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Cover of Sensing Earth: Cultural Quests Across a Heated Globe

Valiz

Sensing Earth: Cultural Quests Across a Heated Globe

Philipp Dietachmair ed. , Pascal Gielen ed. , Georgia Nicolau ed.

€22.50

Sensing Earth states that our environmental issues are in the first place a matter of culture and aesthetics. Technology and science are not enough to solve these problems.

Our globe is facing an escalation of ecological problems, with no quick solutions in sight. We seem to be caught in a spiral of health issues, burnout, sensory overload, depression, and somatic deprivation. Artists faced with these crises are looking for ways to articulate the ongoing emergencies and explore possible ways out. However, the arts and culture are caught in a double bind. Artists and cultural initiatives need circulation to let ideas intersect and create meaningful connections. However, this globalized system also contributes to the planet’s ecological decline: by countless journeys from one biennale, international residency, touring exhibition and networking event to the next. After the Covid-19 pandemic ‘business as usual’ seems to prevail.

Sensing Earth includes essays, interviews, poetry, manifestos, choreographic prompts, speculative fiction, and case studies operating at the intersection of art and activism, culture and nature. All texts explore what sensorial foundations are necessary to address systemic failures, and what routes to take for keeping us moving on this planet, physically, emotionally and intellectually.

Contributors: Grégory Castéra, Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (Dalída Maria Benfield, Christopher Bratton, Luigi Coppola, Pelin Tan), Philipp Dietachmair, Futurefarmers, Pascal Gielen, Marina Guzzo, INLAND (Fernando García-Dory), Meander, Georgia Nicolau, Luciane Ramos Silva, Noel B. Salazar, Joy Mariama Smith, Naine Terena de Jesus, Dea Vidović, André Wilkens, Ana Žuvela

recommendations

Cover of We are not where we need to be, but we ain't where we were.

L’Amazone & Privilege

We are not where we need to be, but we ain't where we were.

Tiphanie Blanc, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and 1 more

We are not where we need to be but, we ain't where we were is the first volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against that reports on active research engaged within the artistic professions and institutions since 2017. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world, by orienting our object of study towards the struggles that impact it. With this publication, our hope is to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the visibilization of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It is the result of militant experiences, at the convergence of our individual experiences and collective questionings.

With texts by Tiphanie Blanc, Antonella Corsani, Fanny Lallart, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ramaya Tegegne and an interview with Outrage Collectif.

Cover of Empathic Intimacies: A Touch That You Can Really Feellllll

GenderFail

Empathic Intimacies: A Touch That You Can Really Feellllll

Be Oakley

Essays €16.00

Empathic Intimacies: A Touch That You Can Really Feellllll is two essays written 2 years apart (April 2020 and April 2022), published together to create a timeline between two points during the pandemic.

Cover of Theory of Water

Haymarket Books

Theory of Water

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Ecology €20.00

A genre-bending exploration of that most elemental force—water—through Indigenous storytelling, personal memory, and the work of influential artists and writers. 

For many years, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson took solace in skiing—in all kinds of weather, on all kinds of snow across all kinds of terrain, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home. Recently, as she skied on this path against the backdrop of uncertainty, environmental devastation, rising authoritarianism and ongoing social injustice, her mind turned to the water in the creek and an elemental question: What might it mean to truly listen to water? To know water? To exist with and alongside water?

So began a quest to understand her people's historical, cultural, and ongoing interactions with water in all its forms (ice, snow, rain, perspiration, breath). Pulling together these threads, Leanne began to see how a "Theory of Water" might suggest a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today. In this inventive work, Simpson draws on Nishnaabeg origin stories while artfully weaving the work of influential writers and artists alongside her personal memories and experience—and in doing so, reimagines water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world.

Theory of Water is a resonant exploration of an intricate, multi-layered relationship with the most abundant element on our planet—one that, as Simpson eloquently shows, is shaping our present even as it demands a radical rethinking of how we might achieve a just future.

Cover of How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts

Kayfa ta

How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts

Iman Mersal

Fiction €10.00

In How to Mend: On Motherhood and its Ghosts, Kayfa ta’s 4th monograph, Iman Mersal navigates a long and winding road, from the only surviving picture of the author has with her mother, to a deep search through what memory, photography, dreams and writing, a search of what is lost between the mainstream and more personal representations of motherhood and its struggles. How to mend the gap between the representation and the real, the photograph and its subject, the self and the other, the mother and her child. 

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet and associate professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Studies in the University of Alberta, Canada.

Text: Iman Mersal
Editors: Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis
Translated from Arabic by Robin Moger
Co-publishers: Kayfa ta and Sternberg Press
Design: Julie Peeters
Size: 9.6 x 14.8 cm
Pages: 168 pages, Soft cover

Cover of Protoplasmic Flow

Samara Editions

Protoplasmic Flow

Jenna Sutela

Performance €27.00

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.