Backward Sway

Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine Appendix #3 Orality includes contributions by Simon Asencio, Bruno De Wachter, Peter Szendy, Clara Amaral, Itziar Okariz, Jude Joseph, Léa Poiré and Mette Edvardsen.

Time has The Appendixes #1–4 is an editorial series by Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré and Victoria Pérez Royo that developed out of the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. For a two-year residency at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers* (2022–23), they came together as a small work group, shaping the work process, hosting presentation formats and making this publication series on paper as four cahiers.

The cahiers comprise a collection of commissioned texts and contributions created for this context, selected documents and traces from work sessions and encounters organized during their residency, texts read together and republished for this occasion, a collection of references, notes in progress, unfinished thoughts and loose fragments – on paper, between pages.

The Appendixes are organized around four themes: (1) The gesture of writing, (2) How to organize a library, (3) Orality and (4) Translation. In addition to being published on paper, the editorial series also consisted of other formats of presentations, exchanges and meetings organized as workshops, fieldwork, performances, conferences, collective readings and oral publications, taking place during their residency at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and in the vicinity.

The Appendixes is the work that continues, material that adds on, some of it perhaps too long or too detailed, unfit or unfinished. The four themes that their research is formulated around originate in specific experiences and questions from the practices of Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine (2010 – ongoing), and also the large publication on the project ‘A book on reading, writing, memory and forgetting in a library of living books’ (2019). The research was both a means of exploring these themes in greater depth and also of bringing them into contact with other artists and researchers working on similar or related subjects. The Appendixes offered them both the contexts and the pretexts for things to happen (in time, in space, on paper).

The Appendixes #1–4, published in these cahiers, do not present an overview or a summary of all of the activities and presentations that took place during the two years at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers. What these cahiers offer is a space in which to hold some thoughts together and to share them in this form. It is one more step along the way, extending the research and work already begun and that will now continue.

One of artist Jenna Sutela's regular collaborators, Physarum polycephalum, is often referred to as a natural computer. This yellow, ‘many-headed’ slime mold is an ancient, decentralized, autonomous organism that processes data without a nervous system, operating via communities of coordinated nuclei that demonstrate advanced spatial intelligence. If the slime mold cannot find the resources it needs, it hibernates until better conditions arise; theoretically, it is immortal. Over the years, Sutela has, for example, ingested the slime mold in her performances as a form of artificial intelligence, letting its hive-like behavior program her own.

Sutela's work for Samara reactivates this line of work, delivering co-existence with the slime mold to people's homes in the form of a dried sample of Physarum polycephalum as well as related performative instructions. Inside the box, the audience receives everything necessary to grow slime mold at home, and witness the behaviour of this fascinating organism. With the set of performative instructions, Jenna Sutela proposes the ways of co-existing and engaging with Physarum polycephalum.

Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living media, such as Bacillus subtilis nattō bacteria and the “many-headed” slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela's work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Moderna Museet, and Serpentine Galleries. She is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-21.

Protoplasmic Flow contains everything required to activate the slime mold in a location of your choosing.

Duration: take all the time that you need
Language: Instructions are in English and Italian.

This issue uses the font designed for german news magazine Spiegel by amazing Lucas de Groot. The color poster is part of the full print of the series “Les Filles d’Amsterdam” by photographer Jean-Luc Moulène. It is the first time this series is printed in book form and in an exclusive interview the artist tells the story of that work.

Contributors: Lily Wittenburg, Maren Grimm & Jakob Krameritsch, Michael Milano, Assaf-Evron, Sophie Thun, Juliana Huxtable, Interview with Jean-Luc Moulène, poster by Jean-Luc Moulène, Magda Tóthová, Peter Machen on Brenda Fassie, Mariah Garnett, Shady El NoshokatyTommy Støckel

FROM THE PROP TO THE INSIDE gathers texts on the concept of the prop—as object, requisite and support—on stage and in the exhibition space. The starting points of this book are objects and installations of the artist Michaela Schweighofer, which deal with the stage as a platform and the sculpture as a prop.

The authors are friends: artists, critics and curators whom she has invited to write a text at the interface of their and her practice. The contributions within take on multiple forms; letters, essays and interviews—they are intended to create a theoretical-subjective anthology that makes visible the phenomena of the private as symptoms of the structural, as well as to provide a direct insight into contemporary artistic creation.

Text: Juliane Bischoff, Veronika Eberhart, Cornelia Lein, Cathrin Mayer, Gianna Virgina Prein, Agnieszka Roguski, Juliane Saupe, Michaela Schweighofer & Chloe Stead

Dead Minutes is a storytelling game about systemic change in an undesirable afterlife. You, the players, will decide what this hell, underworld or land of the dead is like, what its problems are, how change happens there, and what the complications might be when altering something so big, involving so many dead people, over so much time. It’s a game about impossible seeming actions at impossible seeming scales, making difficult choices, and dealing with unexpected outcomes.

The first half of this book gives you everything you need to play a session of Dead Minutes, which takes 2-5 hours with 3-6 people.

The second half features an essay by Patricia Reed that expands on the concepts of heuristic fictions and vital zombies in relation to the afterlife, and a series of afterlife generating 'seeds' contributed by different types of writers - a demonic boardroom presentation by writer and art critic Habib William Kherbek, a ritual from horror game designer Samuel Clarice Mui Shen Ern, a premise by Arthur C Clarke award winning author Chris Beckett, and a letter from Selma Selman.