Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain collects a decade of work, from 2010-2020. In plays, performances, an encyclopedia, essays, autohagiography, hypnagogic, and hypnapompic poems—texts whose bodies drift and delight in form—
Minerva tunnels into mysticism, madness, motherhood, and magic.
Minerva gets dirty with the mess of gender and genius. She does the labor of sleep and dreams. She odysseys through Los Angeles, shapeshifting in stygian night and waking up to wail in the light.
Read an excerpt
here and
here.
Co-published by Sming Sming and Wolfman Books,
buy here for $18
Distributed in the UK and Europe by Parrhesiades,
buy here £16
The audiobook is narrated by Johanna Hedva and features tracks from AM Kanngieser, Geneva Skeen, Pauline Lay and Gabie Strong, and William Fowler Collins.
Buy here for $18.
Illustrations by
Isabelle Albuquerque
interviews—
Interview with Patrick Staff,
The Believer
Interview with Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz,
Art Agenda
reviews—
Minerva in Seven Pieces, by Nina Hanz in
MAP
Sleep, A Genius, by Erik Morse in
The Times Literary Supplement
reviewed by PF Anderson, in
Wordgathering
Beyond the Visual, by Claire Lefèvre in
Springback Magazine
Johanna Hedva’s Staining Power, by Olivia Fletcher, in
Burlington Contemporary
Johanna Hedva’s Mad Epistemology, by Sarah Cavar in
Carousel Magazine
events—
Jul 2, 2021,
Biennale Freiburg
May 22, 2021,
with Ariana Reines, Invisible College
Feb 24, 2021,
A Decade of Sleeping, Institute for the Humanities at University of Manitoba
Feb 10, 2021,
On Doom, workshop at Nottingham Contemporary
Dec 3, 2020,
Book launch at Mint konsthall, ABF Stockholm
Oct 22, 2020,
with Jenny Hval for the launch of her book,
Girls Against God, co-hosted by Verso and Ignota Books
Oct 8, 2020,
How to Tell When You’re Going to Die: Astrology for Writers, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Oct 3, 2020,
Launch with music and q&a, with performances by Gabie Strong and Pauline Lay, hosted by JOAN
Sep 24, 2020,
with Asher Hartman, co-hosted by Two Dollar Radio and X Artists’ Books
translation—
“A Decade of Sleeping,” in German, translated by Jackie Grassmann
blurbs—
“Purchase or thrash: ‘genius.’ Relocate an ‘Ancient Greek text’ to ‘contemporary Los Angeles.’ Does a geographical cure excrete ghosts, ‘visions of strange bodies poised and moving,’ or does it produce a ‘deep, reverberating sound?’ Johanna Hedva’s Minerva begins in this place and we go there, which is to say a reader does. Or might: float/trust this process of alchemical, pelvic, infinite, sub-maternal, and ceramic change.”
—Bhanu Kapil
“Reverberations of this book outlast everything else in our ears, ‘what felt like a skinned, feral cat breaching from my chest.’ Definitely Minerva, goddess of genius and poems! Celestial messenger Johanna Hedva gives up gold after the cult following of their book On Hell. A (god)dess-sized reconstruction of the world we only thought we knew! Welcome home, poets!”
—CAConrad, author of
While Standing in Line for Death
“Blood is spilled: the writer, the reader, the family, and the lovers are all brutally disemboweled. Abandonment, undeath, catharsis, and genius are all held to trial. Theatre, ritual, and memoir are cleaved open by sex, race, and the (mortal) body. Minerva, as in all their writing, sets Hedva’s astounding, somatic wisdom against an urgent, anarchistic wound. Let yourself belong to it.”
—Patrick Staff
“Can an artist’s personal history of their performances be a history of performance art? Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain traces both a decade of Johanna Hedva’s performed works and the edges of that genre’s history: bringing the intimate, fearful, feminine, traumatized, queer, and real-life-lived to look and admire and poke at the assumptions about what performance art has been: genius, unreachable, masculine, and hermetic. Hedva is both a wonderful writer in the school of Helene Cixous, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Clarice Lispector: and like them, a creator of spaces we didn’t know that we’re allowed.”
—Alexandra Grant
“This text is a trouble-maker. Well, that’s not quite right. The trouble was already there, we were just trying to hang a tapestry over it, maybe shove it into the dirt of our potted plant. Hedva has that knack, though, for revealing, for turning something we'd rather keep silent into a beautiful wail.”
—Jessa Crispin, author of
The Dead Ladies Project
“A book about viscera and black ash; ‘Blood and guts… soul and tears.’ Dark matter and sea foam blessed by ‘the tentacles of sea plants when they move…’ This is the literature of THE VOID. I will treasure Minerva as I do the most revelatory writings of Artaud.”
—Lara Mimosa Montes, author of
Thresholes
“I have this fantasy that upon our deaths, we each are replaced with a museum. And that in the museum, is a record, in relics, of what we made, tried to make, failed to make, and what made us. Johanna Hedva’s Minerva affirms and animates this fantasy, overlapping rapturous corporeality with the posthumous archive. It is the nomination of a life’s work of laying bare negative space by way of the nebulization of the body into a museum. (
Minerva, by the way, is the goddess of everything.)”
—Brandon Shimoda, author of
The Grave on the Wall
ISBN 978-1-953189-00-4
E-ISBN: 978-1-953189-01-1
September 2020, English, 5 x 8 in, 194 pages, b&w, softcover
Audiobook: 47 tracks, 4 hrs 46 min
Design: Sming Sming Books
