Serving Cutt

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Glossary of Holes is an exhaustive erotic encyclopedia, working through orifices from the well known to the obscure. The three part collection is meant to provide fresh images of the perverse, and new tongues for pleasures that previously went unnamed. Each volume of the Glossary covers 12 letters of the alphabet. Due to be published by Cutt Press early next year, an illicit preview of one letter (O) was pasted across the side of Berlin's murkiest canal over summer.

I already knew these canals well. Each Friday, I stroll along the waterfronts of Lichtenberg (East Berlin), after a weekly meeting my priestess. Following confession, I unwind by feeding the local two-tone crows as they hop along the banks, or sit on stone steps to watch the murky water slowly churn by. One weekend over summer, I headed further south to meet with E.H., worldly representative of Berlin's pioneering Cutt Press.

Cutt first hit my radar after a reading of the pioneering SM-dyke crew Samois' depraved classic Coming To Power (which ended huddling for protection from torrential rains under central Berlin's Tiergarten Soviet monument). They were responsible for a bootleg republication of sapphic classics such as Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body (which I had relied on for one meeting of my Bi Bookclub). Cutt had also given a platform to contemporary perverts poetics and experimental zines (including Simon van Saarloss' ethnography of lab legends, Give Piss A Chance).

This left us an obvious meeting of minds (and appetites) as I developed the Glossary. We met at the point the canal becomes a fractured threeways: where the formerly DDR neighbourhood of Treptower Park meets the fashionable neighbourhoods of Kreuzberg and Neukölln (previously the outskirts of West Berlin).

With Treptower Brucke known to be a commonplace site for cruisers (among other miscreants), the spot was an intuitive choice for our wheatpaste preview. Along the way, I wrote the following preface on a scrap of notebook paper:

Read this as a folded and thoroughly improper act of trolling. Meant to provoke you to ask:

1) Is that truly a hole...?

2) Why am I aroused?

Rather than a curatorial plaque, providing context, the entry was marked with a suggestive abstract:

Beneath this curving paving stone ramp, the letter O preview was pasted effectively enough to still be found in position months after installation:

What did locals (or passers-by) make from this teaser? What residue of the work clings to the already storied ambience of this waterway fold? Please feel free to visit, and ask around.

Tomorrow (as an exclusive for Supersensual's supporters) I'll share the letter 'O' we pasted in full!

For today, below supporters can find a clip of me reading from the wall, freshly pasted wall, and the Os after some lovely attrition from the elements: