Emotion of Spirits

Mud … and the Earth System explores groundbreaking research in Earth system sciences and highlights the challenges of communicating these findings to the public.

As once-stable “mudscapes” transform, they become both symptoms and symbols of a rapidly warming planet. This book delves into humanity’s connection to these changes through the study of ancient organic and inorganic compounds that have come alive after millennia. It poses essential questions about what these evolving ‘mud’ compounds reveal about Earth’s deep past and our imminent future.

Born from collaborative research led by artist Rikke Luther at the Interdisciplinary Research of Ocean, Climate and Society (ROCS) at the University of Copenhagen in collaboration with Earth scientist, Professor Katherine Richardson, this publication showcases how artistic practices – such as image-making, conceptual mapping, and filmmaking – enhance scientific representation.

Mud… and the Earth System features commissioned essays from experts in Earth Science, Political Aesthetics, and Molecular Geobiology. The book pairs their insights with compelling artwork, including large-scale maps of emerging ‘mudscapes’ in Svalbard, Iceland, Greenland, and Gotland.

The essays give perspectives on the DNA that is collected and stored in mud, which connects life across timescales as an evolutionary resource framing the interactions of human societies with the extreme complexities of the Earth system. Esther Leslie’s “Mud Crystal and Polar Thinking” sets the scene, followed by Karina K. Sand’s “Death and Life:  in Mud: Two Million Years in a Split Second,” and Earth scientist Katherine Richardson’s contribution “A Muddy Diary.”

As Richardson sums up, “Mud is an important medium for storing the archives that describe the history of both life and climate on Earth, and we are only just beginning to understand the fantastic stories that mud can tell.”

Contributions by Esther Leslie, Rikke Luther, Katherine Richardson, Karina Sand

Studies on Squats is an evocative exploration of embodied resistance and political movement that uses the multifaceted posture of the “Asian Squat” as a lens through which broader concepts of migration, illness, and resilience are examined. In Studies on Squats, the body—in its most vulnerable and potent states—becomes a speculative site for reclaiming agency by crafting new forms of protest that draw from ancestral strength, humor and eroticism. This posture, rich with cultural resonance, offers as an entry point to imagine ways in which the body can engage in acts of defiance against systems of oppression. Studies on Squats  invites the audience to consider how dance and choreographic thinking can serve as tools for envisioning alternative futures, where artistry empowers those enduring systemic social injustices to transform their realities. 

Archives on Show brings the potential of reformulating the social and political relevance of archives by curatorial means into focus.

Based on the specific properties, faculties and methods of curation, the volume highlights those techniques and strategies that deal with archives not only to make their genesis and history apparent but also to open them up for the future. The 22 different ways of dealing with archives testify to the curatorial participation in (re)shaping the archival logic, structures and conditions. As process-oriented, collective and relational modes of producing meaning, these curatorial practices allow for the alteration, reconfiguration and mobilization of the laws, norms and narratives that the archive preserves as preconditions of its power.

The contributions to this volume by artists, curators and theorists demonstrate approaches that curatorially insist on building other relations between human and non-human archival participants. Each is using the book to create a curatorial constellation that generates and forms new connections between different times and spaces, narratives, disciplines and discourses. Configured as a glossary, the positions assembled in this volume exemplify curatorial methods with which to treat the archive as site and tool of collective, ongoing negotiations over its potential societal role and function.

Contributions by Heba Y. Amin, Talal Afifi, Eiman Hussein, Tamer El Said, Stefanie Schulte, Strathaus, Haytham El Wardany, Julie Ault, Kader Attia, Roger M. Buergel, Sophia Prinz, Yael Bartana, Rosi Braidotti, Kirsten Cooke, Ann Harezlak, Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, Octavian Esanu, Megan Hoetger, Carlos Kong, Iman Issa, Kayfa ta, Kapwani Kiwanga, Doreen Mende, Stefan Nowotny, Marion von Osten, pad.ma, Abdias Nascimento, Eran Schaerf, Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, Françoise Vergès.

