Books

Elizabeth Povinelli's anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. In these essays, she considers the emergence of new worlds and the extinguishment of old ones, seeking to develop a social imaginary that can sustain radical potentiality without turning a blind eye to our deep interdependence.

“Today is the day with the letter,” Celan writes to Bachmann on October 30, 1957. Theadora Walsh’s essay-poem, The Almond concerns, for I hesitate to write “about” or “is in relation to”, the love between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Two Austrian writers flung across Europe by the atrocities of the Holocaust, excavating the narrows of a language not theirs, or taken from them. An almond is the closest two people can be, and becomes the binding structural conceit of the book, two segments reaching across the blank page to each other, across history, time and language.

The poet, the unknown being… a loony, a dreamer, a hermit. The poet writes poetry… but really, what is poetry? Arts, politics, mere amusement?

This little book is an insight into the mindset of someone who just can’t help but to be a poet. It is a manifesto for the freedom of thought and expression, an essential source of motivation and inspiration for readers and writers alike.

Anisur Rahman (b.1978) made his poetic debut in 2003. As a journalist, translator and playwright he has further contemplated the poetic mind. Born in Bangladesh, he writes in both Bengali and English, but nowadays lives exiled in Sweden.

There is no pause without prior exertion, and this issue of the magazine explores rest and all its associated contexts and contradictions. Amidst increasing environmental pollution, a tenuous global political climate, and a performance-oriented society demanding ever greater productivity, the balance between rest and labour becomes skewed. Pausing carries the risk of falling behind, but this risk can be mitigated by knowing when to rest. This issue examines rest as activity and as resistance. It questions how the individual body, in cohesion with a community, can generate weight through relaxation and distribute it. 

Contributors: Asma Ben Slama, Camila Cañeque, Christiane Blattmann, Eileen Myles, Federico Tosi, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Hanne Loreck, Hans-Christian Dany, Hyemin Yang, Ingrid Jäger, Jenni Bohn, Jochen Lempert, Julia Schulze Darup, Mariona Berenguer, Matthias Schubert, Mikołaj Sobczak, Mirene Arsanios, Nat Raha, Nicholas Grafia, Niclas Riepshoff, Omar Hahad, Sarah Drath, Stacy Skolnik, Thomas Laprade, Vir Andres Hera

Within the format of a magazine, each page of Pfeil represents the floor, walls, or ceiling which together create an imagined room displaying a printed exhibition. Each issue is dedicated to a specific word, and artists are invited and given space to work on and with this term, and to construct or deconstruct the architecture around it. Combined, the contributions transform into an organic display surrounding the leitmotif.

13 poems of various length.

"I have used a procedure to write them and I am happy to share it, but it isn't what's most important about these poems. The subject matter that, I eventually realised, they share to the extent of justifying bundling them up in one pamphlet is religiosity, what stands between belief and act, be it faith or trust."

A transdisciplinary investigation and a choreographic performance, between Umeå and Oslo, about ecological grief, cultural panic, and a feeling of collapse.

How to Die – Inopiné is a performance and a practice. It thinks through, in an embodied manner, the prevailing contemporary moods of ecological grief, cultural panic, and collapse. As a performance in a theater or outdoors, an audience encounters five dancers who are constantly building, unbuilding, and rebuilding. Afterwards, stories are told around a bonfire. As a practice in the studio, school, or street, a group of dancers, artists, writers, and architects meet for a year of residencies between Oslo and Umeå. They host a working process and encounter external informants. The goal is to displace oneself into the unexpected. This publication, two years in the making, engages with the challenges of translating a choreographic process into the space of a book. It both documents the project's development as well as offering the reader-doer different modes of thinking-doing, from somatic practices to proposals for a curriculum. Experiments in writing, mapping, and moving are played with, all engaging with the question, "what is the future of displaced thinking?"

Published following the series of eponymous events held in Umeå, Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Reykjavik in 2019-2020.

