Levene focuses on the physical body and the abstract mind, the struggle to come to terms with and accept time, existence and mortality. It’s quickly understood that 15 years of hardcore heroin addiction, over 60‚000 intravenous injections, have been administered in an attempt to fill this volume of void. Far more than the stereotypical writing so often found in drug literature Levene’s texts employ heroin use and addiction as a means to explore far grander themes of history, nostalgia, consequence and trauma.
For her part, Urbaniak through a series of photographs (Artefacts of Self-destruction) Urbaniak isolates and records the forensics of a ‘lifescene’ (here being the author’s own drug paraphernalia) at times discovering a breathtaking beauty emitted by the objects. Urbaniak’s lens turns the otherwise inanimate objects into landscapes, monuments, horizons, revealing the universal blackness of history and corporeal qualities of the user in the traces of blood and carbon left behind.
“Levene’s words are something like when you find a long lost old faithful, a throbber on the shin, aaaaah.....''
‘The Void Ratio’ left me dreaming again of the fucking nightmare...'PETER DOHERTY
The Void Ratio by Shane Levene & Karolina Urbaniak
ISBN 978-0-9927366-2-0
Softbound
64 pages
Size 18x22cm
Edition limited to 100 copies
Shane Levene
Shane Levene is a contemporary British Outsider writer. He first shot to attention online, attracting a huge cult following, with the writing on his site Memoires of a Heroinhead. Themes common throughout Levene's work include history, nostalgia, tragedy, beauty, animalism and depravity. In 2016, after a 12 year exile in France, he finally returned to his homeland. He remains desperate and destitute, and when he is not living he remembers and writes.
Karolina Urbaniak
Karolina Urbaniak is a visual artist, musician, designer, professional photographer and co-founder of Infinity Land Press. Her published work includes To Putrefaction, The Void Ratio and Altered Balance – A Tribute to Coil (a collaboration between Urbaniak and the award-winning poet and novelist Jeremy Reed). She also composed the soundtrack to the limited edition of Jeremy Reed’s and Martin Bladh’s book Darkleaks - The Ripper Genome. Urbaniak is currently collaborating with british writer Steve Finbow on the multimedia project Death-Mort-Tod - A European Reliquary, forthcoming on Infinity Land Press.