rile*books
rile*books is a Brussels based bookshop and project space for performance and publication. Open Wednesday to Sunday, 11-18h.
events
[Launch] Living to Learn: Art & Education for the Common Good
We're delighted to invite you for the presentation of Living to Learn: Art & Education for the Common Good. The book brings together work of artists, curators, collectives, and scholars in the Americas and the Middle East who address contemporary art as a site of learning in the 21st century. Building on earlier histories of education as a civic service for the common good, it focuses on the last 25 years to address the future of art education—as a practice that unfolds both in and beyond school. We'll be joined by editor Noah Simblist, along with Haig Aivazian, Robert Ochshorn, and Reem Shilleh in conversation to address the ways in which this book might be used to address local and global urgencies.
read moreabout [Launch] Living to Learn: Art & Education for the Common Goodrecent arrivals
Listening Glossary
Listening Glossary explores the many meanings and practices of listening. In an era shaped by climate crisis, war and deepening social inequalities, listening is increasingly called upon to bear witness – to melting glaciers, disappearing species, militarised borders, extractive infrastructures and other forms of violence and loss.
This glossary is a practical guide to listening as a social, political and imaginative practice. It gathers over two hundred terms from art, ecology, activism, psychology, education and philosophy across nine decades of thinking about listening as a way of relating to others, environments and structures of power. Entries invite listening through another’s ears or from specific perspectives, encountering forms of listening that range from the non-cochlear to the interspecies. Together, these entries reveal listening as a critical method for understanding and transforming the worlds we inhabit.
N°4 Spinal Memory
The moment human fingertips lifted from the ground, upright walking became a privilege rather than a mere posture. The liberated hands could now be used to create tools for defense and hunting. The pupils’ gazes shifted from a level view to a downward perspective, a physical change that also translated into an awareness that overlooked other species. The spine, situated at the center of the human body, acts like a covert ruler, measuring the scale of evolution and supporting the illusion of being “human-centric.” Thus, humans stand, placing themselves far above all other creatures. Following this profound gestural revolution came the imagination and manipulation of non-human animals (the Others), turning them into livestock and companions, as their wildness was rewritten as docility. Their bodies became resources to be medicated and refined, transforming into instruments for milk and nutritious meat production. They became basic knowledge and research data, linking humanity’s ever-expanding and illusory colonial territories.
Discussions and attempts to understand often struggle to escape the limitations of human centrism. Trapped in a persistent ethical dilemma, we find it difficult to navigate the unequal power dynamics that confine us. As the urgency of environmental and ecological issues intensifies, a question repeatedly emerges: Is it possible for us to construct a relatively equal multi-species world? Can we, with greater humility and introspection, relearn how to coexist with the Others? This fourth issue does not offer answers; instead, it comprises reflections and imaginations, as most contributors have long-standing experiences with or ongoing research on non-human animals. Through observation, education, painting, writing, and image-making, they seek to loosen the existing “ethical relationships” and “orderly rules.” Returning to the interior of the body, each vertebra of the spine accumulates traces of human transitions and memories that have yet to dissipate. However, the spine has never fully completed its evolution; its flaws are evident, and the hidden pain it causes always accompanies the body. Perhaps it is this persistent pain that continually reminds us that suffering, which may seem unrelated to us, can be perceived anew from the fissure of spines. By stepping into the bodies of Others, to feel and acknowledge them, a slow exchange occurs that reopens our imagination and generates a relationship that has yet to be named.
Contributors: Eva Koťátková, Hsu Che-Yu and Chen Wan-Yin, Victoria Soyan Peemot, Sha Shuang, Liz Pui Yee Chee, Robert Zhao Renhui, Qindi Hu, Chuangbin Chen, Lei Zhu, Wantanee Siripattananuntakul, Boria Sax, Candice Lin and Justin Torres
Assistant Editor: Jierui Ou
Designer: Can Yang
Three Wild Bodies
These powerhouse novels from Catalan superstar Eva Baltasar tell wild, delirious tales of queer women blazing new trails through sexuality, motherhood, and friendship.
