ISBN: 978-0-9978744-7-1
15 x 21 cm (softcover)
136 pages (b/w ill.)
Published: September 2020

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BRANDON LABELLE is an artist, writer and theorist working with questions of social life, cultural history, voice, and agency. Guided by situated and horizontal methodologies, he develops and presents artistic projects and performances within a range of international contexts, mostly working in public and with informal spaces. Central to his practice is initiating collaborative activities with others, often supported by forms of performative pedagogy and self-organization. This leads to performative installations, poetic theater, storytelling and research actions aimed at forms of experimental community making. From gestures of intimacy and listening to creative festivity and open movement work, his practice aligns itself with a politics and poetics of radical civility. He is the author of Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), and Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2102), among others.

The Other Citizen
by Brandon LaBelle

The Other Citizen tracks the hopes and losses, struggles and utopian desires of what the author terms “the floating subjects” of contemporary life. Drawing upon traditions of socially engaged poetics, the work takes aim at the heart of contemporary crisis and exclusionary politics by paying homage to the creative solidarities and pirate imaginaries spanning the globe. Through ten acts, we are led into narratives of friendship and survival, threadbare endurance and tender resistance. From lost teenagers struggling in the maze of neoliberalism to secret gatherings of artistic bandits to those caught in between the borders of nation-states, these emerge as frontiers of invention that, when stitched together, outline the force of an anarchic citizenry. The Other Citizen is a challenging and moving call for exiting the new norm of crisis.