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

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 Sadotti’s play How Can You Like Eva Hesse?, assembled around a lecture by Robert Pincus-Witten. Didi Wambugu, Gilda Williams, Matthew Peers, Sofia Clausse, Fedja Klikovac and Anna Howard enter 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 characteristic of Sadotti’s practice. Working across sculpture, sound, performance, collage and photography, he treats systems, chance and existing cultural material as method, allowing authorship to remain unstable rather than singular or secure. Magazine pages can become scores, popular music can become compressed histories, and sculptures can migrate into publications. Sadotti has described himself as someone for whom “authorship and ownership confuse me.” Elsewhere he has written, “My words are spoken by another.”

Play is both title and structure. The word can mean performance, music beginning, an instruction, or the degree of movement available within a system. Sadotti keeps these meanings active at once, allowing texts, voices, references and participants to move within a framework without fully fixing their relationship to one another.

The book does not 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.”

A critic’s lecture, another artist’s name, a punk record, a discussion, a room and a cast can all become material. The performance does not simply 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.