Becoming Press

Becoming entered the world through the foam that forms on the surface of agitated waters, and so—thusly mirroring the birth of Venus—Becoming Press was born in Cyprus. It started as a side-project, a magazine to be published by Crossdressing Diogenes, but it quickly exceeded its own limits and began to distinguish itself, devouring its host in the process. Alongside the idea of the magazine, Becoming developed into a platform for publishing essays and articles online, which it did for 18-months, until a single, substantial submission over-coded the machine: a text was gifted to Becoming that was so touching, and so well timed, that Becoming pursued the not-unsubstantial task of learning how to publish texts physically, and how to distribute them; and so Becoming Magazine became Becoming Press. At some point, Becoming spawned a record label, Eternal/Return, which was in a way an inevitability, yet nonetheless auspicious, as it marked the perfect inversion, from a record label which also produced texts, to a publisher which also produces music. 

Operated by only two sailors, the way the machine manoeuvres is sporadic and unpredictable, sometimes to the point of frustration, yet the miracle is that the machine really can move, and through a kind of quantum mirroring, the more people engage with it, the more momentum it gains. Becoming thus deals in several forms of matter: materials (books, printed matter), immaterials (essays, articles, interviews), music (albums, performances, radio shows), and film (video art, animation, cinema). There is a pervasive atmosphere of philosophical themes that have been fermenting since the project’s inception, and it is no longer adhering to a recognisable tradition or discipline, and has instead become something ...else, perhaps something that salutes Venus with the mantra: all good theory is inherently emancipatory, or inherently about love . 

If publishing is scaffolding, Becoming uses it to remodel supermassive symbolic structures made of scorching semiotic sand, on that same very beach, at the edge of the World, where Aphrodite first arrived, and where Becoming began.