A book that examines the process of performing the self, distinctive for the formation of the self in Western neoliberal societies in the 21st century. It approaches the self from a transdisciplinary angle where political and cultural anthropology, performance studies and dramaturgy intersect.

Starting from their concern with the crisis of the social, which coincides with the rise of individualism, Vujanović and Cvejić critically untangle individualist modes of performing the self, such as possessive, aesthetic, and autopoietic individualisms. However, their critique does not make for an argument for collectivism as a socially more viable alternative to individualism. Instead, it confronts them with the more fundamental problem of ontogenesis: how is that which distinguishes me as an individual formed in the first place? This question marks a turning point in the study, where it steps back into the process of individuation, prior to, and in excess of, the individual. 

The process of individuation, however, encompasses biological, social, and technological conditions of becoming whose real potential is transindividual, or more specifically, social transformation. A ‘theater of individuation’ (Gilbert Simondon) captures the dramaturgical stroke by which the authors investigate social relations (like solidarity and de-alienation) in which the self actualizes its transindividual dimension. This epistemic intervention into ontogenesis allows them to expand the horizon of transindividuation in an array of tangible social, aesthetic and political acts and practices. As with every horizon, the transindividual may not be closely at hand; however, it is certainly within reach, and the book encourages the reader to approach it.

"Towards a Transindividual Self is an ambitious and capacious effort to theorize a new way to approach collectivity for political purposes through the lens of performance. Convinced that the current neoliberal conjuncture has only heightened a form of capitalist individualism that blocks notions of the social, the authors aim to show that a "transindividual formation of the self can bring about different courses of action and a more socially driven imagination." Transindividuation, they assure us, shows how "we form ourselves on the basis of interdependence, sharing, commonality, as well as indispensability of the individual as the agent of creativity/ knowledge, freedom, and change, who 'possibilizes' their own conditions of formation." 
— Professor Janelle Reinelt (University of Warwick), co-editor of Critical Theory and Performance (University of Michigan, 2006)

"Perhaps the most striking thing about this book is the manner in which it is able to engage with multiple discourses from political theory to aesthetics. In this way it both follows the ambitious scope of Simondon’s work on individuation, and expands into areas that Simondon did not cover, most notably politics and cultural politics, which is the book’s central concern. Rather than ask the question is the individual imagined or real, an effect of social relations or their distortion, the focus on the transindividual makes it possible to grasp individuation as a process: “Instead of pondering how the passage from one to many occurs, individuation permits us to immediately trace a bidimensional process in which both individual persons and the collectivities they form are altered. Another meaning of the crisis of the social has brought about a perfect slogan of such a process of transindividuation: ‘No one will be left alone in the crisis.” (…) Towards a Transindividual Self does a brilliant job of not only arguing for the importance and relevance for the transindividual as a concept for politics, performance, and the politics of performance, but of demonstrating a bold standard for political and aesthetic inquiry."
— Professor Jason Read (University of Maine), author of The Politics of Transindividuality (Brill, 2015)

Co-published by Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Sarma and Multimedijalni institut.

The publication of the winners of the Villa Romana Prize has taken the shape of four distinct yet interrelated booklets – an editorial series continuing the tradition of the institution to offer a space for the dissemination and reverberation of the research and work of the Villa Romana Fellows after their ten-months residency in Florence.

Each year, four selected artists are invited to live and work in the same house that, since 1905, generations of artists have continuously inhabited. They always come as a group – a constellation of four people – but all as singular artists. The opportunity of yearly publishing their work in a bundle of four separate books and within an open series allows for a larger combination of echoes across the generations of Villa Romana Fellows. A further occasion for “being singular plural.”

Contributions by Elena Agudio

The catalogue of the 13th edition of the Rencontres de Bamako - African Biennale of Photography, focusing on multiplicity, difference, becoming, and heritage.

