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Cover of Immutable: Designing History

Onomatopee

Immutable: Designing History

Chris Lee

€22.00

Immutable: Designing History explores the banal genre of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity). This is framed as a ~5,000 year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing — from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed ledgers, like the blockchain. Immutability figures as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering a variety of techniques (material, technological, administrative, etc.) of securitization against the entropy of a document's movement through space/time, and the political.

This project is driven by a contrast: design educators tend to teach forms like logos, books, websites, etc., but not passports, money, property deeds, etc., in spite of these being, I contend, design's most profoundly consequential forms.

As an alternative historiography, Immutable gestures both towards anthropologist Laura Nader's call to "study up" (on those in power), and the radical educator Paolo Freire's recognition of the "limit situation" as a generative condition for emancipatory praxis. The book's aim is to orient graphic design towards the vocation of imagining, naming, and remembering beyond the horizons of its role as a managerial, administrative, and colonial instrument that imposes a rationality of vision and accountability upon what is knowable, thinkable and sayable.

Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. He is a graduate of OCADU and the Sandberg Instituut. His research/studio practice explores graphic design's entanglement with capitalism and colonialism/ity through the banal genre of the document. He is also currently developing a typographical project that narrates the oscillating status of Asians between the "model minority" and "yellow peril" as a function of the consolidation of Euro-American settler identity. Chris is an Assistant Professor in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at the Pratt Institute.

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Cover of ’Est Pas Une

Onomatopee

’Est Pas Une

Philip Poppek

By way of archiving, digital translation and reproduction, Philip Poppek extracts from Magritte’s word paintings twenty-six letters; segmental symbols of a textual system form an alphabet of a, with a familiar apple punctuating a provisional end to the sequence. A poetic correspondence with the letter a speculates on the prehistory of this alphabet, as though searching for some indication as to how we may have come to where we are now, in this ‘post-factual moment’.

Maybe at some point we fell into the foxes’ den, only to re-surface in a landscape of ruins. This book poses a number of necessary questions, perhaps beginning with: ‘Which feminine noun trails after the title script ‘est pas une?

Pomme? Pipe? Histoire? Communauté?

Cover of Designing History - Documents and the Design Imperative to Immutability

Set Margins

Designing History - Documents and the Design Imperative to Immutability

Chris Lee

Design €23.00

Moving beyond the usual genres of form in graphic design’s canonical history, ‘Designing History’ proposes a model centred on bureaucratic instruments of identity, ownership, value, and permission: money, passports, certificates, property deeds, etc. It considers the implications of a design history of the document, where the designer shifts from being a practitioner of conventional design histories to become subject and agency of bureaucratic authority. The book is a revised edition of ‘Immutable: Designing History’ (2022) and includes an extended essay that contextualizes the project as a remapping of graphic design’s historical, pedagogical, and practical assumptions.

Cover of The Feminist Bookstore Movement

Duke University Press

The Feminist Bookstore Movement

Kristen Hogan

Essays €28.00

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

Cover of Entangled – Texts On Textiles

Archive Books

Entangled – Texts On Textiles

Anne Szefer Karlsen

What does it mean to be a curator who writes, and, more specifically, how can curators write about textiles? This publication steps outside the framework of the typical exhibition catalogue to occupy "the space between literature and criticism".

The Community of writers was set up to create time and space to retreat from these outside opinions and demands and to let curiosity and the joy of writing be the driving forces of the writing process. This book has been realised under the auspice of Interweaving Structures: Fabric as Material, Method, and Message, and specifically through collaboration between the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at the University of Bergen and the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź. The two partners have strong positions of specialisation—the museum acts as a caretaker of material textile traditions and art in Poland, and the faculty has a strong textile art tradition and offers the only education programme for curators in Norway.

Edited by Anne Szefer Karlsen.
Contributions by Andreas Hoffmann, Heather Jones, Martina Petrelli, Anne Szefer Karlsen, Lea Vene, Johanna Zanon.

Cover of Being a Chair. Essays on Choreographic Poetry

Varamo Press

Being a Chair. Essays on Choreographic Poetry

Janne-Camilla Lyster

Essays €12.00

Imagine words approaching a dance eyes closed or sleepwalking, words adrift beyond what can be envisioned beforehand, prompting writer and reader alike into a zone where time multiplies, where bodies grow footnotes and paper skin, savour the taste of language, attune their ears to the wavelength of blue. In a string of brief essays on her practice of writing choreographic poetry and scores, Janne-Camilla Lyster offers reflections on time, memory and the senses, on translation, punctuation and rhythm, on mistakes and crevasses, on the impossible and yet other things. What does it take to enter another form of existence, say, a chair?

Janne-Camilla Lyster is a writer, dancer and choreographer. She has published poetry, novels, essays and plays.

Cover of Against Morality

Floating Opera Press

Against Morality

Rosanna McLaughlin

Essays €17.00

A manifesto against the current moralizing trend in the arts.

Should art be determined by political ideals? In recent decades art institutions have sought to embody liberal values of universal equality and social justice. This move toward greater inclusivity has borne witness to a countervailing trend: artworks are increasingly scrutinized for their political implications, and artists must take care not to transgress particular moral fault lines.

Examining contemporary exhibitions as well as works of art and film, and the broader cultural reactions to them, Rosanna McLaughlin investigates the consequences of this moralizing approach to creative work. She invites us to rethink the connection between political values and art—and to ask whether a relationship between them should exist at all. In arguing against morality in the arts, McLaughlin lays the groundwork for a more expansive concept of difference in twenty-first-century art making.

"What if ambivalences were seen as productive, and not a danger to erase? Would we not begin to know ourselves better? What is it that we are so afraid of finding out? Art is a testing ground for ideas, a means of reaching. What a shame, if we use the space it offers to destroy it entirely."

Rosanna McLaughlin is a writer based in East Sussex and the author of Double-Tracking: Studies in Duplicity (2019) and Sinkhole (2023). Her writing on art and culture has featured in ArtReview, Frieze, Granta, The Guardian, and The White Review, among other publications. Between 2021 and 2023 she was co-editor of The White Review.

Cover of The Contemporary Condition - Contemporaneity in Embodied Data Practices

Sternberg Press

The Contemporary Condition - Contemporaneity in Embodied Data Practices

Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder

Essays €8.00

What parallels are there between a human pranayama practitioner and a migratory bird in heavily datafied environments? In Contemporaneity in Embodied Data Practices, two artistic field studies provide the starting point for a dialogical reflection on the entangling of diverse temporalities in body-related, datafied, and experiential practices. Shifting through biological, historical, and technological rhythms, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder unfold their respective more-than-human frames of reference and arrive at specific forms of agency in the contemporary moment. Published in partnership with the Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions at Aarhus University.