Contributions by Harald Becharie, Mia Habib, Jassem Hindi, Asher Lev, Marie Kraft Selze, Namik Mačkić, Ingeborg Olerud, Anna Pehrsson, Ashkan Sepahvand, Nina Wollny.

EcoRove’s Land Keepers Reader brings together writers, activists, journalists, farmers, and ecologists from across Bilad al-Sham — Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine — to tell stories of green resistance in the Jabal al-Sheikh ecological zone. Spanning South Lebanon, the occupied Jawlan, and the occupied Galilee, this landscape faces ongoing ecocide, defined as the deliberate destruction of land and ecologies used by the settler-colonial regime to erode livelihoods, cultures, and environments. The Reader highlights these struggles through essays, research and testimonies that show how native communities remain rooted in place, resisting colonial environmental orientalism, greenwashing, and scorched-earth tactics. As part of a wider body of work that includes a documentary film, tapestries, and sculptural pieces, the Reader amplifies indigenous ecological knowledge and envisions regenerative futures for threatened landscapes.

with contributions by Mahdi Sabbagh, Hamza Hamouchene, Public Works, Hussein Chaabane, Hisham Younes, Nadine El-Khoury, Michelle Eid, and Munira Khayyat

From the intro by Ecorove:
"Return, Al’Awda in Arabic, signals the right of return to homeland, a central tenet of the Palestinian struggle. Al’Awda affirms the fundamental historical, legal, collective, and individual right of Palestinians to return to their homeland. But how do we return to the earth after it has been damaged and scorched? In landscapes marked by war, ruins, rubbles, and ecological destruction, can Al’Awda take another form? Can generations of Palestinian diaspora exercise Al’Awda differently? At a time when international legal systems and institutions have failed to secure justice, can return to land be understood beyond legal definitions alone? In times of mass displacement and ecological devastation, Al’Awda may therefore exceed juridical meaning, and live through those who remain on the land and their acts of love, labour, and agriculture."

Each book comes with a 2-color, double-sided risograph-printed bookmark.
Ecorove is Iyad Abou Gaida and Jumanah Abbas.

Cult novelist Dennis Cooper launches the third title of Little House on the Bowery, the Akashic series he is editing and promoting. 

Grab Bag is comprised of two interrelated novels, Dark Rides and Wish Book, from one of Canada’s most important young writers. Both books are set in the same small rural city, in different eras (1950s, 1930s), each characterized by McCormack’s spare and elliptical prose.

In the long interview that forms the body of this publication, Éliane Radigue talks about her work, her reflections and underlying research, as well as her historical context. The publication also contains a commented list of works and Radigue's programmatic text on The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal.

New expanded edition of the book first published in 2019.

Éliane Radigue (born 1932 in Paris) is considered one of the most innovative and influential contemporary composers, from her early electronic music through to her acoustic work of the last fifteen years. Influenced by musique concrète and shaped by regular sojourns in the United States, where she discovered analogue synthesisers, her work unfolds an intensity which is at once subtle and monumental. Through her deep reflections on sound and listening, not only her music but also her working methods have come to shape a widely resonating set of new parameters for working with sound as musical material.

Julia Eckhardt is a musician and curator in the field of the sound arts. She is a founding member and artistic director of Q-O2 workspace in Brussels, for which she conceptualized various thematic research projects. As a performer of composed and improvised music she has collaborated with numerous artists, and extensively with Eliane Radigue. She has performed internationally, and released a number of recordings. She has been lecturing about topics such as sound, gender and public space, and is (co-)author of The Second Sound, Conversation on Gender and Music, Grounds for Possible Music, and The Middle Matter, Sound as Interstice.

Edited by Julia Eckhardt.
Texts by Éliane Radigue and Julia Eckhardt.

