A proposition opened up by Umashankar Manthravadi in his practice as an acoustic archaeologist, bringing together writers, choreographers, composers, actors, dancers, musicians, field recordists and sound, light, and graphic designers who engage and transform each other's work.

The life and work of Umashankar Manthravadi is a history of sound and technology through the second half of the 20th century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he has been building ambisonic microphones since the 1990s to measure the acoustic properties of premodern performance spaces.

The publication An Archaeology of Listening accompanies the exhibition A Slightly Curving Place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2020, and together they respond to the proposition in Manthravadi's practice that we can't just look for theaters in landscapes of the past—we must listen for them. Including scripts, scores, conversations, and essays, the publication considers its own format in relation to the notion of writing as the first sound-recording device.
This book was conceived in relation to the programme Coming to Know, accompanying the exhibition A Slightly Curving Place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2020. It is the first in a series of volumes titled An Archaeology of Listening.

Umashankar Manthravadi is an Indian self-taught acoustic archaeologist, sound technician, sound recordist, journalist and poet. In the early 1980s, Manthravadi helped set up and maintain one of the world's largest ethnomusicology archives, Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE) in Gurgaon. As part of the artist collective Umashankar and the Earchaeologists (with Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Nida Ghouse) he investigates how sound can influence our understanding of ancient and contemporary sites. He developed ambisonic technology to document the acoustic properties of archaeological sites in India, examining in particular social forms and their actualization in performance and sound.

Premodern acoustic traces as the basis for new communities of thought in the present (a project responding to the work of the self-taught acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi).

Coming to Know asks how listening to the past together might transform our sense of the knowledge held in common. It sets aside the visual techniques of the archaeological site, the museum, and the larger project of colonial modernity, and instead constitutes itself as a resonant structure—a future-oriented monument to historically situated listening bodies as well as a dwelling place for community now.

This book was conceived in relation to the programme Coming to Know, accompanying the exhibition A Slightly Curving Place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2020. It is the second in a series of volumes titled An Archaeology of Listening.

Contributions by Tanvi Solanki, Mark Payne, Annie Goh, Uzma Z. Rizvi, Annette Wilke, Andrew Ollett, Anurima Banerji, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Phiroze Vasunia...

Conversations and essays that question the twisted and oppressive climate in a world where true decolonization has yet to begin.

New nationalisms, toxic patriotisms and systems of exclusion have been on the rise for the last decade, reinforced by technology and rooted in colonialism, slavery and class oppression. Our time offers a unique twist on these age-old structures: rhetorics of decolonization are now weaponized by autocratic regimes, just as they are normalized in the phantasmagoria of cultural practices. It is this paradoxical and entangled situation that we, perhaps somewhat emotionally, started to refer to as "perverse decolonization." This book is the result of a (self-)critical project of discussions, workshops, exhibitions and meetings in Cologne, Poland, Israel, Hong Kong and Chicago. Its conversations and essays question the twisted and oppressive climate in a world where true decolonization has yet to begin.

Contributions by Avital Barak, Saddie Choua, Cosmin Costinaş, Ekaterina Degot, Natasha Ginwala, Andrzej Leder, Georgy Mamedov, Walter Benn Michaels, Joanna Rajkowska, David Riff, Aneta Rostkowska, Joshua Simon, Jan Sowa, Hito Steyerl, Mark Terkessidis, Mi You.

Published in February 2022
English edition
15 x 21 cm (softcover)
164 pages

An extensive and comprehensive polyphonic exploration of the work of The Otolith Group, coming at a pivotal point in their practice.

The work of this London-based artist's collective comprised of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun covers politics of race and diversity and incorporates film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face. 

Presenting all bodies of work contained in the Xenogenesis exhibition, this publication includes many materials and graphics from The Otolith Group's broader practice, including performance, lecture and research material. The outcome of over four years of collaboration, research and conversation, the publication is not a chronological exhibition catalogue or retrospective but a cross-section of their work which includes substantial contributions from the artists themselves, in the form of writing and direct engagement with its production.

The publication also brings together important thinkers, scholars, art historians and writers from disparate fields, who know and have worked with the group, as well as those who are writing from a contemporary perspective. They include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Annie Fletcher, Anselm Franke, Shanay Jhaveri, George E. Lewis, Mahan Moalemi, Fred Moten, Grant Watson, Vivian Ziherl and the late Mark Fisher each of whom reflect on a particular aspect of the Group's practice with supplementary materials such as archival images, documented conversations, early lecture performances as well as other accompanying texts and examinations of their research sites.

An in-depth research project by Elena Mazzi in dialogue with the Mapuche spiritual leader, silversmith and activist, Mauro Millán and Argentinean artist, Eduardo Molinari, about the cultural resistance of the Mapuche people to neo-colonialism in Chile.

Curated by Emanuele Guidi, is promoted by ar/ge kunst Bolzano, and supported by the Italian Council (7th Edition, 2019)–Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture, Silver Rights focuses on the ancestral bond between the communities and the land (mapu), a bond eroded and denied by colonising forces that have mutated over the centuries to gradually establish themselves in recent decades through neo-extractivist practices; a settlement process resulting from the convergence of investment policies and commercial agreements between South American governments and foreign multinationals, including the Italian Benetton.

More specifically, the project responds to the narrative proposed by the Leleque Museum, an anthropological museum opened in 2000 in the very lands owned by Benetton; an ambiguous operation that dismisses the Mapuche people as an extinct culture rather than one that is alive and active in the disputed territory, 'musealising' their memory and material culture. Elena Mazzi addresses this complexity by engaging in dialogue with the dense network of relations that the Mapuche community has been consciously weaving for years; a way of understanding the art of diplomacy that, on the one hand, implies building and maintaining international relations between different political and cultural subjects, and, on the other, is implemented in their cosmovisions as a form of radical mediation between land, human and 'more than human' beings.

Contributions by Leandro Martínez Depietri, Riccardo Bottazzo, Enrica Camporesi, Emanuele Guidi, Elena Mazzi, Mauro Millán, Eduardo Molinari, Ana Margarita Ramos, Ya Basta! Êdî Bese!

published in September 2021
 
trilingual edition (English / Spanish / Italian)

This reader is a culmination of direct and tangential deliberations on notions of labour, appreciated across geographies and mediums. Newly commissioned textual manifestations in a multilogue with historical positions.

The reader could be perceived as a negotiation of positions, as the strive towards utterances, towards becoming. Each text could be imagined as a stanza in a song. This is also a strive towards musicality. Or at least a wish for this reader to be a choir, in which we collectively sing, in which we all listen to each other to be able to sing, but most importantly, in which we afford ourselves the privilege of 'hearing the eloquence of silence', 'seeing the inner vision beneath the closed eyes' and 'listening to the chastity of inner music that defies betrayal by the wayward wind.'

Edited by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Ibrahim Cissé with Antonia Alampi, Amal Alhaag, Zippora Elders, Krista Jantowski, Aude Christel Mgba.

Contributions by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Panashe Chigumadzi, Maurizio Lazzarato, Danielle Child, Anne Moraa, Philomena Essed, Djuwa Mroivili, Anivia Beylard, Jana Keijdener, Iheb Guermazi, Alia Mossallam, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Simone Atangana Bekono, Lionel Manga, Kodwo Eshun, Amal Alhaag, Precious Colette Kemigisha, Guy Ossito Midiohouan, Akila Richards, Mwazulu Diyabanza, Ibrahim Cissé, Léon-Gontran Damas

Graphic design: Leon Lukas Plum / Werkplaats Typografie.

Published in August 2021
Bilingual edition (English / Dutch)

Electric Brine is a volume of poetry and critical essays by women voices from diverse fields such as literature, geography, media studies, history of life sciences, sociology, and poetics of science and fiction, each of them central to the independent curatorial research entity The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO, 2014-ongoing) and its associated online study group Matter in Flux.

Conceived as an anthology and a register, it serves as a testimony to the initiative's long-standing work of creative adaptation and ecological inquiry through a quest to situate a vision of material politics through the lens of six punctuated pieces on flow and fluids. The literary and scientific fabulations found in these pages speak of the conjunction of lived embodiment, the materialized quality of language, and the ability to trigger political imagination through reading, writing and witnessing. Each of these strands polyperform under TWWWO, for they can be traced, retroactively, to the themes present in the live event series, to Matter in Flux's private study sessions, to the initiative's collective writing work presented in public venues and publications. Also included in this volume is an appendix documenting the years of invitation and study, intricately linked to the ideological praxis of these overlaps.

Co-founded in 2014 by Jennifer Teets and Margarida Mendes, The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO) is an independent curatorial research-based entity that collaborates with artists, scientists, science historians, philosophers, anthropologists, activists and more as it explores themes concerned with artistic inquiry, philosophy of science, and ecology. TWWWO began as a live talk-event series over the telephone and has thus expanded to other formats involving experiments with educational actions, discursive talks, and events via diverse methodologies.

Introduction by Jennifer Teets and Margarida Mendes.
Texts and contributions by Dionne Brand, Barbara Orland, Sophie Lewis, Esther Leslie, Hannah Landecker, Lisa Robertson. 

Graphic design: Sophie Keij & Atelier Brenda.

Stronger than Bone draws upon the embodied strength, intuitive desires, and collective wisdom of feminists and non-binary protagonists to foreground the manifold dimensions of feminist politics and commitments.

Written by thinkers and allies across generations with a focus on heterogeneity, intersectionality, and influence across geographies, this reader arrives into the world at a moment of heightened fragility, under the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic. In key historical texts, poetry, and new commissions, a range of artists, theorists, philosophers, and writers grapple with how gender politics might be reconfigured in a world undergoing an interregnum of extraordinary intellectual, technological, political, artistic, and social ferment.

Stronger than Bone reveals strands of inquiry into a range of subjects including: embodiment and techno feminism; sexual freedom and sexual violence; matriarchal resistance building and shamanic practices; the gendered dimensions of self-optimization; digital identity and gaming culture; how the trauma of state violence and racial injustice is passed to future generations; and artistic strategies of renewal and rewriting history. With a view to the peril and possibility of the current moment, bringing together this constellation of voices is an act of acknowledging kinship, one iteration of the liberatory potential of collective forms of intelligence!

Contributions by Chris Abani, Gloria Anzaldúa, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun & Sarah Friedland, Tishani Doshi, Maya Indira Ganesh, Eeva-Kristiina Harlin & Ciske-Jovsset Biret Hánsa Outi/Outi Pieski, Laurel Kendall, Kim Hyesoon, Kim Seongnae, S. Heijin Lee, Audre Lorde, Soraya Murray, Esha Pillay & Quishile Charan, Djamila Ribeiro, Tamarra & Brigitta Isabella, Oxana Timofeeva, Cecilia Vicuña.

The Delusions of Care is a culmination of three long essays that ruminate on notions of care in our contemporary and historically. It is concerned with the appropriation of care by the capitalist establishment as much as supremacists of all kinds. What can we consider as care and who gives care for what reasons. Stuck in the cup de sac of a pandemic that has brought most of the world to its knees, these questions seem of some pertinence. The reflections in this book spanning a critique of care from the regimes of birth control through police brutality to the storming of the Reichstag in the summer of 2020, that very much set precedence to the storming of the Capitol Hill by Trumpists and White supremacists. The book does not only point out the pitfalls of a corrupted notion of care, but tries to offer paths for rehabilitation, restoration, restitution through a non-selfish spirit of care. 

This book is a manifesto in which love and crisis imbue each other with the spirit of care. Bonaventure Ndikung calls on those in its belly to seize the means of the production of caring from the beast of state power and corporate greed. —Arjun Appadurai 

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (born 1977 in Yaoundé, Cameroon, lives and works in Berlin) is an independent art curator, art critic, author and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin and editor-in-chief of SAVVY Journal for critical texts on contemporary African art.

How film may be a constructive tool to examine the state of the world and its cruelties, and how to form a more stable and supportive culture of film production and distribution.

