GIORGIO SADOTTI — Play, The New Rare Editions, London, 2026

A6, 10.5 × 14.8 cm. 56 pages. Perfect bound. 130gsm gloss text; 350gsm gloss laminated cover. First edition of 100 copies. Published by The New Rare Editions, London, 2026. The New Rare Pocket Library, No. 01.

The first publication in The New Rare Pocket Library, Play grows from Giorgio Sadotti’s long-running interest in sound, performance, found material, other people’s words, and the point at which an artwork can begin operating without its author standing beside it.

Its source is a Sadotti play assembled around Robert Pincus-Witten’s “How Can You Like Eva Hesse?”, with Didi Wambugu, Gilda Williams, Matthew Peers, Sofia Clausse, Fedja Klikovac and Anna Howard entering a structure that also folds in Liam Gillick, Christopher Williams, a “Discussion Island,” a record-player introduction and the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the U.K. Materials from the project were activated at 47 Bedford Street, London, in January 2025 before finding another form here.

That accumulation is very Sadotti. His practice moves across sculpture, sound, performance, collage and photography, treating systems, chance and existing cultural material as working method rather than treating authorship as something that has to stay singular or secure — turning magazine pages into scores, popular music into compressed sound histories, even sculptures into publications. He has described himself, in his own words, as someone for whom “authorship and ownership confuse me.” Elsewhere he has written, “My words are spoken by another.”

The T is already in the word Play. It can mean theatre, music beginning, an instruction, freedom within a system, or the small amount of give left between things that are supposed to fit together. Sadotti uses several of these at once.

The book doesn’t stabilise the original event into documentation — it redistributes its components. Names, references, dialogue, music, instructions and fragments are given a second arrangement and another audience. That makes Play an exact opening statement for the Pocket Library: “The book is not a record of the work. It is one of the places the work goes.”

Play takes Sadotti’s own confusion about authorship seriously. A critic’s question, another artist’s name, a punk record, a discussion, a room and a cast can all become material.

The performance doesn’t become a book. It plays again as one.

Published as Pocket Library No. 01, Play sets out the series’ proposition: small publications made with artists, beginning with something already in circulation and giving it another place to exist.

Condition: New.

The New Rare at Glue Book Fair 2026