Artan Sadiku and Stanimir Panayotov live-reading their poems "Feigning Desire as Poetry (Extracts from an Unwritten Poem),” "Alien Age,” and "On the Funeral of Existence” from the book Dark Becomings, along with audience members.
Footage from the event "Death and Sexuality,” held at CRIC: Festival for Critical Culture 2020: Finitude and the Fragile Society: Socialism, Freedom, and Secularity, Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, September 17, 2020, Skopje, North Macedonia.
Background music: Muslimgauze, Azzazin (Staalplaat, 1996).
Video editing: Alexander Feodorov
A book of collaborative poetry written by two friends, poets, and theoreticians, Dark Becomings is created in the process of frantic engagement with mutual editing, co-writing, and puncturing the know-hows of language. An experiment in dissolving the boundaries of poetic delineation while sustaining a consolidated aesthetic vision based on the tradition of the poetics and philosophy of “excess”. Propounding a poetic philosophy of becoming, the core of which is darkness itself. Four quadruple “becomings,” each of them an octagon of poems, walk the spaces of darkness itself between Time and Destruction, Affect and Failure, Kink and Crash, Finality and Despair. These verses implode from within the eerily poetic stories of personal and collective dis/affection in the age of rotting Capital, variously pointing to shared theoretical but aesthetically indexed escape routes. Written in the collective quagmire of poetry, poetics, the aesthetics of failure, self-/destruction, and Bataillian excess, Dark Becomings is nothing less than a contemporary primer of what it means today to innovate the poetic form via theoretical and practical collaboration and dedication – and relentlessly radicalizing the very notion of a “poem.”
Praise for Dark Becomings by Artan Sadiku and Stanimir Panayotov:
"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 phosphorus / 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 between 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
The project is part of the subtheme Re-imagining identity through poetry.
Author
Stanimir Panayotov
Stanimir Panayotov is research fellow at the Department of Literary Theory, Institute for Literature, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Logic, Ethics and Aesthetics, Sofia University (2023–2026). He completed his PhD in Comparative Gender Studies at the Central European University, Budapest (2020). Previously, he taught philosophy and cultural studies (Tyumen, 2021–2023), was postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Sofia (2020–2021), and taught various courses in humanities in Budapest, Jerusalem, Skopje and Sofia. His most recent publications are as editor of O-Zone: An Ecology of Objects (punctum books, 2026), and as co-editor of Soul, Body, and Gender in Late Antiquity (Routledge, 2024) and Black Metal Rainbows (PM Press, 2023). Since 2020, he is editor and initiator of Zlatomir Zlatanov’s publications, and has published his English translations of Zlatanov in Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism and Translation and Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender, and Culture. He has translated from English, Macedonian and Serbian/Croatian (Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Peter Burger, McKenzie Wark, Mihajlo Markovic, etc.), as well as poetry and prose from and into English, Bulgarian and Macedonian (e.g. Thomas Ligotti, Diamanda Gallas, Adrienne Rich, Hristina Pandzharidis, Maria Virhov, Ilinka Crvenkovska, etc.). Panayotov has published three books of poetry: God vs F31 (Ars/Scribens, 2011; Black Flamingo, 2020); Axiom and Grief (Metheor, 2020); Dark Becomings (transversal texts, 2024, in English, with Artan Sadiku). He is also the co-author of the award-winning radio play Transferatu (Bulgarian National Radio, 2006), and is currently writing up a play on John Balance, to be published in 2025.
Photo by Geo Kalev
Author
Artan Sadiku
Artan Sadiku is a free thinker and anarchist activist from Skopje who is interested in topics of subjectivation, political economy, queer thinking and radical practices in politics and arts. He was a motivator of the social movement in Macedonia and initiated the School for politics and critique and is an organizer with the autonomous collective of the Social Centre Dunja. At one point he was a curator at the Museum of contemporary art in Skopje, but he departed after three years. Currently he is organizing the CRIC festival for critical culture that takes place in Skopje. His latest book is on Subjec(ive) politics and he is currently writing on sexuality.
