Postsensual Aesthetics: on the logic of the curatorial

In Imaginary Languages, Marina Yaguello explores the history and practice of inventing languages, from religious speaking in tongues to politically utopian schemes of universality to the discoveries of modern linguistics. She looks for imagined languages that are autonomous systems, complete unto themselves and meant for communal use; imaginary, and therefore unlike both natural languages and historically attested languages; and products of an individual effort to lay hold of language. Inventors of languages, Yaguello writes, are madly in love: they love an object that belongs to them only to the extent that they also share it with a community.

Yaguello investigates the sources of imaginary languages, in myths, dreams, and utopias. She takes readers on a tour of languages invented in literature from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, including that in More's Utopia, Leibniz's "algebra of thought," and Bulwer-Lytton's linguistic fiction. She examines the linguistic fantasies (or madness) of Georgian linguist Nikolai Marr and Swiss medium Hélène Smith; and considers the quest for the true philosophical language. Yaguello finds two abiding (and somewhat contradictory) forces: the diversity of linguistic experience, which stands opposed to unifying endeavors, and, on the other hand, features shared by all languages (natural or not) and their users, which justifies the universalist hypothesis.

Recent years have seen something of a boom in invented languages, whether artificial languages meant to facilitate international communication or imagined languages constructed as part of science fiction worlds. In Imaginary Languages (an updated and expanded version of the earlier Les Fous du langage, published in English as Lunatic Lovers of Language), Yaguello shows that the invention of language is above all a passionate, dizzying labor of love.

How reading and writing are collective acts of political pedagogy, and why the struggle for change must begin at the level of the sentence. 

"Reading is class struggle," writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary demands for social and racial justice by exploring the shifting relations between politics and literacy.

Through a series of creative readings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fredric Jameson, and others, it casts light on history as an accumulation of violence and, in doing so, suggests that it can become a crucial resource for confronting the present insurgence of inequality, racism, and fascism. Reading between the lines, as it were, and even behind them, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió engage in an inventive mode of activist writing to argue that reading and writing are never solitary tasks, but always collaborative and collective, and able to revitalize our shared political imagination.

Drawing on what they call a "red common-wealth"—an archive of vast resources for doing political work and, in particular, anti-racist work—they demonstrate that sentences, as dynamic repositories of social relations, are historical and political events.

Shulamith Firestone was twenty-five years old when she published The Dialectic of Sex, her classic and groundbreaking manifesto of radical feminism, in 1970. Disillusioned and burned out by the fragmented infighting within the New York City radical feminist groups she’d helped to found, when her book hit the bestseller lists, Firestone decided against pursuing a career as a “professional feminist.” Instead, she returned to making visual art, the profession that she’d trained for. She wouldn’t publish anything again until Airless Spaces, in 1998.

Long before her first hospitalization for paranoid schizophrenia in 1987, Firestone had fallen off the grid and into precarity and poverty. For the next decade, she would move in and out of public psychiatric wards and institutions. Conceived as a series of vignettes about institutions and identity, Airless Spaces is a subtle and deeply literary work. Embedded as a participant-observer, Firestone moves beyond the spectacular and frightening surfaces of institutional life to record individual lives and acts of cruelty and kindness. The existence that she depicts is a microcosm of the world beyond.

After they raised her dose to 42 mg. of Trilafon, Lucy very nearly fainted. She felt a rush of bad sensation comparable to her mental telepathy when her grandmother died. ... But there was a good aspect to fainting too. As she was about to lose consciousness, she felt an overwhelming relief. The black velvety edges of the swoon. If only she could faint all the way, black out, and never wake up again ...

Introduction by Chris Kraus
Afterword by Susan Faludi

Ethical, pondering, and wondrous, adrienne maree brown’s Loving Corrections is a collection of love-based adjustments and reframes to grow our movements for liberation while navigating a society deeply fractured by greed, racism, and war. In this landmark book, brown invigorates her influential writing on belonging and accountability into the framework of “loving corrections”; a generative space where rehearsals for the revolution become the everyday norm in relating to one another. 

Filled with practical wisdom on how to be a trustworthy communicator while providing bold visions for a shared future, Loving Corrections can speak to everyone caught in the crossroads of our political challenges and potential. No matter how new to the struggle, or how numerous our failures, brown’s indispensable writing is an invitation to us all. Includes an afterword by Janine de Novais.

From the Palestinian struggle against Israeli Apartheid, to First Nations' mass campaigns against pipeline construction in North America, Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of some of the crucial struggles of our age. Rich with their unique histories, characteristics, and social relations, they are connected by the shared enemy they face: settler colonialism.

In this introduction, Sai Englert highlights the ways in which it has, and continues to shape our global economic and political order. From the rapacious accumulation of resources, land, and labour, through Indigenous dispossession and genocide, to the development of racism as a form of social control, settler colonialism is deeply connected to many of the social ills we continue to face today.

To understand settler colonialism as an ongoing process, is therefore also to start engaging with contemporary social movements and solidarity campaigns differently. It is to start seeing how distinct struggles for justice and liberation are intertwined.

Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.

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.