Monday, February 1, 2021

Rita Sobral Campos and Isabel Sobral Campos : Small Press Spirits

 

 

We launched Sputnik & Fizzle in 2015, amidst an early pregnancy, a move out west and new jobs. All of these changes implied deep transformations in our lives. The personal is political, but the personal is also publishing as politics. Small press publishing is directly embroiled in and dependent on the personal: how much time and energy one can devote to a work that exhilarates but never ceases to demand. We understood then, as we do now, that there would never be an ideal time to begin. So, we simply began. Our ethos is anti-capitalist, our commitments ideological, the work prefigurative.

The idea of S&F can be traced to a lecture that Fred Moten delivered at Threewalls in Chicago a few years ago. We became excited about the possibility of founding a press solely devoted to experimental lectures. Lectures as spatial and communal interventions, an improvised lecture, performance as lecture, lecture as book, the artist as lecture—the possibilities across disciplines and media seemed endless. We sought to connect the printed word to the ephemeral, to highlight a sense of discourse in formation, of ideas and aesthetic leanings taking shape in a conversation (but taking place in a book). In this spirit, S&F’s aesthetic couples the pamphlet with the art book. We also decided that each series should include three books/lectures. And when we recently expanded our focus to publish poetry, we retained the triad, the idea of series, and the commitment to experimental work. In the future, we hope to publish full-length poetry collections and to become an imprint for artist books and translations.

The greatest challenge for the press has been monetary. When we did manage to secure funding, we naively believed that sales of the initial series would fund the next. This was an unrealistic expectation, though it may be possible one day. It took us about two years to produce our present editions.

Some time ago, Matvei Yankelevich wrote a brilliant account chronicling the predicament of small press publishing as much as arguing for its possibilities as a political and creative practice. The ongoing struggle takes place in each reading, each encounter in which books are exchanged, discussed, and produced. It relies upon the myriad alliances brokered between groups or practitioners with access to different kinds of institutional support. S&F, for instance, has collaborated with Atlas Projectos, a publishing collective working from Lisbon and Berlin. Without this collaboration, we couldn’t have made our books. Likewise, as a visual artist and a poet respectively, the collaboration between us, siblings, has brought different skills to the press. We also draw sustenance from friends, lovers, companions, and environments. So much of ourselves has gone into the press.

The signature logo of S&F was adapted from a tiny, fabulous animal represented in a medieval illuminated manuscript, a kind of snail-bird. The absurd figure looks at us playfully askance and the tall slender legs appear to wade in invisible water. It floats and alternately sinks with unfounded confidence. It embodies the spirit of S&F.

 

Sputnik & Fizzle is run by Rita Sobral Campos and Isabel Sobral Campos.

 

 

 

 

 

Rita Sobral Campos (PT/US), born in Lisbon in 1982, lives and works in New York. Exhibitions include: O Trágico Destino Vertical, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2020); short-shorts, with August Sander, Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna (2015); Tournament d’Objet, Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2013); Sunday Sessions, MoMA- PS1, New York (2012); When your Lips are my Ears, our Bodies become Radios, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (2010); Anabasis: On Rituals of Homecoming, Ludwik Grohman Villa, Lodz (2009); UNCLEHEAD with Alexandre Singh, EDP Foundation, Lisbon (2008), and Structural Schizophrenia ou quando a mentira se tornou verdade, Culturgest, Porto (2005). Sobral Campos is a co-founder of Sputnik & Fizzle. She’s part of the Digital Corps committee at Out in Tech, building digital tools for LGBTQ+ activists around the world, and a researcher at a tech company.

Isabel Sobral Campos is the author of the collections How to Make Words of Rubble (Blue Figure Press, 2020) and Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Material (No, Dear and Small Anchor Press, 2015), You Will Be Made of Stone (dancing girl press, 2018), and Autobiographical Ecology (above/ground press, 2019). Her poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars: Poetics for the More-Than-Human World and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of the Sputnik & Fizzle publishing series. New poems are featured in Folder Magazine over the month of January.