kate Zambreno.