Living in the Future

Constructed in Pennsylvania in 1827, Gravity Road was a precursor to the modern roller coaster; a sloping stretch of railroad used to cart coal out of mines. With passenger rides on offer soon afterwards, the rapid descent became an attraction and the technology was appropriated for thrill rides in amusement parks.

Jesse Darling’s sculptures, drawings and installations address the fallibility, fungibility and mortality of living beings, systems of government, ideologies and technologies – nothing is too big to fail. For his exhibition at Kunstverein Freiburg in 2020, Darling created a sculpture of a dysfunctional roller coaster, broken down to a child-like scale, becoming an anti-monument to a modernity that celebrates progress, acceleration and mastery and produces violence.

Exploring the entangled history of labour, leisure, extraction and entertainment, Gravity Road: A Rollercoaster Reader was commissioned in response to Darling’s 2020 exhibition, bringing together new texts by artist and Darling-collaborator Joe Highton and writer Sabrina Tarasoff along with a correspondence between Darling and the Kunstverein’s director Heinrich Dietz.

FEATURING TEXTS BY:
Jesse Darling
Heinrich Dietz
Joe Highton
Sabrina Tarasoff

Moulded from clay, between 2021 and 2023, The subtle rules the dense is a series of ceramic chest plates, by the artist Phoebe Collings-James. Inspired by Makonde and Yoruba body masks and Roman muscle cuirasses, the sculptures explore the interplay between ritualistic objects’ violent histories and their contemporary presentation as fetishistic ornaments. This publication brings together responses to the series from artists SERAFINE1369 and Rehana Zaman and geographer Professor Kathryn Yusoff; exploring layered references to tarot, Shakespeare and post-colonial theory; probing the materiality and extractive politics of geology; and reflecting the plural multifaceted nature of Collings-James’ practice.

A series by Phoebe Collings-James

With Texts by Serafine1369, Rehana Zaman, Kathryn Yussof.

What are our politics of refusal? Sleep? Catatonia? Hedonism? Transgression even? #hustle? 

[Can refusal can be performed as resistance and not operate as preemptively fucked. . .]

Arcadia Missa Publications; Rózsa Farkas, Holly Childs, Leila Kozma, Tom Clark (eds)

CONSTANT VIOLINS is a hybrid book consisting of two parts, each comprised of two texts of sci-fi auto-fiction: ‘FӔTAL ATRACTUS’ & ‘COQUETTES’, ‘RATS LIVE ON NO EVIL STAR’ & ‘SOPH MOB’.  CONSTANT VIOLINS follows mutating characters & contexts that grapple & contort in half-step with the logics of a vast labyrinth of psycho para-social references, playing out across a tête-bêche (or head-to-tail) format book. The myriad ‘worlds’ occupied & embodied narratively riff on the act of world-making in itself. 

As an only child, I used to climb up onto my grandmother’s vanity & collapse the 3 way mirror over my head so I could bask in the calm of the many me’s preening inside its reflective continuum. Sometimes I would just lean against the looking glass above her bureau or pretend the wall was my simultaneous lover. No one wants to be alone. Under covers, I initiate the same sequences of experiments that virtually anyone does. 

We all imagine what our pillows witness annually would baffle sane onlookers. That’s why we practice kissing on our dorsal carpal arches, peaches in the dead of night, or remove condoms from bananas with our teeth. CONSTANT VIOLINS wants what any book wants; to become a formidable power couple with its author like a Pokemon & its precocious Trainer.

Jordan/Martin Hell (b. 1993, USA) is a Black trans(2s) writer, artist, & scholar who attended Städelschule (DE) & Cooper Union School of Art. He is currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary’s University of London. Hell’s work is interdisciplinary & interlaced with his writing as the seedbed for his various explorations across painting, sculpture, pedagogy, music, dance, etc. In all of his work Hell is invested in the embedded associations which proliferate in the global collective subconscious & how that frames intimate (& often violent) realities in the lives of individuals whether historical, celebrity, or obscure. Closely linked with his work is a spiritualist psychoanalytic practice which spans hypnosis, theology, philosophy, Black fugitivity, & indigenous somatics.

The platform, free speech and contempt

How to Sleep Faster is published as part of the collaborative discussion that form the critical direction of the gallery. and sits alongside the first two exhibitions – Sleep Faster (February), and How to Carve Totem Poles (March). It has been put together as an open ended continuation of this dialogue through which we seek to understand the contradictions / complexities that define and form our experience, existence and participation in a contemporary digital-analogue creative environment.

