Broken Dimanche Press

Broken Dimanche Press (BDP) is an international publisher and art platform founded by John Holten and Line Madsen Simenstad in 2008 in Berlin.

The name The Broken Dimanche Press was inspired by Yves Klein's Dimanche-Le Journal d’un Seul Jour, a one-day newspaper that he published and distributed on newsstands. Broken Dimanche Press is a European press interested in all aspects of books within the wider discourses of contemporary art and politics. Founded in Berlin in 2009 by John Holten and Line Madsen Simenstad, BDP has executed many book projects, exhibition, reading series and interventions across Europe.

BDP has a staff of three including academic Ida Bencke and works in on-going collaboration with FUK Graphic Design Studio. It mainly publishes experimental literature and contemporary art. More recently it has branched out into exhibitions within the domain of contemporary art book publishing. It has been based in Berlin since 2008 but has also been active across Europe, notably in Milan, Oslo and Copenhagen. In 2013 there was a Tour BDP which saw events and readings being organised across Europe.

Büro BDP is what BDP call a multidisciplinary hybrid: office, creative agency, exhibition space, book showroom, archive for artists books and reading room, exploring the radical potentialities of an expanded notion of The Book in the contemporary age. Taking its cue from the initial impulse of Broken Dimanche Press – exploring the border between literature and contemporary art practice – the focus is on translation, editions, print solutions and the physical meeting of the core agents in book production: writers, artist, designers, editors, printers, distributors, booksellers and readers. It is furnished with a bespoke modular desk and display unit created by Canadian designer Leanne MacKay and over 50m2 of gallery and office space. It is located in Rixdorf, in Berlin's Neukoelln district.

In 2014, building on the many aspects of the body and the work of literature in a post-human form, BDP editor Ida Bencke came up with the working title Para-Poetics to capture a new poetic aesthetic. "By exploring a literature beyond the human, we wish to challenge the humanistic narrative of Man as the sole animal who has language. Not merely a question of the 'posthuman' – next step on the ladder of continuous progression – we want to confront narratives of mastery and expansion by probing around, before, after and beyond the category of the human. Asking what other possibilities can be afforded to us on the verge of environmental catastrophes? How do we speculate and engage in parallel vocabularies? How do we participate in narrations of worlds inhabited by something other than Man – the manifestation of a Western Logos - while not giving entirely up on the human. With experiments that tend towards asemic writing practices and eccentric narrative vantage points, we want to challenge the ideas of what it means to signify, in what manner significations can manifest themselves, and what promises for our relations to the Others a poetry in an expanded transhuman field might hold. Parapoetic ventures into sign systems that are – quite literally – unheard of."

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