Borealis by Aisha Sabatini Sloan
- Title: Borealis by Aisha Sabatini Sloan
- Author: Aisha Sabatini Sloan
- Publisher: Coffee House Press
- Binding: Paperback / softback
- History of art art & design styles
- No. of pages: 144
- Dimensions (approx. mm): 140 x 177 x 14
Product Description
Art about glaciers queer relationships political anxiety and the meaning of Blackness in open space—Borealis is a shapeshifting logbook of Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s experiences moving through the Alaskan outdoors.
In Borealis Aisha Sabatini Sloan observes shorelines mountains bald eagles and Black fellow travelers while feeling menaced by the specter of nature writing. She considers the meaning of open spaces versus enclosed ones and maps out the web of queer relationships that connect her to this quaint Alaskan town. Triangulating the landscapes she moves through with glacial backdrops in the work of Black conceptual artists and writers Sabatini Sloan complicates tropes of Alaska to suggest that the excitement exploration and possibility of myth-making can also be twinned by isolation anxiety and boredom.
Borealis is the first book commissioned for the Spatial Species series edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen. The series investigates the ways we activate space through language. In the tradition of Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris Spatial Species titles are pocket-sized editions each keenly focused on place. Instead of tourist spots and public squares we encounter unmarked noncanonical spaces: edges alleyways diasporic traces. Such intimate journeying requires experiments in language and genre moving travelogue fiction or memoir into something closer to eating drinking and dreaming.