The roving narrator of Permafrost trades one home for another – moving around Europe in pursuit of liberation, sex, self, and autonomy. In the International Booker-shortlisted Boulder a woman gives up her job as a Chilean fishing boat’s cook to move to Reykjavik with Samsa, the woman she loves. But when Samsa decides she wants to have a baby, she must decide whether this domestic idyll is what she is really looking for. In Mammoth, a young, disenchanted lesbian is looking to rearrange her life. She seduces a string of random men in an attempt to get pregnant and moves to a remote farmhouse to take care of sheep, battle stray cats, dabble in sex work – all in search of a more powerful, deeply felt life.
Kicking the Pricks: The Last of England
Originally published in 1987, and out of print for many years, Kicking the Pricks is a key work in Derek Jarman’s oeuvre, documenting the making of one of his most important and politically-charged films, The Last of England.
Featuring diary entries, interviews and notes from the script of the film alongside writing about his childhood, his father, the process through which he came to terms with his sexuality, his work as a painter and designer, and his debut as a film director, it is one of Jarman’s most radical publications, reflecting unsparingly on what he saw as the corruption of the cinema industry, the moral and personal consequences of AIDS, and Thatcher’s Britain.
This expanded edition features numerous archive photographs, a preface by Jarman’s companion the late Keith Collins, a new suite of poems by Richard Scott, and an extended essay by Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen. It also includes the first-ever publication of an interview with Jarman from 1988, conducted and contextualised by film producer and researcher James Norton.
The Sleep Thief
‘Sleep thief is what the interrogator called me. I’ll never forget that. I would steal a few seconds of sleep so I could remain steadfast before them. The name stuck; I even dreamt about it, the same dream, night after night. I woke up not knowing what to do and drenched in sweat.’
The experimental first novel from International Booker-Prize longlisted Palestinian author Ibtisam Azem, The Sleep Thief follows the life of Gharib (“the Stranger”) Haifawi as he comes of age, is drawn into resistance, makes friends, meets lovers, pushes back against traditional values, longs to be free of the labels and expectations that burden him, rails against the commodification of suffering, and dreams of a Palestinian identity that will transcend sorrow.
Language of the Night
In Language of the Night, Ursula K. Le Guin reflects on genre and the ethical work of writing, championing the imagination as a vital instrument of freedom. Illuminating the making of major works such as A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin argues for science fiction and fantasy as literary modes that sustain philosophical, political and emotional inquiry.
This wide-ranging collection considers artistic responsibility, the uses of myth, the craft of storytelling, and the role of the writer as teacher and public intellectual. It charts Le Guin’s emergence as one of the defining literary voices of the twentieth century, while also considering what she calls the ‘journey of self-knowledge’ – a psychic and moral journey into the unconscious, whose perils and rewards are best expressed through the symbolic language of dreams, fantasy and fairy tales.
A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be
In this refusal of futurity, Ursula K. Le Guin offers a counter-imaginary of place. She takes a non-linear journey through the stories we tell about progress and history, showing a way out of forward-oriented colonial modernity and its doctrine of technological utopias. Drawing upon Taoist philosophy and Indigenous storytelling, she advocates for anti-heroic alternatives to myths of endless growth.
Through Le Guin's characteristically playful prose, A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be shows that how we write is inseparable from how we imagine worlds, revealing the possibilities of living differently here and now.
Fear Eats Ali
The debut-novel of the Lebanese-born and Berlin-based writer Edwin Nasr—a "work of hysterical fiction."
