Tropical Reading - Photobook and Self-Publishing

An essay in the form of painting studies - including persons, dogs, a frog, a hoofed animal, fish, hare, trees and plants.

A complete documentation on a multimedia exhibition by Berlin-based artist Ixmucané Aguila, giving voice to voiceless descendants of victims of genocide in Namibia.

Genocide in Namibia is an especially sensitive matter—its history has at times been ignored, underestimated, or even denied outright. In the artistic documentary Fraitaxtsēs sores tsîn ge ra≠gâ – Ondjembo yo Null Vier, Ixmucané Aguilar has worked in close collaboration with Nama and OvaHerero people who vividly evoke memories and rituals of mourning caused by human loss and land dispossession under Imperial Germany's violent occupation.
From these personal encounters emerge portraits, visuals and narratives as documental fragments, consisting of living voices which insist on defending memory as an invocation to witness and never to remain passive in the face of social injustice. Rather than a linear collection of data referring to distant places and its distant past, this work engages with stories as chronicles calling to be recognised as pieces of humanity and time.

Alongside Aguilar's portraits, this publication also contains contributions by human rights attorney Wolfgang Kaleck and the curator of the work Tristan Pranyko, along with poetry by Namibian artists Nesindano Namises, Fritz Isak Dirkse and Prince Kamaazegi, and narratives, testimonies, chants and mourning rituals shared by OvaHerero and Nama people in present-day Namiba.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at National Art Gallery of Namibia, Windhoek, in 2023

Ixmucané Aguilar (born 1983) is a Guatemalan Berlin-based visual artist/designer who, through multi-layered documentary photography, engages in extensive field research to put out installations and art publications to relay her work in an artistic language.

The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog. 

Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang's trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an "odd girl" from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang's singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot's Fool, with a leap of faith.

The white cubical house, the vernacular architecture in the Aegean Archipelago, knows no author. Its capacity to resist harsh climatic and topographic circumstances has been improved and adjusted through time and seems today close to perfection. The white-washed Cycladic House has become iconic to the image of Greece through the construction of national and tourism narratives. What happens when an architect steps into this process of anonymous transmission of skills? In 1966 music composer, architect, and engineer Iannis Xenakis articulated a response to this tradition and designed, from his base in Paris, a holiday house on the island of Amorgos while choosing to remain absent throughout the construction process.

CONTENTS

Constructing through Absence
by Hulya Ertas

Meteorites
by Mâkhi Xenakis

Summer Home for François-Bernard Mâche by Iannis Xenakis, 1966–74
by Sharon Kanach

Villa Mâche: a harsh hijack against the space of the sun
by David Bergé

Traveling to the Cyclades: Modernist Projections
by Dimitra Kondylatou

Iannis Xenakis, Selected Projects from Critical Index
by Sven Sterken

Production of exhibitions and production of discourse on exhibitions.

With the paradigm of salon exhibitions, developed some three centuries ago, bourgeois art patrons were moved to transform their experience of an exhibition into words. This incitement to discourse persists as a central component of contemporary curatorial practice, within and beyond exhibitions as singular events. In On Discourse and the Curatorial, Mick Wilson draws out the link between the dual imperatives to generate discourse and to cultivate culture, which emerge in the genealogy of the salon, the exhibition complex, and the museum.

In the early 2010s, the idea of "the curatorial" arose after a short but intense debate about what it means to curate exhibitions. The books in the On the Curatorial series look at the consequences of that discussion today and ask: Do we need different curatorial tools to engage with deepening social, political, and ecological crises? The series allows earlier participants in the debate to reflect on how their concepts and practices have changed, while younger generations of curators explore the ongoing need for new conceptual approaches to curation.

The series is edited by Carolina Rito, who is professor of creative practice research at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities, Coventry University, UK, and executive editor of Contemporary Journal.

Mick Wilson is professor of art and director of doctoral studies at the University of Gothenburg and co-chair of the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary.