Where Do You Draw The Line Between Art and Politics

ROT is a publication reflecting the research “Wicked technology/Wild fermentation,” by Sara Manente that focuses on forms and practice of fermentation as ways to rethink bodies and their making. This glossy magazine performs research, aiming to infect the reader, and questioning how to spread, publish, and help the work survive. 

Sara Manente is a performance artist, dance maker and researcher born in Italy and living in Brussels. She is interested in narrowing the distance between the performer, the audience, and the work. Her research starts from a dance practice that problematizes perception, translation, and ways of doing. Her work comes out in hybrid forms: book launch, 3Dfilm, written text, interview, choreographic piece, workshop, telepathic experience, collaboration, et al.

FORMS OF LIFE OF FORMS brings artistic research into form – not merely as an aesthetic question but as a social and political one. Indeed, there are no politics without form! With Forms of Life, Rob Ritzen curated several “Moments” that assembled works, collective readings, and other references into a single installation. This publication reshuffles documentation of these “Moments” as a visual reflection of the trajectory of this research.

Rob Ritzen works as a curator with a background in philosophy. His curatorial practice is focusing on self-organized and cooperative formats. Consciously positioned at the margins of established institutions and outside of market-oriented spaces, his practice is placed in close association with communities of cultural practitioners. His initiatives are attempts to reconfigure the politics of making art and alternative forms of production and presentation.

BEAUTY KIT – AN ECO-EROGENOUS ART PROJECT by Isabel Burr Raty with contributions by Kristin Rogghe, Elke Van Campenhout, Gosie Vervloessem, Pablo Diartinez and Tim Vets, is an experimental catalog summarizing Isabel Burr Raty’s research on conceptualizing and manufacturing eco-erogenous para-pharmaceutical products. It tells the story of the BKFF, a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their orgasmic juices to produce beauty bio-products, used for treatments in the BK Spa, critically discussed in the BK Focus Group and moving forward into becoming a village, where every-body harvests each other. The catalog comes with contributing text, “Harvesting bodies – The Farm as Paradox” by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout, and other reflections on the project.

Isabel Burr Raty is a Belgian-Chilean artist, filmmaker, and Media Art History teacher in ERG (École de Recherche Graphique), living between Brussels and Amsterdam. She is currently developing her second feature film, about the colonial impact on Easter Island, and creating live art and new media installations that queer production understandings, such as the Beauty Kit Project. Her works have been shown internationally.

An anthology of text and graphic scores to be used while walking, from Fluxus to the critical works of current artists, through the tradition of experimental musicand performance, gathered and presented by Elena Biserna.

Walking from Scores is a hundred or so collection of non site-specific protocols, instructions and textual and graphic scores centred on walking, listening and playing sound in urban environment. It explores the relationship between art and the everyday, the dynamics of sound and listening in various environments and the (porous) frontiers between artists and audiences. It starts with two premises: an interest in walking envisaged as a relational practice and tactic enabling us to read and rewrite space; an interpretation of scores understood as open invitations and catalysers of action in the tradition of Fluxus event scores.

With scores and texts by Peter Ablinger, Milan Adamčiak, G. Douglas Barrett, Elena Biserna, Blank Noise, George Brecht, Cornelius Cardew, Stephen Chase, Giuseppe Chiari, Seth Cluett, Philip Corner, Viv Corringham, Bill Dietz, Amy Dignam, David Dunn, Haytham El-Wardany, Esther Ferrer, Simone Forti, Francesco Gagliardi, Jérôme Giller, Oliver Ginger, Anna & Lawrence Halprin, David Helbich, Dick Higgins, Christopher Hobbs, Jérôme Joy, katrinem, Debbie Kent, Bengt af Klintberg, James Klopfleisch, Milan Knížák, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Jirí Kovanda, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Bob Lens, Ligia Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Walter Marchetti, Larry Miller, iLAND/Jennifer Monson, Max Neuhaus, Alisa Oleva, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Open City & Emma Cocker, Nam June Paik, Michael Parsons, Ben Patterson, Cesare Pietroiusti, Mathias Poisson, Anna Raimondo, Pheobe riley Law, Jez riley French, Paul Sharits, Mieko Shiomi, Mark So, Standards, Nicolas Tardy, Davide Tidoni, Ultra-red, Isolde Venrooy, Carole Weber, Manfred Werder, Franziska Windisch, Ben Vautier, La Monte Young.

Elena Biserna is a scholar and independent curator based in Marseille, France. She is associate researcher at PRI SM (AMU / CNRS) and TEAMeD (Université Paris 8). Her interests are focused on listening and on contextual, "situated" art practices in relationship with urban dynamics, sociocultural processes, the public and political sphere. Her writings have appeared in several publications. As a curator, she has collaborated with different organisations and presented her projects internationally.

