‘The rise of fascism makes our work even more important’: Montez Press, champions of queer, feminist art | Art and design

Stuart McKenzie turns towards a fan on a makeshift stage so his long brunette hair blows in the wind. The artist is dressed in a power suit with thick rimmed glasses, flamboyantly smoking a cigarette as he performs the confessional poetry he’s been writing since the 80s. “Stuart is this fantastic London staple who is just coming out of the woodwork now,” says Emily Pope, the director of Montez Press, who hosted the fundraiser where McKenzie performed to support their queer, feminist press and radio.

McKenzie is a typical Montez Press collaborator: an experimental artist who doesn’t fit neatly into either art, literary or music spaces (although he did recently support the indie band Bar Italia). He’s later in his career than some of the emerging artists they collaborate with but he has Montez Press’s “desire to push boundaries and ask questions,” as Anna Clark, one of the organisation’s founding members, puts it.

Established in 2012 by a group of exchange students from Goldsmiths College of Art at Hamburg School of Art, Montez Press was formed to counter a publishing landscape dominated, they say, by heteronormative journalists and academics. Instead, they wanted to celebrate more experimental forms of writing, led by artists who championed feminist and queer perspectives. Their first book was Chubz by Huw Lemmey, a nightmarish, homoerotic satire about the protagonist, who dates a leftwing journalist, inspired by Owen Jones, whom he meets on Grindr in the summer of 2011 as Nigel Farage rises to power as prime minister. It’s a story about class struggle, populism, and our dependence on technology – tied together with a lot of sex.

The press commissions a novel each year, written by a younger artist doing something “we perceive to be particularly groundbreaking in the realm of auto-speculative or fan fiction,” says Pope. That’s literature rooted in personal experiences explored through a futuristic or fantastical lens, often inspired by existing characters, settings, or plots from copyrighted media. Their latest release was Jaw Filler, written by Maz Murray and Charlie Markbreiter. It’s a pulpy neo-noir detective novel about the disappearance of Character as he enters Sim World’s First Trans Commune, a virtual reality community constructed by an influencer and paid for by a dark tech company.

The team themselves often write books: Stacy Skolnik, who is the co-director of Montez Press Radio, wrote The Ginny Suite in 2024, a mystery centred on a global condition affecting women that causes submissiveness and aphasia; while assistant editor Elida Silvey is in the process of writing her vampire story.

Extracts from these books and plays are streamed on Montez Press Radio, alongside more bizarre transmissions. Artist Lux Pyre can be found popping bottles on the airwaves incorporating ASMR with readings from his fan fiction fantasy about sexual desires. “He’d never done this before. Neither had we actually, so we had to build this little DIY soundproof box,” says Miranda Shutler, who’s in charge of the London programming. “It’s a really great space for experimentation in the same way that the press is.”

On the station, Irish noise artist Vivienne Griffin sings into the back of an “augmented self-playing harp”, called the New Note, a clarsach (Celtic harp), they’ve made using a modular synthesiser: “I’m a gin and tonic drank by an alcoholic,” they sing, as the harp plays, “day after watching the news, shit storms strolling, extremist flowing, the colour of rage.” They also host their show, Hell Sister, in which they interview countercultural icons such as Adele Bertei, a prominent figure in New York’s late 70s no wave scene.

Anna Clark, Stacy Skolnik and Thomas Laprade started started Montez Press Radio in 2018, broadcasting an alternative programme that captures underground art, literature, nightlife and music scenes, from an art gallery in Manhattan’s Chinatown. “The radio made a lot of sense,” says Clark, “providing a space where people could have experimental projects, have intimate conversations and be able to disseminate that to an even wider audience.”

It’s all very lo-fi with the energy of a community radio station, where you might catch music curated by an East Village record shop and queer London-based DJs; jam sessions-slash-performances; or 12 hours of lectures, songs, and poetry related to Palestinian liberation in collaboration with Radio Alhara. One conversation between researchers from Forensic Architecture – who use architectural evidence in cases of human rights abuses and war crimes – advocated for land restitution and reparations in Namibia by re-enacting the colonial violence perpetrated at the time.

It’s an attractive alternative to public radio, which in the US has “been completely slashed and undermined,” says Clark. “That just makes me feel even more impassioned in continuing to find ways to reach our audience and the people who want to support democracy and independent media.” Clark, who is living in America under Trump, adds: “the rise of fascism is really challenging and makes the work that we do both even more important, doubling down on our commitment to support trans people, feminist perspectives, underrepresented voices, as that becomes more and more under attack.”

Unlike community radio that was once rooted in one particular scene and city, Montez Press is completely international, operating between bases in Hamburg, New York and London. The radio has offshoot programming in Mexico, has put on events in Vietnam and Korea, while its Interjection Calendar, which commissions 12 emerging and established artists and writers to map the year in contemporary art writing, is being edited in Taiwan. The previous calendar was curated by Irish artist Racheal Crowther, who looks at surveillance, governance and institutional power in London. “We’re really interested in how to connect hyper-local, grassroots, counter-cultural scenes in contemporary art, writing and music, and how to foster a global community,” says Pope.

Over the decade that Montez Press has been publishing “we’ve shifted from being on the periphery to being a pillar in new ways of thinking about independent publishing,” Pope says. The queer, feminist publishing landscape in London has evolved into a diverse ecosystem of small independent presses, artists self-publishing, alternative book and zine fairs, and dedicated shops. “A really interesting question is how to remain relevant when something that you were doing was countercultural and then there seems to be more of it.”