Lesson on Gravity is a slice of Anne Juren's ongoing artistic research into 'fantasmical anatomies'. 'What happens when our sense of ground, orientation and support is lost? What are the risk and the promise of detaching ourselves from the pull of gravity?' As this apocryphal Feldenkrais lesson embraces moments of intrusion and fragmentation, poetry and flights of fancy, it shows how language is alive, embodied and liquid. It also invites the reader to treat the book itself as a body, an unruly tongue sticking somewhere in its folds and creases.
Anne Juren is a choreographer, dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner. In 2021 she finished her PhD at Stockholm University of the Arts with the project Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies.
Varamo Press is an artist-run, independent publishing house founded in 2018 by Mette Edvardsen and Jeroen Peeters. It takes inspiration from César Aira's character Varamo, a clerk whose chance encounter with a trio of publishers in a bar inspires an unlikely collaboration that yields a masterpiece of experimental literature.
In 2022 Varamo Press launched the series Gestures, small format books that come with a grey cover and a unified design. The series experiments with the essay genre and provides a platform for shorter texts we'd like to make available for wider readership and unexpected encounters. Gestures include commissioned essays as well as translations, reformulations and yet other alternative editions of existing material.