The dominant narrative in this "globalized world" is, incidentally, that of singularity—of universalism, of single identities, of singular cultures, of insular political systems. With this narrative, however, comes an illusory sense of stability and stasis; identities seem inalterable, cultures are immutable, political systems prove uneasy in the face of change. Thus, in sustaining this pervasive discourse, there has been a great loss of multiplicity, of fragmentation, of process and change, and not least of complex notions of humanity and equally complex narratives.

In decentering this year's biennale On Multiplicity, Difference, Becoming, and Heritage, General Director Cheick Diallo, Artistic Director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and the curatorial team—Akinbode Akinbiyi (artist and independent curator), Meriem Berrada (Artistic Director, MACAAL, Marrakech), Tandazani Dhlakama (Assistant Curator, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa), and Liz Ikiriko (artist and Assistant Curator, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto)—of the Bamako Encounters pay a powerful tribute to the spaces in between, to that which defies definition, to phases of transition, to being this and that or neither and both, to becoming, and to difference and divergence in all their shades. Accordingly, Amadou Hampâté Bâ's statement (Aspects de la civilisation africaine, Éditions Présence Africaine, 1972) presiding over the manifestation, Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono,translates to, "the persons of the person are multiple in the person."

A key tool for negotiating the processual and shifting nature of multiplicity lies in storytelling. It is the central medium through which humanity points the lens on itself and launches an attempt at self-understanding and reflection, and the breadth of answers given throughout history testifies to the congenial nature of storytelling and multiplicity. Moreover, the stories we tell not only negotiate who we are but also expose underlying currents of who we will become in the future. This is the concern lying at the heart of the 13th edition of the Bamako Encounters—the stories we tell, the multiple facets of humanity we accommodate, notions of processuality, becoming in being, embracing identities that are layered, fragmented, and divergent, and the multifarious ways of being in the world, whether enacted or imagined. It should be emphasized that this does not apply only to questions of personal identity. On the contrary, it is a bold affirmation of transformation and transition, of becoming in an emphatic sense, and is thus equally significant for state politics. It also rings true for questions of heritage/patrimony. Embracing the kaleidoscopic legacy of our multiple heritages means to open them up and liberate the term "patrimony" from its etymological roots (the Latin patrimonium means "the heritage of the father"), imagining in its place an inclusive concept of matrimony.

Thus, in this 13th edition of the Bamako Encounters with the title Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono, artists, curators, scholars, activists, and people of all walks of life are invited to reflect collectively on these multiplicities of being and differences, on expanding beyond the notion of a single being, and on embracing compound, layered and fragmented identities as much as layered, complex, non-linear understandings of space(s) and time(s).

Published following the 13th edition of the Rencontres de Bamako - African Biennale of Photography, in Bamako, Mali, in 2022.

With Saïd Afifi, Ixmucané Aguilar, Baff Akoto, Annie-Marie Akussah, Américo Hunguana, Daoud Aoulad-Syad, Leo Asemota, Myriam Omar Awadi, Salih Basheer, Shiraz Bayjoo, Amina Benbouchta, Hakim Benchekroun, Maria Magdalena Campos Pons, Rehema Chachage, Ulier Costa-Santos, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Fatoumata Diabaté, Aicha Diallo, Amsatou Diallo, Anna Binta Diallo, Mélissa Oummou Diallo, Nene Aïssatou Diallo, Binta Diaw, Adji Dieye, Imane Djamil, Sènami Donoumassou, Abdessamad El Montassir, Fairouz El Tom, Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose, Raisa Galofre, Raisa Galofre, Joy Gregory, Gherdai Hassell, Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Letitia Huckaby, Anique Jordan, Gladys Kalechini, Hamedine Kane, Atiyyah Khan, Gulshan Khan, Seif Kousmate, Mohammed Laouli, Maya Louhichi, Mallory Lowe Mpoka, Nourhan Maayouf, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, Botembe Moseka Maïté, Louisa Marajo, Clarita Maria, Billie McTernan, Mónica de Miranda, Arsène Mpiana Monkwe, Sethembile Msezane, Ebti Nabag, Elijah Ndoumbe, Lucia Nhamo, Samuel Nja Kwa, Nyancho NwaNri, Jo Ractcliffe, Adee Roberson, Fethi Sahraoui, Muhammad Salah, Neville Starling, Eve Tagny, René Tavares, Sackitey Tesa, Helena Uambembe, David Uzochukwu, Sofia Yala, Timothy Yanick Hunter.

