Writing Against. Reflections on ON VA ÊTRE ABSOLUMENT CONTRE, designed and published by Barco Bêbado—a Review by Germán Sierra

ON VA ÊTRE ABSOLUMENT CONTRE 
(Barco Bêbado, 2026)

Writing Against. 
Reflections on ON VA ÊTRE ABSOLUMENT CONTRE*

 designed and published by Barco Bêbado
A Review by Germán Sierra

 
Je m'oppose is the new j'accuse: eu me oponho: I object: I am against.
 
J'accuse is a wake up call directed at a judging authority (whose existence is currently inconceivable and, in any case, the legitimacy of the judgement would be rejected), as well as the acknowledgement of a shared, solid model of reality which we would be also against. We declare ourselves against the logic of accusation and the sycophantic dynamics of representation.
 
Je m'oppose, however, opens spaces of freedom, lines of rejection turning into lines of flight. It suggests that experimental art might preferentially be produced from rejection-spaces. It means writing against writing, performing against performance, disavowing order and rational design, together with refusing the dream of an ideal avantgarde that would entail submission to an oriented direction, a teleological delusion or, at least, the implicit recognition of a previously imagined detour. "There's no avant to garde"—I declared elsewhere.(1) There's no tour from which to de-tour, there's no time arrow anymore but multiple diagrams of flow, the likeliness of setting a direction is unthinkable; we're just floating around among cosmic debris spiraling into the unknown. "I tend to continue my own poetry performances as many other artists who feel they have no place to settle but in their perpetuum mobile, just to go" —writes Nina Zivančević in this volume.
 
Like Gary Shipley's serial killer going on killing and writing about his killings.
Like Louis Armand who, by refusing to give a title to his piece, doesn't make it "untitled" but "upgrades" to title the whole text.

           "I can't go on, I'll go on", as Beckett wrote.
            The punk motto "no future" became our generation's futurist manifesto and we're absolutely not going back.
          "We are not taken in by the present that would make us believe we had any authority or exercised any influence, and still less are we taken in by the past, and still less again presumptuous of any future," wrote Maurice Blanchot.(2)
             "The future"—Wenaus and Harris quote at the beginning of their chapter—"is amnesia in reverse."
 
ON VA ÊTRE ABSOLUMENT CONTRE is a very improbable book in a world ruled by probability—a world where old poetics, old politics and old technologies are continuously being repackaged as new—, made by people who will go, anyway, on, assembling contributions by some of the most interesting experimentalists and scholars out there to offer an example of what literature wants to be today.
 
Artists will eventually become avantgardeners, working to grow some unexpected varieties of hybrid plants in the chaotic midst of the jungle, picking mutant mushrooms in the dark forests of the internet, the blockchain, or the library. Not so long ago, Ron Sukenick framed innovative writing as the continuation of a "rival tradition"(3)—which is another way to say that we've been writing against writing since writing was invented. Contemporary experimental authors write against "the human", against "the author", against "the reader"—in the same way that experimental scientists work against the current models of reality. Contemporary experimental writers also write against the current models of reality, setting up the basis of a general rejectological practice. If I had to single out the most relevant trend in contemporary art I would say againstism: accelerating deterritorialization by rejecting the foundational aesthetic modes of out time; nostalgia, modernity, postmodernity, automation. Contemporary experimental writers write against the past, present and future, yet mixing all model-times together into, for instance, radical textvisual collages.
 
Ramiro Sanchiz and David Vichnar invoke the spectre of necromodernism: "a modernism long-buried but still somehow living on, its undead corpse back again for yet another zombie standoff."(4)
 
"Beyond the threshold of Modernism and its utopian underpinnings," —says Vincent Como in The Black Singularity— "the immediate conscious reality is divided by the active and passive, the self-referent and the exteriority of the unknown possibilities beyond oneself. These elements outside of immediate control, outside of immediate realization, are the very shape and form of finality."(5)
 