This volume brings together 50 years of correspondence from the archive of de Appel contemporary arts centre in Amsterdam. In tracing a relational and affective history of the institution, each piece offers a glimpse into the artistic projects and programmes de Appel has commissioned and championed; the cultural shifts and careers it has nurtured; the celebrations and struggles it has weathered; and the collaborations and friendships sparked along the way. The book gathers materials from more than 100 voices, with paper and digital exchanges covering an intricate web of people, places, and events, ultimately coalescing into what can be perceived as the unified work of an institution.

Includes a light-blue satin Ribbon by Alison Knowles.

Sustaining the Otherwise is a collaborative research and artistic project about restitution, reparation and transformation taking place in multiple locations over several years. Initiated and conceptualized by researchers and curators Amal Alhaag & Selene Wendt, it offers a space for artists, activists, scholars and writers to be in dialogue and to explore the topic of restitution in relation to both material and immaterial culture, through a program that frames restitution within the context of contemporary art practice.

Edited by Amal Alhaag & Selene Wendt

Featuring an introduction by Amal Alhaag & Selene Wendt as well as provocations, reflections, and essays by Barby Asante, Michael Barrett, Quinsy Gario, Sana Ginwalla, Aude Christel Mgba, Lennon Mhsishi, Ogutu Muraya, in addition to a sonic contribution by Robert Machiri. 

Le Collectif Occasionnel a organisé en Suisse deux expositions qui présentaient les oeuvres de personnes à la fois artistes et travailleureuses du sexe. Cet ouvrage prolonge leur travail en proposant des textes et des entretiens avec des Tds ou des alliéxes. Permettant l’auto-représentation des personnes interrogées, les entretiens mettent en lumière la pluralité des pratique du travail du sexe, mais aussi l’importance de construire des solidarités travailleuses, des outils pour défaire les stigmates et des perspectives de luttes intersectionnelles.

What does it mean to drill deep and interfere with the configuration of tectonic plates? What does it mean to hollow out and alienate islandic undergrounds? How is wealth extracted and exploited from the ground, crumbled into fragments, transformed into matter, pieces of power, moved away to be represented elsewhere? Whose lungs and souls are capitalized upon and hidden under the suffocating dust in mining shafts? To whom do the surface of the land and its underground belong?

This book takes proto-industrial mining in the Aegean island of Serifos as an entry point for disclosing historical and contemporary consequences of politics of the soil through land extraction, and looks at how mineral evidence was historically produced, disseminated, and capitalized upon in the Aegean region and beyond.

Contents:

Mineral Travels:
Fragments of Geographies on the Move
by Lydia Xynogala

The Evil in the Surface
by Lorena Vicini

Consuming Land at Serifos
by Asli Özdoyuran
and David Bergé

Letter from Frikas Fortress
by Constantinos Speras

Iron Lungs
by Milica Ivic

Walking on Marble: Materialized Histories
by Anna Run Tryggvadottir

This most substantive monograph yet published on the work of German-born, New York–based multimedia artist Andrea Geyer focuses on her recent explorations of the marginalized yet pivotal role that women have played in the formulation of American modernism, tracing and honoring the ephemeral acts, initiatives, and stories that shaped it. Featuring full-color images of Geyer’s artworks and research materials, including documents, found photographs, and previously unpublished photographs by the artist, Dance in a Future with All Present offers insight into Geyer’s art and the multiple histories of modernism.

Includes texts by Matthew Jeffrey Abrams, Andrianna Campbell, Juli Carson, Barbara Clausen, Lynne Cooke, Dean Daderko, Saisha Grayson, Sharon Hayes, Megan Heuer, Danielle A. Jackson, Alhena Katsof, Kristan Kennedy, Thomas J. Lax, Ralph Lemon, André Lepecki, Renate Lorenz, Josiah McElheny, Fred Moten, Kristin Poor, Yvonne Rainer, Gabriela Rangel, Jeannine Tang, and Soyoung Yoon.

Copublished with Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in 2019.
Edited by Alhena Katsof, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schroeder. 
Design by Dante Carlos.

Movement Research announces Issue 52/53 of its print publication, the Movement Research Performance Journal. For this issue, Sovereign Movements: Native Dance and Performance, guest editor, choreographer Rosy Simas invited writer, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, to work with her. Together they assembled contributors from Native and Indigenous communities to reflect upon their practices, the historical conditions out of which they operate as well as movement, performance, and choreography as a socio-political project. Just as it is important for physical institutions to acknowledge that they sit upon occupied land of Native and Indigenous people, so too must institutions of history, practice, and epistemology acknowledge their occupation of knowledge and memory.

Throughout this issue, dance and movement is posited as a powerful strategy against settler-colonial mindsets and as an effective tool against erasure of Native and Indigenous cultural traditions. These pages discuss the importance of Native sovereignty and analyze various histories of resistance to settler-colonialism. Artists in the issue propose alternative artistic models to probe the roles of art and artists in society towards a more expansive constellation that fundamentally critiques the Western reward system in culture as well as the often celebrated cult of authorship.

What words made this world of captivity and extinction? If written language is a biological adaptation, how can a text reshape the environment? These are the questions at the heart of Grammar of the Cage, a startling first collection of poetry by Pam Ore. The Compulsive Reader calls Ore "a poet of great promise," and poet Eloise Klein Healy says she has found Ore's book "haunting but necessary...a stunning debut collection."

Grammar of the Cage is clean and heartbreaking as a bone, and yet, as poet Ingrid Wendt writes in her Introduction, "[like] Emily Dickinson, Ore's 'business' is 'to sing.' And sing she does."

Edited and selected by the brilliant Leo Boix and with poems in Spanish and English from across Latin America. There’s more than 30 poets featured, covering poems about what it is to be queer in contemporary Latin America. These poems cover gender, sexuality, politics, nature, and everything in between.

The acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' Love Song to the Nation, All About Love is a revelation about what causes a polarized society and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces.

"The word 'love' is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb," writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness—not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society's failure to provide a model for learning to love.

As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question "What is love?" her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the "100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life." All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better.

Since the 1970s, Cynthia Hawkins has investigated the potentials of abstract painting. While often beginning a work or series with a predetermined concept or strategy, Hawkins’s process-oriented practice simultaneously embraces the improvisational to create a systemized space for her continually evolving vocabulary. From 1979 to 1981, important early years in the elaboration of her work, Hawkins documented these developments in a journal. A record of routine and the everyday, the journal also gathers sketches, notes for new and in-progress works, and responses to contemporary art and criticism, bringing the artist’s process, experimentation, and reflections on materials, formalism, abstraction, and figuration into relief. 

Art Notes, Art also offers a picture of the burgeoning Black-owned gallery scene in 1970s and ‘80s New York that Hawkins was an important participant in—including Cinque Gallery, Kenkeleba Gallery, and Just Above Midtown, where she had her first solo exhibition in 1981–as well as the women artists’ circle she was an active member of, which hosted weekly shares, critiques, exchange, and amplification of each others’ work. An important glimpse into Hawkins’s creative process and artistic community, Art Notes, Art is richly illustrated with works by the artist produced during this key period–some of which are now lost–photographs and ephemera, and a visual archive of contemporaneous work by her peers.

Editor: Ananth Shastri
Managing Editor: Rachel Valinsky

A layered and polyphonic investigation that, setting out from the Orobic Alpine territory in Northern Italy, explores the mountainside not merely as a natural backdrop but as an epistemological lens through which to understand and rethink the contemporary world.

The book originated as an online magazine and an expansion of the biennial program Thinking Like a Mountain (2024–25), a project inspired by Aldo Leopold's exhortation to abandon an anthropocentric gaze in favor of a geological outlook on the peaks, thereby acknowledging the intrinsic value of every natural element. An Orobic Journey developed independently from the exhibition program and is not limited to mere documentation; instead, it functions as a parallel research tool articulated through essays, conversations, and visual documentation, featuring contributions from artists, scientists, researchers, anthropologists, ornithologists, curators, academics, architects, writers, and other experts. 

