LESSONS OF DECAL
ESSAY COLLECTION/AUTOTHEORY—Published by the 87Press (Dec 2023). Available to order here.
Lessons of Decal is a meditation on reading, listening, play, not-planning, touch, texture, queer abstraction, lush abstraction, a poetics of porosity or percolation, cloudiness, desire, and confusion. Laced with lyricism and playfulness, this essay collection views Form as its side-kick, its beloved. A decal is a copy, a transfer of forms and knowledge, something that sticks and leaves a mark.
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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 Decal invites an idea of the book as a set of gestures and possibilities, invoking (on every page) the experimental and queer ancestors who "speak nearby."
— Bhanu Kapil
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
