QUINN LATIMER (US)
Residency period: September-October 2023 and March 2024
Quinn Latimer is an art critic, poet, essayist, editor, performer and occasional curator whose work often considers technologies of gender, language, ecology and artistic practice. Born in California and based in Basel and Athens, she is the author of Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (Sternberg Press, 2017), Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (Mousse, 2013), and Rumoured Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012). Her writings have been published in Artforum, Bookforum, The Paris Review and Texte zur Kunst, and she regularly contributes essays and poems to museum catalogues and artist books. She is the editor of many books, including Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology, with Kateryna Botanova (Sternberg Press, 2021), Simone Forti: The Bear in the Mirror, with Roos Gortzak (Walther König, 2019), The documenta 14 Reader, with Adam Szymczyk (Prestel, 2017), and Pamela Rosenkranz: No Core (JRP Editions, 2012). She was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel. She is now Head of the MA at Institut Kunst Gender Natur in Basel, where she organises, with Chus Martinez, a semi-annual symposia series on questions of gender, nature, epistemology and practice.
During her residency, Latimer devoted herself to the research and writing phases of a new book that slipped between genres—auto-theory, art criticism, oral history, parable, poetry, and film script—to explore the poetics of exposure and the transmutations of form, environment, self, and solidarity. Engaging with decolonial feminist art practices, the book traced technologies of voice, performance, and place alongside a historical body of water and the human and nonhuman spirits that have long crossed it. The unique conditions of La Becque—and the exceptional, almost effortless way it underlined the falsity of any nature/culture binary or divide—reflected the ideas and worlds of the book, even if the surface of those worlds could not have appeared more different.