Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2018. 212 pages, illus. ISBN-13: 978-1-947447-9-12. DOI: 10.21983/P3.0234.1.00. OPEN-ACCESS e-book and $21.00 in print: paperbound/5 X 8 in.
An Adventure is wrapped in a net that precariously holds the characters moving through it. This net, a vertical architecture that takes the Bettys to the mall restaurant that is the site of their daily collective encounter, is also what keeps them on their toes, literally: her high heel stuck in its armature, its lack of purchase catapults Red Betty to her death. There is no other book like this. Weaving conceptual threads into the daily life of a crew of colours, the Bettys are a tensile provocation to questions of difference – race, gender – that refuses symmetry at every turn. The book itself is a vertical net, a geography that architects other ways of coming into relation, chromatically.”
~ Erin Manning
Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Adventure is the second in a series of three novellas emerging from a writing practice that taps the cusp of consciousness between dreaming and waking. A storyline, or genealogy, tinted a shade of RGB red, is fashioned by thinking through the felt unthought of this between space — a fabulation, an anarchive of what passes through. Lucid dreaming of this type is rife with allusions to conceptual and material goings-on, manifesting in awkward imaginaries. The dream personas are rendered as complex character amalgams with nomadic ages, sexes, genders, and phenotypes. Occurrences of lived “fact” elide with a hallucinatory real as speculation.
In An Adventure, a feral feminist artist collective, The Bettys, inhabit a timeless Arcades Project. This is their experiment in wild hypo-consumerism. The event of Red Betty’s fall generates the advent of a turn. A cleaving. The intra-play of personal politics and activist artistic practices is surreally suffused with attention to color, to life and death, to lightness and heaviness.
Read the rest of the trilogy: Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: A Novelty (Vol. 1) + Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Actual Occasion (Vol. 3)
About the Author
Sher Doruff works in the visual, digital, and performance arts in a variety of capacities. For the past ten years her work has been situated in the expanded field of artistic research practice as an artist, writer, tutor, mentor, and supervisor. Her research practice currently explores fabulation and fictive approaches to writing in and through artistic research. She currently mentors 3rd cycle/PhD artist researchers at the DAS Graduate School (Amsterdam University of the Arts) and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy of Art and Design. She has has published numerous texts in academic and artistic contexts.