Ali, a self-denigrating Catholic and unruly homosexual who immigrated to Berlin almost a decade ago from southern Lebanon, stands accused of assaulting a police officer during a Palestine solidarity demonstration. Caught in a suspended present as he faces possible deportation from Germany, Ali prepares to bid his goodbyes to a city in ebullition. The many people in his life pierce through the dense fog of days: Francesco, an Italian ex-boyfriend afflicted with the malady of hope; Samira, his tenacious confidante and the bearer of her Syrian community's burdens; and, somewhere far away, his father Karim, who took arms with the communists against the Israeli occupation in the 1980s. There are also the Germans, and the beast that slumbers in them—who knows what it remains capable of. Carried by tragic humor and political reckoning, Fear Eats Ali is a forthright novel about the time and place of resistance, the debt one carries in its wake, and the helplessness of men in the face of immense historical transformations
"Edwin Nasr has written a great war novel that draws us into the exhausting venality of German Staatsräson and into a complex world of transnational solidarity and anti-colonial struggle. What does it mean to fight and fail and start again? This is the crucial question of Fear Eats Ali—a book for our historical moment, a book that needs to be read." — Avery F. Gordon, Professor Emerita University of California Santa Barbara, author of The Hawthorn Archive (2017) and Ghostly Matters (1997/2008)
"Indignant and charming, Nasr's prose is unforgiving in its excavation of the paradoxes by which political agency is wrested from us at every turn. Prescient, razor-sharp, and radiant." — Juliana Huxtable, author of Mucus in My Pineal Gland
Edwin Nasr was born in 1994 in Haret Sakher, Lebanon. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany. His writings on politics and contemporary art have been published in Bidoun, n+1, Afterall Journal, The Funambulist, Mousse Magazine, and Mada Masr, among others. He is the Senior Editor of Palestine is everywhere (TBA21, Silver Press and the87press, 2025) and translates from French to English for different publications.
A Journal of Militant Sound Inquiry – Vol. 2 – Learning Circles for Palestine
The second volume of the journal investigating movement-based listening practices that take the forms of militant inquiry and political education, edited by the international sound art and popular education collective Ultra-red, is dedicated to the "Learning Circles for Palestine."
Contributors reflect on the current Palestine conjuncture several years after solidarity actions spread across university campuses around the world. It is now clear that the crackdown on student activism was a pretext for the dismantling or capturing of public institutions. The move against dissent also provided common ground for neofascists and liberals to enforce a consensus with imperialism.
The second volume ofUltra-red begins by pairing poems from Palestine with poems detailing the attacks on pro-Palestine students on university campuses. The journal then moves into its main feature: a dozen conversations with student and community groups. Each conversation is framed as a learning circle in which reflections shape critical questions and mark contradictions that speakers (and journal readers) continue to consider in the present moment. These learning circles come to the journal largely from contexts where Ultra-red members are involved in anti-capitalist and anti-racist base-building in Los Angeles, New York, London and in Novi Pazar. Additionally, we hear reflections on the Palestine conjuncture from the Bethlemen-based scientist and public-educator, Mazin Qumsiyeh as well as Palestinian Liberation Theologian and popular-educator, Omar Haramy. Through a list of listening protocols, the journal also offers a guide for readers to pursue their own learning circle for Palestine.
The journal continues with a special section titled, "The Case of Apartheid South Africa and Israel." This section combines historical and personal reflections on the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa with a photo essay on anti-apartheid solidarity in the U.K. from the 1950s to the 1980s. Both articles underscore the historical links between South Africa's apartheid government and the state of Israel and the alliances established between anti-apartheid and Palestinian liberation movements.
The journal concludes with new dispatches from ongoing militant investigations. We read about Southern Italy where activists attempt to build a movement across multiple struggles from anti-extractivism to farm workers. A dispatch from the direct democracy movement in Serbia. And, an oppositional research detailing the role of neofascist operatives in pursuing hegemony in the U.S. by targeting poor people's movements and capturing university infrastructure and curriculum.
This volume of Ultra-red is edited by Dont Rhine and Robert Sember in collaboration with Zissel Aronow, Janna Graham, Chris Jones, Zoe Kisselbach, Elliot Perkins, and Araceli Veloz, and it includes numerous contributors.
Edited by Dont Rhine and Robert Sember in collaboration with Zissel Aronow, Janna Graham, Chris Jones, Zoe Kisselbach, Elliot Perkins, Araceli Veloz.
We Look Alike
Rosanna Puyol Boralevi, Kinke Kooi
The second book in the "Brookinette" children's book series (published by Brook), We Look Alike is a book for little ones and older children alike that tells the story—through the drawings of Dutch artist Kinke Kooi—of encounters, friendship, and little mistakes, featuring a cast of snails, flowers, fruits, and ladybugs.
