Lessons of Decal is a book of creative non-fiction that blends critical analysis, personal reflection, poetics, and performance writing. Deeply informed by attentive reading and research, these lyric essays are accessible yet playful and at times experimental. All chapters are interested in the pull between autobiography and abstraction; between hospitality and formal difficulty. Most of these essays have their origin in some kind of live occasion, usually performative lectures which combine research with costume, projections, choreography, poetic language, and performative delivery.
How does the bronze wire speak back to the writer who tenders it?What is the role of autobiography in a teaching practice that develops questions through touch, and the theory of that touch?How can vulnerability, in writing, be the place that writing comes from, actually? Sophie Seita's essays are staged at the boundary of body and text, commitment and memory.Lessons of Decalinvites an idea of the book as a set of gestures and possibilities, invoking (on every page) the experimental and queer ancestors who "speak nearby." —BhanuKapil
A love-letter to artistic research, Seita's writing celebrates the desire, disorientation, and discovery to be found in feminist practices of reading. A potent reminder of the generative passion that we can only wish motivated all critical inquiry. —Gordon Hall
Reading Sophie Seita’s invigorating and instructive essay collection,Lessons of Decal, I returned to key questions about and practices of reading and artmaking, which Seita explores from numerous angles: queer, feminist, historicist, bibliophilic, political, and personal ones, to name but a few. Here the figure of the decal is but one of the many productive metaphors Seita explores. Employing playful, innovative prose forms that took me beyond the page into the space of performance—many of these essays were originally presented live and in print have lost none of their brio--Seita drafts an original roadmap for thinking about past art and making new art today. —John Keene
For Fans Of: Maggie Nelson, Christina Sharpe, Chris Krauss