Embracing Ursula K. Le Guin's "carrier bag theory," An Orobic Journey brings together non-heroic tales of resistance, adaptation, and cohabitation. The book opens with a reflection on species migration and "migratory restlessness": a condition that does not only concern the spontaneous return of wolves to the Alps or the transit of birdlife, but becomes a metaphor for a shared condition of continuous movement and searching. The future of the mountain—amid tourist monocultures and acts of transformative care—is investigated by conceiving the Alpine landscape as a political space shaped by power relations, images, and collective memories, and inhabited by multispecies communities that dwell in a place, weaving intergenerational relationships. With both a poetic and political approach, An Orobic Journey attempts to rethink ways of looking at the mountain landscape while imagining new collective rituals.

Five dance pieces and an iconographic imaginary in convulsion: making the most of these ingredients, Alexandra Balona engages with the work of Cabo Verdean choreographer and dancer Marlene Monteiro Freitas.

This book offers a lens onto the dazzling oeuvre of a choreographer whose boldness shakes the foundations of every theater she enters. It centers on five emblematic works: Guintche (2010), Paradise—Private Collection (2012), Jaguar (2015), Bacchae—Prelude to a Purge (2017), and Mal—Embriaguez Divina (2020). It follows Monteiro Freitas's creative methodology, weaving references from her personal archive together with works from art history, navigating between ideas and possibilities in the manner of an atlas bearing the weight of the world. From wonder emerges a mode of attentive reading; one capable of observing and, out of fragments, revealing the methods, processes, and mechanisms of art. The texts in this book are "small critical machines for reading the unreadable."

Troubling the Stage: The Choreographic Work of Marlene Monteiro Freitas is both a study and an encounter; a powerful crossing of choreography with critical thought. It invites readers, scholars, and audiences alike to experience the intensity, violence, joy, and humanity of one of today's most uncompromising choreographic voices.

In 1971, the great Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus (1944-2007) published a single issue of an English-language literary anthology that he called Tigris. The magazine—a whisper on the literary landscape that appeared three years after Boulus’s arrival in the US—brings together work by Boulus and several of his literary friends, in translation by Boulus and Etel Adnan.

Tigris was not an end in itself, but rather a temporary solution to the lifelong problem of how to devote oneself to poetry across different countries, eras, and styles: how to live poetry. Yet, in so doing, the small anthology includes significant work: Etel Adnan’s “Jebu,” translated by Adnan, and poetry by Boulus, Fouad Rifkah, Yusuf al-Khal, Mouayad al-Rawi, and Riadh Fakhouri, all in Boulus’s translations, as well as a work by Ankido, a “street-activist poet-café worker of importance to the Palestinian Liberation Movement.”

In Dodie Bellamy's imagined "sequel" to Bram Stoker's fin de siècle masterpiece Dracula, Van Helsing's plain Jane secretarial adjunct, Mina Harker, is recast as a sexual, independent woman living in San Francisco in the 1980s. The vampire Mina Harker, who possesses the body of author Dodie Bellamy, confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four vastly different men through past letters. Simultaneously, a plague is let loose in San Francisco-the plague of AIDS.

Bigger-than-life, half goddess, half Bette Davis, Mina sends letter after letter to friends and co-conspirators, holding her reader captive through a display of illusion and longing. Juggling quivering vulnerability on one hand and gossip on the other, Mina spoofs and consumes and spews back up demented reembodiments of trash media and high theory alike. It's all fodder for her ravenous libido and "a messy ambiguous place where pathology meets pleasure." Sensuous and captivating, The Letters of Mina Harker describes one woman's struggles finding the right words to explain her desires and fears without confining herself to one identity.

“Sketchbook 1-10” with Antoinette d’Ansembourg bundles a complete collection of pocket sketches created between 2020 and 2023, stretched across ten different notebooks. These sketches, despite their two-dimensionality, form the mainstay of her sculptural output, offering a glimpse into the intimate process behind her stately installations.