Kinke Kooi felt lonely in what she saw in books, stories and movies: the images never seemed to look like her. That's why she started looking at nature and gardens to find recognition. With pencils and paint, she composes a world whose shapes recall bodies as much as landscapes. Colours sounding like feelings. Often, she wonders how to represent emotions.
We Look Alike is a bilingual book in French and English, a conversation between two creatures who see each other but sometimes make mistakes, oopsy. It evokes hope for transformation in stories: encounter, recognition, friendship and little mistakes. "Am I you when you are me?" wonders a choir of flowers, snails, fruits and ladybirds, just to mention a few.
The text was written by Rosanna Puyol Boralevi based on the titles of works and conversations with Kinke Kooi, Marion Vasseur Raluy, and Alice Schneider.
Kinke Kooi (born in 1961 in Leeuwarden, lives and works in Arnhem) is a Dutch artist who creates sensitive, organic works that blend drawing, watercolor, and collage, in which bodies, flowers, and seashells merge in a world that is both sensual and poetic. In her pictorial work, Kinke Kooi magnifies the details of human bodies, animals, and plant elements—all depicted without hierarchy. A staunch feminist, she explores themes such as confinement, hospitality, metamorphosis, and our relationship with nature, prompting reflections on difference and empathy.
Rosanna Puyol Boralevi is a French poet, translator and editor. Co-founder of Brook editions, she publishes translations of texts inspired by feminist and anti-racist struggles, a literature that is both poetic and analytical. She collaborates with artists on exhibitions, video and performance programs, and organizes reading groups, writing and translation workshops, often with friends.
The Institution and Its Intentions
Vere Van Gool, Bettina Steinbrügge
An invitation from Mudam Luxembourg to consider the place, role and future of cultural institutions in the twenty-first century.
This publication collects and preserves the ideas put forward during the symposium "A Model: Reimagining Museums," which took place at Mudam – The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg, in June 2024. The convening explored the mission of museums today and examined how contemporary institutions can continue to serve as sources of culture, preservation, education, and community in the future.
The symposium marked the final chapter of a broader program dedicated to examining the museum as a model. The series was introduced by "A Model," a three-part exhibition curated by Bettina Steinbrügge that reflected on the role of the museum in the twenty-first century, reaffirming the need to consider the institutions a dynamic, living place, sensitive and receptive to contemporary debates. It also considered the possibilities that arise when museum collections are reimagined as active and performative environments. More than thirty artists were involved – some conceiving new commissions, others responding to works in Mudam's collection.
Texts by Giulia Bellinetti, Clémentine Deliss, Ben Eastham, António Mendes, Florence Ostende, Agustín Pérez Rubio, Bettina Steinbrügge.
Foreword by Bettina Steinbrügge; interviews with Claire Fontaine, Bettina Steinbrügge.
Manuals of no-how #2—The and
Various
A book that says a school, provisional and for nothing. A collection of p(o)edagogical manual, in which exercises can be read as works — works, as instructions or scores.
Imperfect dictation, or twisted ekphrasis, so that something may happen again — in another body, another voice, another time.
With contributions by Isabel Carvalho, Tomás Cunha Ferreira / Vapor Praia, João Polido, Clara Amaral, Sílvia das Fadas / Cinema Fulgor, Marta Ângela & Nu Nu Pinto / Marte i Núpiter, Okbooks! (Elsa Baslé, Leyre Léon, Chloé Gourvennec) & Mila Landreau, Pedro Barateiro / Spirit Shop, Meg Stuart, Vera Mantero, João Fiadeiro, André Lepecki, Ana Jotta, Arnaldo Antunes, and with the participants of The and's Edition: Oona Wilkinson, Sara e Tralha, Thijs Vleeschouver, Joana de Sá, Anton Ripon, Inês Barros, Anatole Prost, Maxence Junin, Nuno Beijinho, Ieva Ģertrūde Vītoliᶇa, Laura Gama Martins, and Will Gibbs.