Out of frustration and exasperation with the state of the world in 1960, Indonesian poet Willibrordus Surendra Broto Rendra asked himself: "How does the world breathe now?" 

The film series conceived of by SAVVY Contemporary, which ran from September 2016 through March 2018, was a response to our own dismay at the continued injustices that the world faces. Each week SAVVY invited a different speaker who would choose a film that she or he felt answered, or asked more questions of, the question, "how does the world breathe now?" More than just a series of screenings, the film series became a kind of ciné-club where we also ate, drank, and danced together, and out of which new concepts, collaborations, and polemics emerged. With this publication we hope to offer readers another mode of thinking about films, and to pick up on some loose threads or unfinished conversations of the film series. 

Over the course of the publication's three sections: Bearing Witness: old & new filmic practices with political clout; Archiving, Preserving, and Accessing Film; and New Relationships, New Practices: Towards sustainable & ethical filmmaking, SAVVY brings together the voices of contributors such as Sarah Maldoror, Filippos Koutsaftis, the Spotters of the TRIBUNAL "Unraveling the NSU Complex," Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Talal Afifi and Viola Shafik, the *foundationClass, and Olivier Marboeuf, among others. Together, we explore how film may be a constructive tool to examine the state of the world and its cruelties, and we ponder how to form a more stable and supportive culture of film production and distribution.

Contributions by Talal Afifi, Elena Agudio, Antonia Alampi, Ana Alenso, Alexander Apóstol, Iván Candeo, Pia Chakraverti-Würthwein, Haris Epaminonda, Eirini Fountedaki, Filippos Koutsaftis, Lal Laleş, Nikola Madzirov, Sarah Maldoror, Olivier Marboeuf, Marco Montiel-Soto, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Erika Ordosgoitti, Rolando Peña, Franziska Pierwoss & Siska, Carlos Rebolledo, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Viola Shafik, Spotters.

A collection of essays, librettos, lyrics, memories, photos, personal anecdotes by musicians, visual artists, researchers and archivers that pays homage to the work and life of African-American composer, musician, performer, activist Julius Eastman.

The book investigates his legacy beyond the predominantly Western musicological format of the tonal or harmonic and the framework of what is today understood as minimalist music. By trying to complicate, deny or expatiate on the notions of the harmonic, tonal hierarchy, the triadic, or even the tonal centre, Eastman's compositions explore strategies and technologies of attaining the atonal. One might be tempted to see Eastman in the legacy of Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg and others, but here too, it is worth shifting the geography of minimal tendencies and minimalism in music. It is worth listening and reading Eastman's music within the scope of what Oluwaseyi Kehinde describes as the application of chromatic forms such as polytonality, atonality, dissonance as the fulcrum in analysing some elements of African music such as melody, harmony, instruments and instrumentation. This publication constructs a non-linear genealogy of Eastman's practice and his cultural, political and social relevance, while situating his work within a broader rhizomatic relation of musical epistemologies and practices.

Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was an American composer, pianist, vocalist, and dancer whose work fell under minimalism. He was among the first composers to combine minimalist processes with elements of pop music.

Contributions by Talal Afifi, Elena Agudio, Antonia Alampi, Ana Alenso, Alexander Apóstol, Iván Candeo, Pia Chakraverti-Würthwein, Haris Epaminonda, Eirini Fountedaki, Filippos Koutsaftis, Lal Laleş, Nikola Madzirov, Sarah Maldoror, Olivier Marboeuf, Marco Montiel-Soto, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Erika Ordosgoitti, Rolando Peña, Franziska Pierwoss & Siska, Carlos Rebolledo, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Viola Shafik, Spotters.

A curatorial project about concepts of hospitality and the triggers of hostility in hospitality.