Building on the notion of ‘praise,’ Adama Delphine Fawundu frames this book as a celebration of life. She honors the stories whispered to her by her mother; she adorns her body in her grandmother’s textile work; she elevates the memory of various named and unnamed Black women of the diaspora and documents the iconic small Civil War era styled white wooded praise house on a patch of land off the side of a road in South Carolina not far from Beaufort creating an intimate body of work of color photography of an interconnected history.

This book about female figures—grandmothers, mothers, daughters, artists, caregivers, storytellers, and cooks—explores a range of emotions that consume us about family life and history. It is both an art book
and a memoir. Viewing it brings us face to face with known and unknown cultures and introduces us to various art practices shared, taught, and learned through the African diasporic traditions. Fawundu connects to the self through history, joy, and beauty and offers the reader ways to navigate fear based on migration and loss. It is a gift, too, as it allows us to imagine alongside the artist.

Adama Delphine Fawundu is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY of Mende, Bubi, and Krim descent.
Through photography, video, textile-based sculptural forms, and performance, she creates embodied entities inspired by Indigenous knowledge systems and spiritual retentions across time and space. She co-authored the book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University.

Edited by Chiara Figone

Contributions by Mistura Allison, Berette S Macaulay, Niama Sandy, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Deborah Willis

Sustaining the Otherwise is a collaborative research and artistic project about restitution, reparation and transformation taking place in multiple locations over several years. Initiated and conceptualized by researchers and curators Amal Alhaag & Selene Wendt, it offers a space for artists, activists, scholars and writers to be in dialogue and to explore the topic of restitution in relation to both material and immaterial culture, through a program that frames restitution within the context of contemporary art practice.

Edited by Amal Alhaag & Selene Wendt

Featuring an introduction by Amal Alhaag & Selene Wendt as well as provocations, reflections, and essays by Barby Asante, Michael Barrett, Quinsy Gario, Sana Ginwalla, Aude Christel Mgba, Lennon Mhsishi, Ogutu Muraya, in addition to a sonic contribution by Robert Machiri. 

A manifesto for the decolonization of art book fairs and publishing.

Can we decolonize art book fairs? Can we decentralize knowledge and deconstruct privilege in our contexts? Decolonizing Art Book Fairs aims to rethink through the existing and speculative frameworks of organizational practice in the art book fairs. This workbook attempts to introduce new narratives and help deconstruct the frontiers between north(s) and south(s), putting an emphasis on practitioners and initiatives from the African continent and diaspora. A workbook with (primarily newly commissioned) texts and interviews.

Contributions by Jean-Claude Awono, Yaiza Camps, Chayet Chiénin, Chimurenga, Renata Felinto, Wanjeri Gakuru, Moritz Grünke, Aryan Kaganof, Sharlene Khan, Grada Kilomba, Carla Lever, Fouad Asfour, Dzekashu MacViban, Gladys Mendía, James Murua, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Simon Njami, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Monica Nkodo, O Menelick 2Ato, Pascale Obolo, Michalis Pichler, Mario Pissarra, Sergio Raimundo, Djimeli Raoul, Flurina Rothenberger, Bienvenu Sene, Bisi Silva, Kwanele Sosibo, Parfait Tabapsi, Louise Umutoni, Zamân Books & Curating.

The legacy and posterity of the Tashkent Festival for Asian, African and Latin American Cinema, which was held between 1968 and 1988 in Uzbekistan.

Between 1968 and 1988, the Tashkent Festival of Asian, African, and — from 1976 onwards — Latin American Cinema was held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. As an exercise in soft power and a response to anti-colonial movements and the socio-political upheaval of the late 1960s, the festival grew into a unique gathering for film professionals and became an important platform for South-South solidarity that went beyond the cinema halls of Tashkent. In essays and conversations by researchers, film-makers, and organizers of contemporary film festivals, the Destination: Tashkent Reader reappraises the original festival's programming, while also looking critically at its legacy. From the vantage point of Berlin-based diasporas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the reader also investigates how such practices of encounters and collaboration resonate within the film scenes of these three continents today.

