Overview

You wake up in the footwell of a mid-sized hatchback somewhere on a highway in outer Bangkok. You compile neurotic spreadsheets of the best ‘party destinations’ in Europe, whilst your work emails pile up without ever being read. You quit your job. You launch a banal start-up. You grieve for a past relationship. You stare endlessly at the waves coming in from a beach in Koh Pha Ngan. You vape intensely. You spend money on feelings, on the performance of your own persona, whilst you observe yourself with a detached sense of horror. i will pay to make it bigger is a novella, by poet and artist Ahren Warner, in which ‘you’ are the main character. Through text and image – autofiction, docufiction, and just plain fiction – you work your way through a tangle of preoccupations: from what it means to buy enjoyment, to the fragile construction of your own self as a cultural product. i will pay to make it bigger is also a photobook, a collection of images produced whilst living in Thai ‘party hostels’. Although these photographs might seem to exist as the documentation of intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.

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9781913513580

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Ahren Warner has published five books of poetry, most recently I’m totally killing your vibes (Bloodaxe, 2021) and The sea is spread and cleaved and furled (Prototype, 2020). His photography, film and installed works have been exhibited and screened at galleries and institutions including TJ Boulting (London), South London Gallery, The Centre for Digital Arts (Mexico City), Tube Gallery (Palma), Saatchi Gallery (London), Nikola Tesla Museum (Zagreb) and British Council (Athens). His work has appeared in the MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery Documents in Contemporary Art series, The Guardian and on BBC Radio, as well as being published internationally in journals and magazines. He has also received awards from organisations including The Arts Foundation, Royal Society of Literature and Society of Authors. i will pay to make it bigger is his first novella, and his first photobook.

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