The unlikely seemed possible in the summer of 2015, as thousands of immigrants from mostly Syria made their way to Germany and Angela Merkel made the statement "Wir schaffen das" (We can do it/ we can cope with it). A German's venture into open hospitality was being witnessed as the country celebrated its newfound "Willkommenskultur." Soon enough, however, the summer of grace became the autumn of rage and the winter of nightmares, as the initial goodwill turned into the resurgence of the extreme right in Germany. Much is happen- ing today that calls for a reflection on hospitality in Germany, in Europe, and in the world at large. Taking as a point of departure Derrida's notion of "hostipitality" – that is the presence of hostility in all hospitality and hosting–this anthology brings together original contributions from artists, scholars, activists, poets, curators, and musicians who reflect on different experi- ences and notions of hospitality. 

In an age of flourishing resentments and antipathy towards all that seems conceptually or physically "strange"/ a "stranger," in a time when the historical violence of the guest (as a colonizer) over the host is reiterated and fortified; in an era that has turned hospitality into a neoliberal commodity, it becomes urgent to reconsider hospitality's gradients of power.

Contributions by Elena Agudio,Mohamed Amjahid, Ulf Aminde, Arjun Appadurai, Federica Bueti, Ibrahim Arslan, Joshua Chambers-letson, Bilgin Ayata, Jill Denton, Jihan El-tahri, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Seloua Luste Boulbina, Raisa Galofre, Lionel Manga, Peter Morin, Massimo Perinelli, Naeem Mohaiemen, Miriam Schickler, Farkhondeh Shahroudi, Safiya Sinclair, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Denise Ryner, Margarita Tsomou, Tania Willard.

A curatorial and research project that aims to move beyond insanity as the opposite of sanity, and imagine a space beyond what is understood as sane, i.e. ultrasanity—not a romanticization of madness or mental illness, but an effort to reconsider and challenge the notion of madness and the stigmas labelled on the so-called mad.

This publication unfolds as a collection of words, works, and images that informed, incited, and embodied SAVVY Contemporary's project Ultrasanity. On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry, and Resistance, an exhibition and research project on the elasticity of sanity. 

It doesn't materialise simply as a catalogue of the exhibition but as a book retracing the trajectory of a research, as an occasion to extend SAVVY's curatorial proposition into a further choral perspective. With it we aim to deepen some of the reflections that moved and agitated us through two years of researches, conversations, programming, and practicing of Ultrasanity. The cogitations and the confrontations, the movements and the sounds, the trials and the tribulations, that accompanied us through the project and its 4 chapters and iterations are here collected to resonate one to each other, and to open new trajectories and paths.

Contributions by Hortensia Völckers, Kirsten Ha, Alya Sebti, Inka Gressel, Joerg Fingerhut, Ana Gómez-Carillo, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Agudio, Frederick W. Hickling, Debbie-Ann Chambers, Jaswant Guzder, The Brother Moves On, Jota Mombaça, Ghayath Almadhoun, Dora García, Monica Greco, Sajdeep Soomal, Ayesha Hameed, Jaswant Guzder, Johan Lagae, Sofie Boonen, Maarten Liefooghe, Mpho Matsipa, Dorothee Munyaneza.

A tribute.

A pioneer of African cinema and author of an uncompromising, strong and diverse oeuvre, we have come to know and appreciate Med Hondo over the decades as one who simultaneously gazes, belligerently and attentively, sharply, passionately and ironically, deep into the past, precisely at the present, but also far into the future. On the Run, Perspectives on the Cinema of Med Hondo features contributions that pay tribute to Med Hondo's films. This publication examines Hondo's work, which is often focused on the production of history and its practice from an African perspective, taking into account the temporality of the narratives in his work.

Contributions by Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Madeleine Bernstorff, Kudzanai Chiurai, Ute Fendler, Abrie Fourie, June Givanni, Med Hondo, Boudjemaâ Karèche, Astrid Kusser Ferreira, Seloua Luste Boulbina, Shaheen Merali, Pascale Obolo, Abdoulaye Souleye, Françoise Vergès, Ibrahima Wane.

Seventeen interviews conducted with Med Hondo over a period of almost half a century, most of the interviews originally published in French were translated into English.

