XI Ways to Talk about Sex
Published 23 months ago
Photographer Rasha Kahil brings together eleven blush-inducing stories
- Text by Susie Bubble
"XI was the sadist to my masochism.
We had g-chatted all day at work, but I had misunderstood his invitation to
fuck in the office toilets, and missed my chance. By 6pm, I was all tingly
and force-invited myself to his flat, despite his protests about him having
band practice. I told him I just needed 45 minutes, to which he replied “only?”.
I smiled as we boarded the 55.
I propped myself on the kitchen
counter and he grabbed and parted my thighs. The sound of keys fiddling
at the front door interrupted the beginning of what could’ve been an
unusual fuck. His kitchen is not very clean."
It was an X-rated night at the Shoreditch store No-One last night, where photographer Rasha Kahil launched her self-produced newsprint magazine, XI. The eleven stories in XI were written by Kahil herself in an attempt to bring the subject of sex back down to earth in a matter-of-fact way. Don't expect to find Mills & Boons-style florid language here, as demonstrated by the excerpt above. Interwoven with anonymous portrait photography from Kahil's photo blog La Gueule du Monde, XI purposely strays from having a concrete narrative. The women and men that Kahil depict are nobodies going through the motions of sex. We speak to Kahil about how XI came about and where the stories came from.
Dazed Digital: What prompted you to produce XI? What was the idea behind it?
Rasha Kahil: I had written these 11 stories about a girl's sexual encounters with eleven different men in reverse chronology, from the latest to the first, and wanted to present them in a way that would be different from the latest flurry of tell-all sex confession literature. The text, although explicit in its language, is also very matter-of-fact, and merges the emotional with the physical, which is what sex does. It's not porn and it's not romanticism, it's just sex.
In a way, it was mostly about wanting to bring sex down into the fabric of everyday, through the use of anonymity. The fact that I immersed these texts within pages of portrait photography is a way of detaching it from the author and creating multiple voices. Any of the girls in the photographs could be the author, and any of the men pictured could be the men in the texts. No one is named. Even the reader could become the author...
DD: Were the stories inspired by your own experiences?
Rasha Kahil: It's the question I get asked the most, and the one I (usually) don't answer. Let's just say I'm not a virgin.
DD: How did you set about writing about this girl and her encounters....?
Rasha Kahil: "XI" came about very spontaneously. I was intensely frustrated one day, and it all came out flooding out into a story of a sexual experience. Frustration always seems to stem from sex one way or another... It took me about 20 minutes to write. I let my friend read it, and she enjoyed the non-porn aspect, the fact that it was explicit yet retained forms of emotions that she could relate to by linking back to her own experiences. There was feeling behind the 'hardcore', and honesty by non-embellishment. So I started writing more... Each encounter had its own personality, from the blasé, to the funny to the tragic.
It was only when I decided to publish all the finished stories that the idea of making an art publication came about, by merging the words with the portrait photography I'd been doing the past year. I sourced all the images from my blog La Gueule du Monde.
DD: Where do you think XI fits in the scheme of zines?
Rasha Kahil: I really don't see "XI" as a zine. I have no intention of publishing a second volume, or making it into a series. It's just a one-off publication. I guess the fact that it's published on newsprint paper makes it look like a zine, but it could've easily been a proper glossy hardback book. I just chose to print it as a newspaper in order to make it accessible and cheap, which fits into the idea of the everyday.
DD: It seems like you're trying to de-sensationalise sex but do you think dedicating a publication to the subject has the opposite effect?
Rasha Kahil: I've always been interested in sex as subject matter, it holds so much emotion, complexity and is far-reaching. It's shared ground. I'm neither sensationalizing it, nor de-sensationalizing it. It's a tool for narrative just as anything else could be, and a lot of my work revolves around it. Celebrating sex sounds a bit corny, but I'd love to do just that! More, more, more!
DD: Any plans to publish this regularly?
Rasha Kahil: Nope. It's done and dusted. There are a billion other ways of exploring the matter, "XI" is just one of them.
'XI and La Guele Du Monde' available online, at No-One and at soon from independent bookstores in London.
