13 February 2026 | 19:00
Mala Stanica Gallery, Skopje
Within the framework of CRIC Festival 2026, Kontrapunkt invites you to a performance presenting the book Dark Becomingsg by Artan Sadiku and Stanimir Panayotov, (Vienna & Skopje: transversal texts & Kontrapunkt, 2025).
“but I stand alone and drag my steps
and move chaotically with no direction
but there is no path only stubbornness”
The book and the event are in English.
Instead of a “classic” book launch, we treat Dark Becomings as something that is not to be explained, but activated.
No speakers sitting on a panel “presenting” the book. No ceremonial praise. No proper distance between author, reader, and audience.
Dark Becomings is a book of collaborative poetry by two friends, poets and theorists—Artan Sadiku and Stanimir Panayotov—written as a “frenetic” practice of mutual editing, co-writing, and the “puncturing” of language’s knowledges: piercing its habits, its certainties, its automatisms. It is an experiment in dissolving the limits of poetic form, yet with a persistent, consolidated aesthetic vision that draws on the tradition of the poetics and philosophy of “excess”—and in doing so it places darkness not as a theme, but as the core of becoming.
The book is composed of four “becomings,” each structured as an octagon of poems, moving through spaces of darkness between: Time and Destruction / Affect and Failure / Kink and Crash / Finality and Despair. These poems “implode from within” personal and collective stories of dis/affection in a time of rotting capital, leaving traces of theoretically adjacent yet aesthetically indexed lines of flight.
THE RITUAL:
The evening at Mala Stanica is conceived as a performance of the book: the text will be projected on the walls across two connected gallery rooms (open to one another). Dark, droning soundscapes will permeate the space—constant, oppressive, generative—like an underground nerve.
Visitors will be invited to step into reading—to approach, take a fragment, speak it, interrupt it, overlap with another reading, and create a cacophony of voices that is not “harmonized,” but accumulates, collides, chokes, and opens.
This is not an “open mic” for individual self-promotion. This is a collective engine: a poetic machine that tests the threshold between whispering and shouting, between the intimate and the political, between desire and decay. Thus, it does not matter who you or we really are.
Multiple voices may rise simultaneously—creating interference, excess, dark multiplicity. Some will read alone. Some will overlap. Some will merely witness the overflow.
If darkness is a method—then the method is: to read together, to the point where the “I” is no longer the owner of the voice.
Failure is expected. Failure is the form. Form follows failure.
“we shall remain invisible, and we shall hide
along the route, along the despair”
DURATION: 45-60 minutes of sustained immersion
Music credits: krāllār, “Twin Cities” (from V.A., XE35 Skyline Access, Osijek, Croatia: Xtematic/Xernex, 2015). More about his work and to support him here: https://krallar.bandcamp.com.
The book’s paperback edition will be available for purchase on site. Come not to hear a “promotion,” but to perform the text. The free pdf version is available here: https://transversal.at/books/dark-becomings.
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Praise for Dark Becomings:
Like a cormorant rising from the hunt, these Becomings surface from the abyss of late modernity only to plunge back into the void of a dead history. Sadiku and Panayotov are seers in the dark, and the forms they find to limn for us remain sumptuously unilluminated, encased in onyx. Like those creatures dwelling in the leaden Styx evoked by Baudelaire, their “wide eyes of phosphorous / Blacken even the night.” What these poems promise is not redemption but rather passage through the irremediable, where desire and despair are indiscernible and where their convergence conveys the force of impossible facts.
— Nathan Brown, Canada Research Chair in Poetics, Concordia University, translator of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (Verso, 2024), author of Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique
These are poems woven in the breath of never-ness. I read them like a debate of two ghosts whose sweet and toxic spirits are strong enough to condense into a body floating in the air. Its head is haloed in darkness, showing the pure negativity of transformation, that nothing actually undergoes change. Becoming is unbecoming. Read them quietly to see that the body has your own form. Wait, it is your reflection. No—it is you. And thus the debate subsides into the expenditure of a perfectly useless, absolute truth: you never had to be anyone.
\— Nicola Masciandaro, Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
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Artan Sadiku is a free thinker and anarchist activist from Skopje with an interest in ideas of subjectivation, political economy, queer thinking and radical practices in politics and arts. For over 20 years he has been active with various autonomous activist initiatives and independent cultural projects in Skopje and the Balkans. His latest book is on Subject(ive) Politics and he is currently writing on sexuality.
Stanimir Panayotov is postdoctoral fellow at Sofia University and lecturer at Plovdiv University. Previously, he taught philosophy and cultural studies (Tyumen, 2021–2023), was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Advanced Study in Sofia (2020–2021), and taught various courses in the humanities in Budapest, Jerusalem, Skopje, and Sofia (2011–2020). His first monograph, Feminist Theory of Disembodiment, is forthcoming in 2026 (Anthem Press), аnd is the author of two poetry books in Bulgarian: Axiom and Grief (Metheor, 2020), and God vs F31 (Ars/Scribens, 2013; second edition: Black Flamingo Publishing, 2021).
Споделено на: February 9, 2026 во 1:59 am