Contributions by Cana Bilir-Meier, Souleymane Cissé, Pascale Fakhry, Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick, Sophie Genske, Timur Karpov, Ali Khamraev, Valeriya Kim, Carlos Kong, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Maren Niemeyer Jacqueline Nsiah, Furqat Palvan-Zade, Marie Helene Pereira, Elena Razlogova, Aykan Safoğlu, Masha Salazkina, Alex Moussa Sawadogo, Can Sungu, Echo Xuedan Tang, Sarnt Utamachote.

Foundlings, a video film, was shot near Wexford, in the south east of Ireland where she grew up. This visual poem without a particular narrative and full of autobiographical elements is set at a very slowed down pace. Floating images and heavy voices are central to the associative strategy that is at work here. The images allow one to listen to a hypnotic voice, while at the same time allowing the eyes to wander... to daydream... to travel over drawn out time. The images are country images, images of repetitive calm, the kind of calm one finds between awake and asleep. The speed of the sea sets the pace, regular yet irregular. The images are inhabited by people who cannot speak. Who are busy doing nothing, except passing time. Silent brothers and sisters of the sea.

The soundsculpture Unsaid, a joint work by Orla Barry and Portuguese artist Rui Chafes (1964), is very opposite to the film. The film is full of open spaces and bright colours. The sculpture is black, closed and claustrophobic and on top of that it is housed in a narrow tower five meters tall. The visitor has to take place on a rather unconventional chair and put his head in a closed off sphere, surrounding himself by darkness and leaving him with his own heartbeat. A voice addresses the visitor directly on highly intimate terms. The seating is hard and uncomfortable. One has to be strong to experience this piece that is a perpetual struggle between body and mind.

At the occassion of Barry’s show argos editions published Foundlings, a combined artist book and catalogue that can be ordered through argos. The book includes a DVD.

Orla Barry (1969) is an artist who centres her practice on language, written and spoken. Her work is strongly poetic and lyrical, crossing a wide variety of media. Barry was born in Ireland, and the rhythm of her phraseology, the pictorial and narrative vernacular on which she draws, somehow evokes her homeland’s topography, climate and literary heritage. At argos the artist presented two new works.

In early 2024, writer and activist susan abulhawa managed to enter Gaza twice through the Rafah crossing. There, at the Culture and Free Thought Association, susan held a series of workshops for young people who had been displaced to tent encampments. The lives of all participants were marked by unrelenting Israeli violence and extraordinary loss—of home, family, safety, education, electricity, and all the structures of life. They’d fled from place to place as Israel’s colonial violence swirled around them, complete with food and water insecurity and constant threat. Still, despite the bitterness of life in tents and the dangers of travel, they came together to share in the refuge of writing and community.
 
Samya recounts a tender moment with an old man mending shoes in the street, while her cousin Saja hides books in her closet, hoping they and her home will still be there when she returns. Ghassan is haunted by the baby he rescued from the rubble, who for a time became his son. Fatima risks it all retrieve her clothes from a danger zone buzzing with drones and warplanes. Maram’s loving aunt is gone, and chaos inhabits Amr’s mind. Samah, Lubna, Rizq, and Nebal take us by the hand through raining death, trails of tears, classroom shelters, and shared clothes in crowded tents.
 
Every Moment Is a Life delivers rare, unfiltered portraits of life under genocide, platforming the emerging voices struggling to survive in Gaza today. These essays are raw and real, capturing human moments—buying bread, going to the bathroom, sharing a meal, drinking coffee—all set against the backdrop of history’s first livestreamed ethnic cleansing. With courage, anger, love, agony, and—impossibly—hope, these achingly tender voices from Gaza will stay with us, captured in these pages, forever.