An Orobic Journey – On Migratory Restlessness, Community, and Multispecies Geographies

Why be the object when you can dive into yourself and archive your own adolescence? And what about this adolescence when it lasts until the late thirties, and expands beyond the traditional understanding of age group? 

This volume redefines the coming-of-age genre by addressing the contours of the obsession with the prolonged teenager years. Contemporary art views adolescence as a mental state, a condition that has eroded the traditional markers of the passage into adulthood; not a transitory phase but a prolonged mode of being or even a critique of a world that itself refuses to stabilize.

Extramentale, a curatorial platform on teenage aesthetics, was founded by Julia Marchand, the editor of this book, which spans the period from the platform's creation in 2016 through to its eventual closure in 2026. It gave voice to artist-adolescents and author-adolescents, mainly millennials and Gen Zers.

Adolescent artists of the Extramentale program and beyond contributed to this publication by sharing their words on the many dimensions of the adolescence: Robin Plus, Gaia Vincensini, Raphaëlle Serre, Linda Voorwinde, Tohé Commaret, Louise Nicolas de Lamballerie, Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel, Kevin Blinderman, Mohamed Bourouissa, Michal Novotný, Laura Owens, Magda Szpecht, Thomas Liu Le Lann, Velvet Aubry, Arnaud Dezoteux, Prune Phi, Alban Diaz, Ant Łakomsk, Liselor Perez, Francesca Grilli, Camille Aleña, Joanna Kordjak, and Katarzyna Kołodziej-Podsiadło; interviewed by Venice-based researchers Cecilia Larese, Vittoria Morpurgo, and Julia Marchand.

Covering the past thirty years of William Scott's practice, this monograph offers the largest comprehensive selection of paintings, drawings, masks and architectural models, as well as an unique insight on his creative and transformative approach.

Published on the occasion of Malmö Konsthall William Scott's exhibition at Mälmo Konsthall en 2022.

William Scott (born 1962 in San Francisco) has developed his own artistic practice while working at Creative Growth, an art center in Oakland where people with development disabilities are given the opportunity to work and advance creatively as artists. Combining image and text, his colourful paintings tie in stylistically with current popular culture. Scott's vividly graphic and highly detailed paintings, drawings, and sculptures explore the intersections of community, cultural memory, faith, and science fiction. "Rebirth" is a constant subject for the artist, who reimagines the social topography of his native San Francisco as well as new, interstellar organizations. His portraits depict family members and neighbors, and celebrate Black actors, musicians, and civil rights leaders. For Scott, painting is a transformative as well as a documentary tool; a way to re-craft his personal narrative and even undertake extraordinary acts.

Edited by Nicola Wright
Texts by Carson Cole Arthur, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Helen Delaney, Tom di Maria, Simona Dumitriu, Nathan Hamelberg, Kathleen Henderson, Matthew Higgs, William Scott, Nicola Wright

Antonio Obá: Rituals of Care traces the practice of the Brazilian artist since 2016, offering a broad survey of his recent work, dwelling on the recurring motifs and iconographic sources that feed the complex imagery of his painting. Extensively illustrated, the book returns the richness of Obá's paintings, with enlargements on some of the details woven into the pictorial texture that, in addition to showing his masterful technique, make certain elements of his visual vocabulary stand out.

The conversation between Andrea Bellini and Antonio Obá that opens the book offers the opportunity to learn, through the artist's voice, about the key passages of his research, and to examine his diverse cultural references—from the Baroque of Minas Gerais to traditional Chinese painting, from Rembrandt to the Catholic ex-votos—until we discover the Obá's civic vocation, of painting as a spiritual practice.

The two essays commissioned for the occasion analyze the complexity of these layered signifiers. Lorraine Mendes's essay "Every Boy Is a King" offers an in-depth analysis of Obá's religious syncretism. It suggests an interpretation of its layered symbols, particularly the sankofa and the deity Exú, both of which pay tribute to the artist's West African roots. Above and beyond the specific cultural contexts of this iconography, the author emphasizes the universal value of Obá's work, its evocative, transformative, dynamic power, which—like music or dance—knows no national boundaries or barriers.

Larry Ossei-Mensah's essay "Embodiment: The Art of Antonio Obá" investigates the complex cultural legacy that is intertwined with the artist's practice, connected to his Afro-Brazilian roots, to the social and political realities of the Black diaspora, and to Christian, Candomblé, and Umbanda traditions. In addition to examining the context in which Obá's work is rooted, the author situates it within a galaxy of artists who have focused on questions of identity, often using their own bodies as tools of social and cultural critique.

