Simone Forti

“I’ve gathered so many books (….), all about the family. This is all washing over me like a waterfall. I can’t figure out the genealogy, the chronology flows like currents that wind around each other at different rates. (…). And now I’m recognizing that I’m part of this tribe, this family of writers writing about our tribe.”

These sentences can be found in Simone Forti’s new publication ‘The Bear in the Mirror’, a wonderful collection of stories, prose-poems, drawings, show more photos, letters, notes and memories. The renowned experimental dancer, choreographer, artist and writer Simone Forti (1935, Italy) dives into the (his)stories of her family and of the woolen mills they once owned, trying to put all the myths and fragments of information into some kind of perspective. A subtext in the book is Simone Forti's interest in bears. She takes us on a mind-provoking, mesmerizing journey through time and place, from December 1938 till the present moment, from Italy to Los Angeles. Along the journey we find ourselves in different cities and in the woods, where we meet her family, bears, dogs and spiders.

After the L.A. launch at Artbooks @ Hauser&Wirth on November 17, the European launch took place at bookstore San Serriffe in Amsterdam on 15.12.2018

The event included a reading by Simone Forti (via Skype) and writer Huan Hsu, a presentation of Forti’s seminal ‘Dance Constructions’ – ‘Huddle’ (1961), and a screening of Forti’s works ‘Three Grizzlies, New York Zoo’ (1974) and ‘Sleep Walkers/ Zoo Mantras’ (2010).

Simone Forti’s ‘The Bear in the Mirror’ is published by Vleeshal, Center for Contemporary Art in Middelburg (NL) and Koenig Books, Cologne (DE). Following Simone Forti’s solo show ‘Here It Comes’ at Vleeshal Markt and Vleeshal Zusterstraat in 2016 – which included the performance of all ‘Dance Constructions’, a new interpretation of ‘See Saw’, and two unforgettable performances by Simone Forti and Charlemagne Palestine – Vleeshal’s director Roos Gortzak asked Simone Forti to collaborate on a book. Simone Forti proposed ‘The Bear in the Mirror’, which Gortzak gladly took on. Gortzak asked Nerijus Rimkus for the graphic design, as she felt a shared sensibility. After a close collaboration over an elongated period of time, Vleeshal is thrilled to launch Forti’s book now.

Short bio's:

Simone Forti emigrated with her family in 1939 to the United States and is based in Los Angeles. Her early ‘Dance Constructions’ were influential in the reinvention of dance and performance in the 1960s and ’70s. Over the years, she has worked with artists and composers such as Robert Morris, La Monte Young, Yoko Ono, Robert Whitman, Charlemagne Palestine and Peter van Riper. Forti's work and performances include exhibitions and performances at Index, Stockholm; Museum of Modern, Salzburg; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; The Box LA Gallery, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Sao Paulo Biennale; Louvre, Paris.

Huan Hsu is the author of ‘The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China’. As a staff writer for the Washington City Paper in Washington, DC, and the Seattle Weekly, he won multiple Society of Professional Journalists awards and received recognition from the Casey Foundation for Meritorious Journalism. His essays and fiction have appeared in Slate, The Guardian, The Literary Review, and Lucky Peach. He lives in Amsterdam, where he lectures in journalism and creative writing at Amsterdam University College.

Nerijus Rimkus is a graphic designer working between Amsterdam and Vilnius. He holds a BA for Fine Arts and Design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (2014) and a MA in Graphic Design from Werkplaats Typografie (2016). He has worked together with, among others, CAC (Vilnius), Kim? Contemporary Art Centre (Riga), Autarkia (Vilnius), Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), Vleeshal (Middelburg), Lithuanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (Venice) and his work was included in the Biennial of Graphic Design (Brno). show less