We are happy to share “Masc Green” by Danit Ariel, the second chapter in our new series of Open Letters!

The Open Letters project invites The Hague artists to occupy our large storefront window with messages of urgency and vulnerability.

“Masc Green” is a celebration of expansive masculinity. Danit Ariel wrote this text the day after Sarah Everard was killed, when for a brief moment, there was collective engagement in conversations around toxic masculinity. The dominant narrative at the time seemed to be that cis men had no one to look towards for examples of healthy masculinity. And so “Masc Green” was born as a call to look around. To look properly and beyond the binary. Look to trans mascs and queers, butches and dykes. To choose them as your role models for masculinity.

Danit Ariel is a Queer Jewish visual artist and writer attempting to construct an empathic gaze. Ariel’s research asks how we share and hold each other’s stories, as well as how art can create new ways of ‘meeting’; with an emphasis on platforming marginalised narratives.

“Masc Green” is on view in our front window for the duration of a month, and is freely accessible from the street at any time. 

In a special installation at Page Not Found, Kandis Williams proposes a reading lounge made of found interior objects, to dissent from the pristine white cube environment as a structure which facilitates and rigidifies the dissemination of knowledge.

Cassandra Press Readers are presented alongside “Blackity Black Black Black”, a zine published in collaboration with Collective X, and “The Absolute Right to Exclude”, a textual processing of Cheryl Harris’ “Whiteness as Property”. Recordings of public discussions held by Kandis Williams and Cassandra Press are available for viewing. Taken together, the works in this installation highlight the central process of assemblage that can be found across Cassandra’s offerings, which build through an array of textual and cultural materials. Furthermore, the steadily growing library gives space to publications by artists and writers such as Denise Ferreira da Silva, C.L.R. James, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, and Bracha L. Ettinger. 

Founded in 2016 as an extension of the multidisciplinary practice of Kandis Williams, Cassandra Press is a collaborative publishing platform that highlights and disseminates texts on issues of race, feminism, power, and aesthetics. Cassandra Press has since grown to become a multifaceted educational resource, hosting virtual workshops, organizing artist residencies, commissioning texts, and building public exhibitions alongside its publishing program.

Williams began Cassandra Press after being alarmed by the rise of right-wing authoritarianism while deeply inspired by a new audience coalescing around the Black Lives Matter movement. During the past seven years, Cassandra Press has published forty-four Readers. Organized around a central impulse, they are photocopied, roughly bound anthologies that present theory, history, sociology, and criticism by a panoply of intellectuals, activists, and editorial sources. Williams makes these resources available for free to Black students and instructors through online programming and local engagements. In 2020, Cassandra Press expanded collaborative aspects of its work into the Cassandra Classrooms project, a series of immersive courses led by artists, intellectuals, and educators who share their vital knowledge and invite participants into generative investigation.

The reading lounge is freely accessible during our opening hours Wednesday through Sunday, 13:00-18:00, until 13 November.

Cassandra Press and Collective X have collectively gathered a list of resources to compliment the reading lounge and event cycle at Page Not Found. The resource list spans online and offline platforms and publications within the English, French and German domain.

On 25 November we give you a little encore to the cycle: as part of Hoogtij #71 we will present a special screening of documented discussions and artist talks, guided by Kandis Williams.