Year: 2020
Artist Book
Medium: Leather, Moleskine Paper Stock, Elastics, Ribbon, Strings, Post-It, Postcards, Paper Clip, Tape
Dimension: 8.25” X 5” X 0.75” (EACH)
Edition of 20 + 2 AP

Through a self-prescribed splitlectic, Whiskery Squid speaks as memoirs in memories. The poems and lyric essays in this collection dissociate from the mantle of silence: when can too much be violence? Is brokenness such a threat? Whiskery Squid is a receipt of acceptance; subterranean drills into human hours; tentacles beyond a single self; surreal echoes. It embodies an expanded sense of what it means to memoir: to breathe, never excluding those dank minutes; to heal ad infinitum; commingling timescapes; to fail forward; to press body to another; be in oceanic conversation.

As an art book made in collaboration with artist Alexander Si, the fragments transcend mere text into a performative-interactive experience. Two hands making this one thing blurs conventional under standings of the memoir. In cracks and cool cuts, Whiskery Squid raises salutations to hearts well pulped, well alive.

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adéolá olákìítán is a writer and transdisciplinary curator working between Lagos and New York.

Their praxis is invested in poetics, marginal technopolitics, and queer spiritations. olákìítán is currently reseeding qra33 and is a curatorial fellow of punk orientalism based in nyc.

All Texts & Images By Adéolá Ọlákìítán