Oriole Press

An artists’ imprint for experimental reading and writing.


Oriole Press is run by artist, designer & facilitator francis burger, and friends. It exists to make room for love letters from infatuated disciples, for books about books, and whip scorpions.

Oriole Press is named after the Black-Headed Oriole that frequents the pockets of broad-leaved endemics that hug the  north-facing (frost-sheltered) ridges of Johannesburg’s peri-urban neighbourhoods – the Oriole stays a little out of sight but pronounces itself through its loud whistles and imitations, and its distinctive ‘liquid-sounding warble’ (a perfect description via wikipedia and a recording of the call below, the warble is about mid-way).

   


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Oriole Press is run by artist, designer & facilitator francis burger, and friends. It exists to make room 


Publications Addressed to its intended
Light Passes
An audio version of the publication, with spoken transcripts by each contributor and a downloadable pdf is available on bandcamp  (highly recommended).


Light Passes, initiated and gathered by Gretchen Blegen. Softcover, 95 pages. Edition of 40. Digitally printed in Berlin on an HP Indigo 7000 by AusDruck. Published by Oriole Press and Gretchen Blegen, 2023.

South Africa R500
Europe & UK €25
Prices exclude shipping

Light Passes is an eclectic collection of texts, images and conversations surrounding light and its varied presences across artistic practice, choreography, land, power and memory.  

Light Passes was initiated and gathered by transdisciplinary artist Gretchen Blegen (Berlin), and began as a series of exchanges with artist and writer Bettina Malcomess. The publication expanded across 2022 with collaborative contributions by choreographer Zwoisy Mears-Clarke (Rösrath) and lighting designer Emese Csornai (Berlin), performing artist duo Ana Laura Lozza & Bárbara Hang (Berlin and Buenos Aires), artist and writer Bettina Malcomess(Johannesburg), print and radio journalists Kirbie Bennett and Jamie Wanzek (Durango). Light Passes was produced in collaboration with Oriole Press.

“The more I work with light in performance and dance, the more I associate light with something both ephemeral and contextual. Light is a synonym for perception, grounded in its own histories and relationalities. I feel light as a limitless vocabulary of possibilities that reaches well beyond the task of making things visible or creating an effect. It digs deep into psychosomatic body memories of place and experience, warmth and sensation

[...]

Through the leaves, through the window to the page. A shimmer of possibilities in seemingly impossible states. 144 years after the invention of the light bulb. A glitch in the social order after sundown. A remembrance of the circadian rhythm. Light as it passes through, as it flows”


—from Light Passes, Prologue, Gretchen Blegen 2023



Details and inserts from Light Passes, 2023.



Digital photograph from ‘Fade into Rhythm' by Ana Laura Lozza & Bárbara Hang, 2023.
“Someone trying to read while the lights go on AND OFF
Eyes at work
Conversations on satellites
Things to touch in darkness
Eyes looking with lids shut
Someone always looking through the camera
Always old technology devices laying around
Five people in the forest at night
Four people on a sofa looking at a wall petting objects on their laps
Two fishes and several rats
Hands feeling eyeballs” 
—from Fade into Rhythm by Ana Laura Lozza & Bárbara Hang.

Colophon

Light Passes

Initiated and gathered by Gretchen Blegen
Contributions by Zwoisy Mears-Clarke and Emese Csornai, Ana Laura Lozza & Bárbara Hang, Bettina Malcomess, Kirbie Bennett and Jamie Wanzek
Publication designed by Francis Burger

95p, printed by AusDruck, Berlin, on HP Indigo 7000, with trimmed acetate and colour tissue paper inserts, two folded letters, and a hand written note.   

Additional editing by Mars Dietz, Zinzi Buchanan, Bettina Malcomess

Accessibility consultation by Quiplash

Post sound production and audio mastering by Lane Hots

Published by Oriole Press in collaboration with Gretchen Blegen

CC-BY-ND 

2023 

ISBN 978-0-7961-1727-4

Light Passes was made possible through the #TakeCare and #TakeHeart research grants from the Performing Arts Fund financed by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media within the framework of NEUSTART KULTUR and BACKBONE Berlin.
Audio publication and digital download at www.lightpasses.bandcamp.com


Oriole Press
Johannesburg, 2001.
South Africa.