To read Med Hondo opens us up to many perspectives: to his work and its time-historical contexts, to his interests and obsessions, to his standpoint with regard to the intertwining of politics, economics, and culture. Med Hondo describes the school of pronunciation until such point as the slightest accent is erased; he observes the insults immigrants in France have had to tolerate, and fuses their stories and histories with the present; he builds bridges to the Caribbean and to the Western Sahara, to Algeria and Burkina Faso, to Niger and Senegal, to South Africa and the USA. This publication aims to draw attention to Med Hondo's cinema and legacy.

The book originated in the long-term project Cours, cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi—Run, comrade, run, the old world is behind you—The Cinema of Med Hondo.

Franco-Mauritanian director, screenwriter, producer and actor, also known for his work in dubbing, Med Hondo (1936-2019) is one of the great figures of African cinema. His militant work denounces neo-colonialism, racism, the rupture between the peoples of Africa, immigration policies and the resulting social violence.

This publication explores the key tenets of artist Nicoline van Harskamp's research and practice, such as the contemporary use and modification of languages, a treatment of names as spoken language rather than spelled identity markers, and the practice of self-naming.
In the fictive worlds represented in this book, society is not centralized, not oversized, and self-naming is brought forward as a form of self-empowerment and resistance.

Central to this book are scripts by Nicoline van Harskamp, for the video work PDGN and a series of staged works titled My Name Is Language. A scholar of literary arts and performance culture, Avishek Ganguly reflects in his essay "Global Englishes, Rough Futures" on questions of translation, incomprehension, and untranslatability in van Harskamp's work. The book also includes a list of text-change algorithms that van Harskamp calls "distorters" and an excerpt from Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy.

Nicoline van Harskamp (born 1975 in Hazerswoude, Netherlands, lives and works in Amsterdam) is an artist whose work considers acts of language and solidarity, focusing on the constant evolution of spoken language, and its inevitable divergence from hegemonic norms. All of her works have a performative character and take the form of live staging, video, installations, and even publications, since her working process is characterised by the transformation of speech to writing and the other way around. She has presented her work and staged live pieces at art institutions, museums and the Internationally.

The scripts of Romy Rüegger's performances: a constellation of texts, largely written to be spoken. The scripts as they are printed do not document the performances primarily. They are indications of spacial and temporal layering, juxtapositions of aesthetic and poetic elements and bodies. Overlapping every day observations with archival material, confronting, jumping.

Romy Rüegger (born 1983, lives and works in Zurich) is an artist and writer working with sound-based practices and shared listening. Her writings for performances, audio works and choreographed spaces draw on anti-racist and intersectional politics of language and memory. Recent performances, audio works and publication contributions include Synthetic Stream Plays (Kunsthalle Basel, 2018), Binary Codes as NO (Gasworks, London, 2018), “I am the Wall” (in: Grounds for Possible Music, Errant Bodies Press, Berlin, 2018), Reina llora*, Reads (Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, 2017), I am the Wall (Q-O2 / Performatik Festival, Brussels, 2017), History is Closed Today (Helmhaus, Zurich, 2017), J'ai everyday ma substance (in collaboration with Anna Frei, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, 2017).

Published 2018

This book tiptoes between aesthetics and ethics; it proposes to rethink trauma in its necessity as well as impossibility to be represented and understood.

The traumatic experience of violence marks social orders and imbues history. How does it reach beyond distress and pain? This collection of works interrogates alternative narratives: The traces of trauma may also comprise a subversive potential, which withdraws from the hold of power and instead makes room for a sense of history's vulnerability.

Thoughts, artistic contributions and text, most of them produced especially for this volume, move around notions of trauma, in an attempt to encircle moments, at which translation of meaning seems suddenly suspended.

Contributions by Pavel Büchler, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Jenny Edkins, Aurélien Gamboni & Sandrine Teixido, Unica Zürn, Falke Pisano, Katja Mater, Georges Perec, Andrea Bellu, Ben Seymour, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Gitte Villesen.

Published with Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève.

published in March 2020
English edition
13 x 20 cm (softcover)
240 pages (ill.)

There is no question that ecological ideas acquired a central role in contemporary episteme. In contrast, the heuristic function that these ideas can assume in the current polarisation is questionable: that which, over the last decade, has identified the environmental crisis with the (categorical and totalitarian) concept of the Anthropocene.