Je m'oppose: opposition is neither nihilism nor denial. It's not just Bartleby's passive refusal, fake revolutionary resistance, or letting yourself dissolve into nothingness. On the contrary, it means actively flowing through what's being rejected (which, by rejection, becomes an outside-in, a "field," a "resistance" in electrical terms), analyzing it, reconfiguring it, finding its weak and hot spots. Being against language doesn't equate silence, but the implementation of esoteric languages, imperceptible waves, the recognition of all meaning as noise. Noise is, by the way, the best antidote for slop. We still crave for the new, but innovations are often more complicated than simply the production of formal novelty, for they usually reflect the collective and evolutionary "success" of a heterogeneous group, which may require additional adaptations beyond a novel form or social changes. (6)
 
In a world defined by fragmentation, and poetically approached by opposition, rejecting the world means becoming a dispersed, untraceable multiplicity—which is maybe one of the reasons why some of the most interesting books being published lately are collectively-written collage-installations: One, by Blake Butler, Vanessa Place and Christopher Higgs; Collected Voices in the Expanded Field, published by 11:11 Press; Revenge of the Castle Freak by Inside the Castle; the Alienism project coordinated by Louis Armand or the Xenopoetic project by Kenji Siratori —and now Barco Bêbado's ON VA ÊTRE ABSOLUMENT CONTRE. These books are neither the typical anthologies nor the product of a recognizable literary/artistic movement (such as dadaists' collage books or the surrealist Cadavre Exquis), but the result of contingent and diverse networks of writers, visual artists and book designers, often working from different styles and pursuing different aesthetic endeavors, yet "strangely attracted" by some "coordinating artists" into singular projects. A common feature of all those projects is that the editors/publishers are talented artists themselves.
 
As a consequence of the aesthetic disintegration of the media, collectives spontaneously gather into temporary unstructured swarms, winging around like the Furies in search of opportunities for a random rejection, delimiting counter-spaces that are oblique to the slop-saturated media. In this fragile but fertile environment they manage to use their specific crafts to replace the mandatory hyperdesigned-reality utopia.
 
In OVEAC (even the acronym sounds good, like some weird sci-fi machine!), the result of this unlikely gathering is deployed as a deeply ergodic, visually stunning puzzle of texts that sometimes only become readable by rotation of the physical book, like when driving through a curvy road. Do not expect a conventional compilation: we're talking about a multidimensional, multilingual crash-space where essays, fictions, poetheories, manifestos and paintings collide and break into pieces like macromolecules exciting each other in a high-energy environment, immediately becoming reactive and reordering themselves into counter-designs, coupling with antiparallel interfering translations, turning languages into sharp instruments that break down standard reference symbols.
           
So here you are, from satirical horror to abstract antagonism, a madman's map of our brave new world.
 
 
Notes:
1. Germán Sierra and Emmanuel Magno, Interstitial Artelligence. Centre for Experimental Ontology, 2022.
2. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond. Translated by Lycette Nelson. State University of New York Press, 1992.
3. Ron Sukenick, The Rival Tradition.
https://www.flashpointmag.com/sukeint1.html

4. David Vichnar, Necromodernist Architectures in Contemporary Writing.
/www.3ammagazine.com/3am/necromodernist-architectures-in-contemporary-writing/

5. Vincent Como, The Black Singularity.
https://drainmag.com/the-black-singularity/
6. Douglas Erwin, The Origins of the New. Princeton University Press, 2026.
 
*Limited print run of 300 copies / retail price €40 // Barco Bêbado #66: 

Contact https://www.facebook.com/emanuel.cameira.7

 
On va Être Absolument Contre is a trilingual anthology published by Barco Bêbado and edited by Emanuel Cameira which features the work of Andrés Vaccari, Andrew C. Wenaus, Charles Bernstein, Daniel Y. Harris, Danny Fox, Eduarda Neves, Emanuel Cameira, Felix Bernstein, Gary J. Shipley, Louis Armand, Manuel João Neto, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Nina Živančević, Paulo da Costa Domingos, Peter Bouscheljong, Pierre Merejkowsky, Rui Baião, Stavroula Belios.