Peter Downsbrough (New Jersey, US, 1940) lives and works in Brussels (Belgium). Associated with major international art movements such as minimal art, conceptual art, and visual poetry, his work spans across various mediums including sculpture, wall pieces and room pieces, books, work on paper, photography, film, and video. The work, which has affinities with architecture and typography, explores the traditional use of space and language, while criticizing power structures, e.g. urbanism, that influence social interactions and shape the landscape.

A special edition issue curated, designed and published by AVARIE, Paris and Labor Neunzehn, Berlin. It accompanies KAMERA SERIES, while it is an independent and valuable object to collect.

The central idea that informs and directs the booklets’ montage is the interplay between the concepts of addition and subtraction. This is achieved by unveiling a missing image in the screening or an unreleased second from an artist's film, expanded to 24 pages. Additionally, each booklet contains a piece directly removed from the show.

The editing establishes a dialogue between film frames and performed writings derived from texts, scripts, storyboards, and notes. The KAMERA exhibition is consequently extended into a physical space—the book—allowing for its widespread dissemination, complementing and contrasting with its potential online occurrence.

KAMERA SERIES is a screening program of experimental films, video art works and printed matter taking place in a former GDR building in Berlin. Each event showcases a retrospective of selected films by an artist and a small exhibition of his/her publications or works on paper over a span of 4 days.

"Cet ouvrage est un magazine participatif regroupant les oeuvres de 48 artistes autour d'un thème commun, l'artefact. Vertige du passé ou projection contemporaine, l'artefact nous parle. Il raconte les cultures, en façonne le souvenir et promet ainsi un voyage à travers les créations humaines. Ce sont ces témoignages tangibles de l'existence que nous souhaitons vous offrir grâce aux interprétations captivantes de l'artefact. Chaque page de ce nouveau numéro est une invitation à plonger dans les méandres de l'histoire ou de la fiction, à explorer les différentes strates de l'humanité à travers le primes de ses réalisations matérielles."

Alexandre Daram, Alice Royer, Audrey Poujoula, Audrey Ramos, Basile, Bordel j’ai glissé, Cel, Charlie Udave, Collectif IPN, Elliott Sanchez, Emilia Pesty, Marie Derrien, Fils Kurylak, Flora Rushiti, Hélène Berlemon, Inès Day, Julie Plantefeve, Kaspar kaspar.wtf, Kawani DS, Kiara Patry, Laura Zanti, Lauriane Rolo, Le Bayou Club Graphique, Lea Canovas, Lili Archer, Lily Terrible, Lisa Dehove, Lola Marty, Louis Kervel, Lutine Cabarrou, Maeva Iorio, Maké, Martin Régnier, Maxoy, Meuneurol, Nathanael Brelin, Nurzen & Jack Montaly, Oscar, Pierre Touron, Ptit Lylou, Rachel Roland, Rose Meybeck, Sarah Josserand, Theo Grandchamp. 

The artist book Amanda is greatly inspired by “Tradeswomen” quarterly magazine for women in blue-collar work, published in the 1980’s and 1990’s in the United States. Amanda is similarly thought as a periodical dealing with the subjects of technology and industry from a feminist (not solely female) angle. The first issue contains fiction stories of an emancipatory character, citing trade associations, oil industry in Iran and ghosts of the printer feeders.

The publication is made in the framework of The Building Institute, an experimental organisation aiming to strengthen the position of femmes builders in the domain of technical construction work. Amanda brings together literary texts by Maria Toumazou, Samantha McCulloch, Sepideh Karami and Madeleine Morley, combining fiction stories with visual artwork. 

Olga Micińska is a visual artist currently living in Amsterdam. Graduated from the MA Art Praxis program at the Dutch Art Institute and holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Also trained as a woodworker, collaborates with craft studios of various domains. Recently she has initiated The Building Institute.

The Building Institute (TBI) is an experimental platform aiming to emancipate the undermined knowledges dwelling in the craft domains, and to unpack diverse questions related to technology and the means of production. TBI combines art’s speculative competences with the grounded practice of manual labor, manifesting its objectives through educational activities, exhibitions, and publications.

One of America's most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United State.  

Since the book was written, the carceral system in the US has seen unprecedented growth, with more of America's black population behind bars than ever before. The scathing analysis of the role of prison and the policing of black populations offered by Davis and her comrades in this astonishing volume remains as pertinent today as the day it was first published.  

Featuring contributions from George Jackson, Bettina Aptheker, Bobby Seale, James Baldwin, Ruchell Magee, Julian Bond, Huey P. Newton, Erika Huggins, Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and others.