Completing the book is a chronology, compiled by Sara De Chiara, tracing the artist's formative years and exhibition history, accompanied by rich documentary materials.

Published on the occasion of Antonio Obá: Rituals of Care, the first mid-career survey in Europe dedicated to the Brazilian artist, curated by Andrea Bellini, at the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, in 2025.

Antonio Obá (born 1983 in Ceilândia, Brazil) lives and works in Brasília. His multifaceted practice encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and performance. His œuvre interrogates and subverts historical representations, reappropriating spiritual practices and stigmas of racism. Obá endeavors to reclaim his African heritage in a societal framework that has historically sought to dilute Black culture. His works therefore confront the violence inflicted over centuries upon African-Brazilian traditions and communities with new narratives.

A complete survey of the cast, forged, and fabricated metal sculptures made by Danish artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen since 2017.

The artist's practice addresses the industrial complex of virtual and robotic bodies and their relationship to labor in tech, pornography and gaming. While some sculptures were conceived as individual pieces, others were created with digital counterparts within installations that typically include CGI animation, documentary video, drawing and prints.

By presenting the metal works as stand-alone pieces, this book adheres to Meineche Hansen's concern with the material means of production, highlighting their concrete yet elusive nature. Several pieces in the publication are accompanied by poems written by artist Diego Marcon in response to the works. As an artist's project and an archival document, the publication echoes the tradition of documentary photography devoted to sculpture.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen (born 1981 in Denmark, lives and works in London) is a Danish artist. She produces exhibitions, interdisciplinary seminars and publications that foreground the body and its industrial complex, in what she refers to as a "techno-somatic variant of institutional critique". Meineche Hansen questions the body in the field of industrial representations: robotic or virtual bodies, and their relationship with the working world of industries of gaming, pornography, and new technologies. Her research-led practice has taken the form of woodcut prints, sculptures and CGI animations, often made by combining her own low-tech manual craft with outsourced, skilled digital labour.

Edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.
Poems by Diego Marcon.

A re-examination of Yvonne Rainer's Parts of Some Sextets, a radical performance and pivotal piece in the American choreographer's career, which led her to theorize her conception of dance in the 1960s, before being revived in 2019.

Parts of Some Sextets, Yvonne Rainer's 1965 performance for ten people and twelve mattresses, represents a turning point in the American choreographer's oeuvre. "My mattress monster," as Rainer calls it, was built in her formative years with the experimental downtown New York group Judson Dance Theater. In this work, she asserted her exploration of "ordinary" actions as well as her disregard for narrative constructions to create an intricate choreography that unfolded with a new scene every thirty seconds.

More than half a century after its premiere, Rainer, in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Emily Coates, directed the 2019 revival of the piece for the Performa 19 Biennial in New York, grappling with the changing contexts of a new presentation of her radical performance. Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 delves into every aspect of this dance, from its original manifestation to its reconstitution.

This book, designed by visual artist Nick Mauss, includes previously unpublished archival images and documents from the 1965 stagings at the Judson Memorial Church in New York and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Texts by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman, and Soyoung Yoon, as well as a new interview with Rainer, pose questions about the trajectories of artworks, performers, and audiences, all while tracing the life—and afterlife—of a dance.

Edited by Emily Coates. 
Texts and contributions by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman and Soyoung Yoon; conversation between Yvonne Rainer, Emily Coates and Nick Mauss.

Hardscapes / Here documents and brings together two exhibition projects by artists Nina Canell and Maria Hassabi. Produced on the occasion of the exhibitions of the same name curated by Samuele Piazza at the OGR Torino, the publication consists of two graphically specular books that merge into a single volume. Essays, unpublished materials and a rich set of photographic materials form the driving force behind two visual narratives that offer new keys to understanding the research of the two artists.

Hassabi's live installation Here calls on visitors to share space and spend time with six performers portrayed in a decelerated rhythmic choreography within a sculptural environment. In constant motion, the dancers contribute to a situation of shifting presence, demonstrating the contestable nature of the "here and now." Immobility and slowing down are thus used both as techniques and as subjects of representation: the performing bodies oscillate between dance and sculpture, subject and object, living body and static image.

Canell's Hardscapes combines two works that focus on the concepts of circulation and transformation as well as on unexpected forms of coexistence. Energy Budget (2017–18), a video that alternates between two subjects: a basement in which a leopard snail crawls over an electrical panel, and the gradual shifting of the frame away from "dragon gates"—portal-like openings in huge buildings on the Hong Kong waterfront. Muscle Memory (16 Tonnes) (2020–21) is a floor sculpture, decomposed and transformed by the density of moving bodies, which literally crumbles under the soles of passing visitors.

In addition to texts by the curator, the publication includes essays by Felicia Leu and Laura Preston, along with a conversation by Maria Hassabi and Nina Canell with Lorenzo Giusti.

Published on the occasion of the epoymous exhibitions at OGR Torino in 2022.

Edited by Samuele Piazza.
Texts by Lorenzo Giusti, Felicia F. Leu, Samuele Piazza, Laura Preston.

A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story.

With an introduction by Theo Downes-Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss and Kelly Link.

Steering the Craft is Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier bag of the tools of a writer’s craft: how – and why – to write. From the sound of language to tenses to point of view, Le Guin offers a comprehensive and generous guide to the fundamental components of narrative, illustrating her incisive analysis with examples from some of her favourite writers. Revised and updated for the twenty-first century, this handbook includes exercises that the writer can do alone or in a group.

Words gathered from The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1986), Natural Enemies of Books (MMS, 2020), Non credere di avere dei diritti (Libreria delle donne di Milano, 1987), Dada Cannibalistic Manifesto (Francis Picabia, 1920) and WITCH (Rebecca Tamás, 2019). A first version of this poem/pamphlet was made in the context of See What I Mean, a workshop by Phil Baber at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, october 2024.

'My aim for Mother Reader has been to bring together examples of the best writing on motherhood of the last sixty years, writing that tells firsthand of the mother's experience.

Many of the writings in Mother Reader comment on and interpolate one another, in citations, in footnotes, in direct homage. As I was assembling this collection one text would lead to one another, treasure-hunt fashion, the clue provided by an acknowledgement or bibliography. And just as often the writing circles back.

In Mother Reader chapters are excerpted from autobiographies, memoirs, and novels; entries are lifted from diaries; essays and stories are culled from collections, anthologies, and periodicals. My project has been to assemble a compendium or sampler of these ''kindred spirit'' works on motherhood, so that readers, and especially mothers with limited time on their hands, can access in one volume the best literature on the subject and know where turn to continue reading." [Moyra Davey in the introduction]

Writings by Margaret Atwood, Susan Bee, Rosellen Brown, Myrel Chernick, Lydia Davis, Buchi Emeta, Annie Ernaux, Mary Gaitskill, Susan Griffin, Nancy Hutson, Mary Kelly, Jane Lazarre, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Ellen McMahon, Margaret Mead, Vivian Montgomery, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olsen, Alicia Ostrker, Grace Paley, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Lynda Schor, Mira Schor, Dena Schottenkirk, Mona Simpson, Elizabeth Smart, Joan Snyder, Elke Solomon, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Alice Walker, Joy Williams, Martha Wilson, Barbara Zucker.

An essential collection of essays on language, the imagination, and the art of words by one of the great literary masters of the last century. 

This book traces a long sweep (1973-2014) through Ursula K. Le Guin's career; offering both a portrait of the author as a philosopher and a reference text for new generations of wordworkers and bookmakers.

I acquired Sonia’s copy of Fraser Darlingʼs book in 2010 when my cousins, sister, and I were going through Soniaʼs house following her death. From one of her glassed-in bookshelves, the spineʼs distinctive artwork caught my eye. When I put my hand in to grab it, it was immediately apparent there was something odd. Turning it over, I realised the book contained enclosures. It had been used as a flower press. Between its pages were eleven sheets of specimens, each sheet masked off with two pieces of neatly arranged blotting paper. All the sheets were titled in pencil: ‘Aviemore—May 1961’. 

Sonia Campbell Penney was a professional gardener, keen botanist, and the author’s aunt. Her ‘book’ is a copy of Natural History in the Highlands and Islands by F. Fraser Darling, interleaved with eleven sheets of plant specimens, guarded by blotting paper, which Sonia collected around Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands in May 1961. Functionally, if sporadically, annotated with plant names and, occasionally, places of finding, these sheets might be interpreted as a form of nature writing or a holiday diary almost without words. Sixty years on, Bridget Penney asks what a close, though thoroughly unscientific, consideration of these unmediated traces might reveal.

The first thing a traveller has to learn in Palestine is to wait: the Palestinians have been doing it for more than 50 years. In the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and on the West Bank, they have been waiting for permission to return ever since the Nabka, the catastrophe of 1948, when they were driven out of their houses and away from their land.

In November 2002, the Brussels-based authors of Time Suspended went on a ten-day visit to Palestine. Like most, everything they knew of the country came from media. They discovered a complex and intricate society that could not be summed up in a soundbite. The many full-bleed images of Palestine presented here (many of them depict a somewhat deserted, laid-back, sleepy, place) challenge years of media-tainted observation and truly give insight into the daily lives of its inhabitants.