Nico Vassilakis, staring, vispo, visual poetry, concrete poetry, asemic writing

Expleted, completed, depleted. Letters (aka alphabets) will always turn out to have been humanity's most destructive invention - shadow companions right to skinny end, black dot-matrix dogs of chalkboard traumas. In this curricular scene, being an illegible subject is your best defense, against bullets, bullet-points, power, power-point, rules and rulers. Molten instruments for sure, these writings might also be ambient field recordings of an alphabet's unconsious, through its letters' hypersleep journeys to other destinations. Off-world, off-pivot, out-of-centre. De-parliamentarised, thrown out of government jobs, slow cruising towards a consensus that can never be reached. An autogestion spacetime craft of the fundamentals. Yep, socialism will always turn out to have been the only solution. It can launch (as it does here) with a series of serendipitous explosions. A conjure-gawk sowing gapeseed, an audacious carp, a freaky duck with webbed touch, muddling intermeddler diapered in inks? Oh, you mean N-I-C-O V-A-S-S-I-L-A-K-I-S. Everyone ever homeschooled by that guy started a new civilization. Donato Mancini

How many ways do seeing and saying separate, coalesce, contradict, and divide? As many as there are combinations of letters in the alphabet that do and do not form words, and are entered into temporal sequences, fit to be tied with marbled moods. This is Vassilakis at his most confessional, as he tells us what he most seeks is that "wonky second when the brain doesn't know how to process incoming information . . . .The letters like an off-grid dinosaur lumbering and uttering, keeping our early developmental selves alongside our adult frame." Jeanne Heuving