Knee Balance

How can we define and document our present? 

Postmortem is a sensitive yet critical metaphor for a world suspended between collapse and reinvention—a diary of the now. Drawing together writers and artists from Europe and the SWANA region, this issue locates areas of tension that define our era. Far from a mere dialogue between regions, it exposes the inner and outer fractures of Western hegemony, unearthing shared emotions. 

From reclaiming histories and narratives in the Arab world to deconstructing digital spaces as arenas of control and resistance—even exposing systemic exclusions embedded in blood donation policies—contributors reveal these tensions as a fertile terrain for dialogue and reflection. 

Through critical essays, narrative writing, poetry, interviews, and contemporary art, the concept of Postmortem unfolds an in-between state where death and rebirth occur simultaneously. Across three interwoven chapters—Metaconnexion, Dissociation, and Fragmentation—the issue engages radically with body politics, othering, post-orientalism, surveillance, decoloniality, freedom, and resistance. 

Both a chronicle and a hybrid object where text, design, and image interact, Postmortem archives a world in flux. Rather than prognosticate, it dissects the present as the essential site for reimagining our future. 

Contributors : Sara El-Jazara, François Peyroux, Nadine Makarem, Soukaina Melhaoui, Louise Mervelet, Manon Schaefle, Marina Mardas, Irina Breitenstein, Amer Al-Dakar

Somewhere in England, confined to a room with empty chairs and an old telephone, is I. I wasn’t born here. English is their second language. They’ve given up writing. England With Eggs depicts the psychological aftermath of migration through a personal vortex of foreign experiences. Oscillating between narrator and character, Franz Kafka and long-distance calls, I spends sleepless nights drawing eggs, rearranging the chairs and talking to an uncanny voice on the phone. The isolated protagonist’s inner life is fractured: notions of place and history grow ever more fragile, language ever less certain. Torn between stubborn expectations and the reality of a foreign country, England With Eggs unfolds against a silent backdrop of austerity, colonialism and xenophobia. It is a study of acceptance, a reminder that sometimes the things we flee from are the ones we carry along on our journey.

This publication is limited to 100 copies, which are signed and numbered by the author.

Edited by Angie Harms

The materials collected in the publication have been developed departing from the documentation, transcription and translation of textual, visual, sculptural and audio materials produced between March and November 2021 for STILI DRAMA. 

STILI DRAMA is an open-ended episodic para-cinematographic project, which functions as a spontaneous expression of MRZB research. STILI DRAMA XVIII-XXI and LA GIOSTRA DI LULU XLI-XLIV are the two first fragments of the work.

Language: English, Italian
Edition of 100 copies

Child’s Replay is a hallucinatory homecoming. As we follow THE CHILD in a series of private re-enactments, the present self is revealed as the past’s fragile construction. Pursuing the banality of trauma, a first-person character juxtaposes childhood events with internal misrepresentations, reflections on the emotional toll of migration, psychoanalytic theory, Brazilian history, and literary criticism. An exploration of the impact that language and fiction have on real bodies, Child’s Replay assembles a hybrid portrait of memory and anti-memory. 

This publication is limited to 100 copies, which are signed and numbered by the author. 

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.

STILL LIFE is an online and printed zine about relationships and configurations in which one person is still while others are not. Or where one person is passive and others are active. It’s about how we put ourselves in other people’s hands. Or how we are put in other people’s hands. It’s about care and power and vulnerability and agency. And other things not so clearly named. It’s about the different kinds of knowledge that people have about their own and other people’s bodies. And the kind of philosophical and political understandings woven into that knowledge.

Eshkol and Wachmann focused dance on its basic element: the movement of the human body. They treated the different parts of the body as separate instruments, similar to the musical instruments of an orchestra–each with its own rules for the movements to be performed. This new edition of the 1958 publication is supplemented by contributions from Eshkol’s companions and further archive material, which contextualizes and supplements the history of the 'EWMN’s‘ origins and embeds it in contemporary discourses on dance and movement. 

The publication is published in the context of the performance 'Pause: The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group‘ at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (August 2023), as well as the exhibition 'Noa Eshkol: No Time to Dance‘ at the Georg Kolbe Museum (15 March–25 August 2024). The new edition was developed together with the 'Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation‘.

The first monograph dedicated to the pivotal work of African American postmodern dancer, choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings.

A foundational figure in dance, Blondell Cummings bridged postmodern dance experimentation and Black cultural traditions. Through her unique movement vocabulary, which she called "moving pictures," Cummings combined the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement in order to explore the emotional details of daily rituals and the intimacy of Black home life. In her most well-known work Chicken Soup, Cummings remembered the family kitchen as a basis for her choreography.

This book draws from Cummings's personal archive and includes performance ephemera and numerous images from digitized recordings of Cummings's performances and dance films; newly commissioned essays by Sampada Aranke, Thomas F. DeFrantz, and Tara Aisha Willis; remembrances by Marjani Forté-Saunders, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Streb, Edisa Weeks, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar; a 1995 interview with Cummings by Veta Goler; and transcripts from Cummings's appearances at Jacob's Pillow and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Bringing together reprints, an extended biography, a chronology of her work, rarely seen documentation, and new research, this book begins to contextualize Cummings's practice at the intersection of dance, moving image, and art histories.

Blondell Cummings (1944-2015) was a choreographer and video artist who mined everyday experiences like washing, cooking and building to create works celebrated for their rich characterizations and dramatic momentum. According to Wendy Perron, Cummings crossed over from modern to postmodern, from the Black dance community to the avant-garde community. Cummings referred to her stop-motion movement vocabulary as "moving pictures," which combined her interests in the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement. Her dances drew from an accumulation of character studies that often began with photography and workshops, and included poetry, oral histories, and projection. Her interest in moving pictures is also evidenced in her commitment to dance films. She both supported the documentation of dance, and created many experimental dance films.

Edited by Kristin Juarez, Rebecca Peabody, Glenn Phillips.
Texts by Sampada Aranke, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Tara Aisha Willis, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Streb, Edisa Weeks, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Blondell Cummings, Veta Goler.

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.