Arcadia Missa Publications; Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark, Jammie Nicholas, Laura Farley (eds).

4SPIKE & howawfulallanis, Alex Less, Alice Royer, Alligataure, Amelie Clicquot, Anjol, Arañada, Axel Fievet , Axelle Bourguignon, Baron & Tosma, Charlie Cooper, Charlotte Sallan Gémard, Délora Abbal, Elliott Sanchez, Erimoczi, femo, Fleur Douglas, Gaia Bergelin & Inès Camrla, Justine Bouvet, Kara, Kiara Patry, Lilian Magardeau & Elisa Grondin, Loreleï, Lucile Moreau, Manon Souza, Marie Martin Design, Mira, Migraine, Nathan Peron, Nathanael Brelin, Nomaison, Ema Tomas, Othilie Jourde Ledoux, Piquico , Rémy Bellariva, Séraphin Degroote Ferrera et Arthur Diguet, Syan Fischer, Tanikawa Sari, Vanessa Kintzel, Virginie Contier, Viviane Le Borgne, Zoé Vincent. 

How to Sleep Faster 2 is the second of our biannually published journals that form the backbone of Arcadia Missa’ critical collaborative discourse on participation, post-digital visual-production and institutional subjectivity.This issue explores moments of collapse, shift and potential in a cultural moment framed by economic, political and societal disturbance.

Arcadia Missa Publication; eds Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark et al.

Casual Encountersz presents On The Rag, America’s Greatest Tabloid. Blending art and literature with sex, slime and sleaze, On The Rag emerges from LA's underground reading series Casual Encountersz to create a new media platform where the Ivory Tower and the gutter collide. On The Rag is a literary journal, gossip mag and conceptual art project all in one. Get off the apps…And get On The Rag!

For nearly two years the author collected phrases from the exhibition press releases she received through email, posting certain of them on Facebook in a rather unsystematic way (that is to say, when she felt like it), with only one change, that of the personal pronoun, so each statement appeared vainglorious, absurd, even tragic. She supposes the measure was if they made her laugh or gasp or used words she deplores when thinking or writing about art. The posts gathered quite a following. Some people still mention them to her, and others have asked her to look at their own press releases before circulation.

These extracts have provoked laughter, disbelief (especially when performed as public readings, when she has  been obliged to swear to their veracity), self-recognition, and yes, shame.

She had only three rules: 1) She would not quote the press release of anyone she knows (certainly she could have done—she must admit that both a friend and someone she dislikes intensely have slipped in, and she fervently hopes neither ever reads this book); 2) She would not alter anything except the pronoun (this is largely true; however, for this book, she corrected some errors of punctuation and spelling, changed spellings to their English form, and employed her beloved Oxford comma); and 3) She would not use anything the artist had written (this, too, is true, save for one exception that was too wonderful not to include).

Finally, she  gathered a collection of endorsements, some along the way, others when she indicated this work was done. She is still alive and she continues to labour in obscurity. 

This publication brings together two original screenplays for yet-realized video works by Robinson along with a collection of research material presented as a retrograde calendar. The screenplays, / Imagine Prompt: Catfish Monogamy and The Jealousy of Sagittarius A*, both deal with contemporary life and creative labor as they intersect with digital culture and current anxieties regarding AI. In addition, the screenplays are followed by A Faggot is a Unit (Homage to Hanne Darboven), a collection of archival photographs, scanned objects and ephemera, as well as stock imagery and graphics from the internet collected by Robinson over the course of seven years (2015–2021). The imagery further splits the disorienting narratives presented in the two screenplays to offer a kaleidoscopic and unpredictable way of reading stories while functioning simultaneously as visual companion and counterpoint to the scripts.

Writing and editing is central to Robinson’s published and film work, inquiring into queer histories and the contemporary economy of the image, not as novelty subjects in themselves, but as forms of knowledge integral to questioning histories of perceived liberation. We are committed to representing diverse voices and perspectives that challenge and build upon our vision of bringing material from the fast-paced digital experience to the book form.

Padraig Robinson is a Berlin-based artist, filmmaker and writer. 

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making.

The experiment of the one hundred word constraint, each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long, amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground.

What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? 

The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.