Ecological discourse positioned itself inside historically situated trajectories that contributed to the transformation of aesthetical paradigms and political practices. In the scenario that 1968 opened up, the transversal nature of subjectivity allowed it to cover different fields, beginning with the tension between the logic of a unitary discourse and the creation of a multiplicity of possible worlds, between the molar and the molecular, the micro and the macro.

Ecological thought, as such, cannot help but conflict with that which is assumed to be homogeneous and constant, with that which forces the earth to be centred, measured, and expropriated, just as life must be biogenetically controlled, colonised, and subjected to patriarchy.

This book documents an installation by Eric Baudelaire revisiting the political and personal saga of the Japanese Red Army as an anabasys—an allegory of a journey that is both a wandering into the unknown and a return back home.

“This book is not for reading but for wandering. Its lines do not roll out continuously but superimpose each other to infinity, creating not a compendium of knowledge but a web of prescience. It does not follow a logical framework but unfurls a grid with multiple entries. It does not assert a set subject or conclusive postulate. At most it invites us to probe the recesses of a mind in motion, and steeps us in the driving material that brings it to life. It reflects the works it exhibits, the documents it discloses and the commentary it generates: it aspires to ubiquity. Anabasis, the very real linking thread that stitches it together, serves not just as an archaeological enigma, but also as an allegorical force. The main author of this ocean crossing, Eric Baudelaire, is both a collector of vestiges and a sketcher of wandering lines who has surrounded himself with other meticulous voices (Pierre Zaoui, Homay King, Jean-Pierre Rehm), fellow-travellers in this library secret. Readers will be able to enjoy the gradual unfolding of the story of war and politics whose underlying intellectual and poetic adventure this book enables us to recall—that of its repetitions, ramifications and hybridisations: the story of Anabasis after Anabasis (or from Xenophon's Anabasis to that of Paul Celan by way of Alain Badiou's), from an ancient narrative to its modern reappropriation.” — Morad Montazami 

Edited by Eric Baudelaire and Anna Colin.

Texts by Morad Montazami, Pierre Zaoui, Homay King, Jean-Pierre Rehm.

This book is compiled of portraits of film initiatives from around the world, interwoven with conversations with adventurers who have rebooted movie theatres or built them up from the ground in the hope that it can be an inspiring compendium for future cinema builders, filmmakers, film curators and film lovers.

Anouk De Clercq in conversation with Verena von Stackelberg, Ana López Ortego and Daniel Bejarano, Ilona Jurkonytė and Ugnė Marija Andrijauskaitė, Adam Pugh, Thomas Liu and Silja Espolin Johnson, Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, María Palacios Cruz and Ben Rivers, Heather Lane and Mia Ferm.

The author is an artist and filmmaker based in Brussels and Berlin. In her work, she explores the potential of audiovisual language to create possible worlds. She is affiliated as an artistic researcher to the School of Arts University College Ghent, and a founding member of Cinema Nova, Monokino and Auguste Orts.

Assaf Gruber’s films examine how art affects individuals who are not necessarily drawn to it. What may seem to be the unladen weight of culture, sometimes turns out to be its own rendering.

The films’ plots emerge from their characters’ personal environments, addressing the manner by which personal stories become intertwined with political ideologies, and the way in which social relations between private and public spheres are shaped. Gruber’s protagonists include: a sixty-year-old man, who due to his religious background was rejected multiple times from East German art academies during the 1970s; a retired security guard from the Old Masters Gallery in Dresden who now wants to spend the rest of her life as a volunteer in an Avant-garde museum, and the Chinese owners of a manufacturing company for contemporary sculpture, based in Poland. 

The publication is composed of eight chapters, each focusing on a discussion that turned out to be a significant factor in the films’ production. The tran- scription of each conversation is placed next to film stills with subtitles superimposed. This conceptual design allows Gruber to present the films as the third party in each chapter, as if they too are commenting, questioning, and completing the dialogue. 

Contributors: Paolo Caffoni (Ed.)