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Essays

Essays

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 Radical Attention

Peninsula Press

Radical Attention

Julia Bell

Essays €11.00

An essay on the battle for our attention in the age of distraction. 

Attention pays. In today‘s online economy it has become a commodity to be bought and sold. Bombarding us with free smartphone apps and news websites, developers and advertisers have turned what and how focus our attention into the world‘s fastest growing industry. 

In exchange for our attention, information and entertainment is ever at our fingertips. But at what cost? In this essay, at once personal and polemical, meditative and militant, Julia Bell asks what has been lost in this trade off. How can we reclaim our attention? In a world of infinite distraction, how can attention become radical?

Praise for Radical Attention

‘Terrifying, clarifying and ultimately hopeful, this is an essential book. Julia Bell grapples with the grim realities of our online lives, setting out possibilities for resisting and reclaiming our imperilled freedoms.’ — Olivia Laing

Cover of I See That I See What You Don't See

Het Nieuwe Instituut

I See That I See What You Don't See

Van Westrenen F., Otero Verzier M.

Essays €22.50

This “black book” published by Het Nieuwe Instituut presents a layered, non-binary notion of darkness. Navigating through cosmic, automated, and seemingly invisible environments, it delves into what we do not generally get – or choose – to see. Moreover, the book explores the relation between the possibility of seeing and forms of oppression and emancipation. Sharp book design frames contributions by the Academy for Urban Astronauts, Ramon Amaro, Danilo Correale, Jonathan Crary, Aldo van Eyck, Ludo Groen, Bregtje van der Haak, Saidiya Hartman, Marten Kuijpers, Momtaza Mehri, Melvin Moti, Lucy McRae, Johannes Schwartz, Dirk Sijmons, and Leanne Wijnsma.

Dutch/English.

Published 2020.

Cover of Funeral Diva

City Lights Books

Funeral Diva

Pamela Sneed

Poetry €17.00

In this collection of personal essays and poetry, acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s. Funeral Diva captures the impact of AIDS on black queer life, and highlights the enduring bonds between the living, the dying, and the dead. Sneed's poems not only converse with lovers past and present, but also with her literary forebears - like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde - whose aesthetic and thematic investments she renews for a contemporary American landscape. Offering critical focus on matters from police brutality to LGBTQ+ rights, Funeral Diva confronts the most pressing issues of our time with acerbic wit and audacity.

Poet, professor, and performer, Pamela Sneed is the author of Sweet Dreams, Kong, and Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery. She was a Visiting Critic at Yale, and at Columbia University's School of the Arts, and is online faculty at Chicago's School of the Art Institute teaching Human Rights and Writing Art. She also teaches new genres at Columbia's School of the Arts in the Visual Dept. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in Nikki Giovanni's, The 100 Best African American Poems.

Published October 2020

Funeral Divais the Winner of the Lambda Award for Lesbian Poetry.

Cover of Electric Brine

Archive Books

Electric Brine

Jennifer Teets

Essays €18.00

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.

Cover of Politics of Food

Sternberg Press

Politics of Food

Aaron Cezar, Dani Burrows

Essays €24.00

This publication critically assesses and illuminates ways in which the arts can confront food-related issues, through the contributions of artists, anthropologists, activists, agronomists, and chefs.

The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of artists and artist collectives interrogating the global politics and ethics of food production, distribution, and consumption.

As an important document of new research and thinking around the subject, this book, co-published with Delfina Foundation, contains reflections on food by prominent artists, anthropologists, and activists, among others. Interviews with chefs, policy makers, and agronomists critically assess and illuminate the ways the arts confront food-related issues, ranging from the infrastructure of global and local food systems, its impact on social organization, alternatives and sustainability, climate and ecology, health and policy, science and biodiversity, and identity and community.

Contributions by Kathrin Böhm, Center for Genomic Gastronomy, Leone Contini, Cooking Sections, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Amy Franceschini & Michael Taussig, Fernando García-Dory, Melanie Jackson, Dagna Jakubowska, Nick Laessing, Jane Levi, Candice Lin, Poppy Litchfield, Christine Mackey, Taus Makhacheva, Elia Nurvista, Senam Okudzeto, Thomas Pausz, Daniel Salomon, Vivien Sansour, Standart Thinking, Serkan Taycan, Lantian Xie, Raed Yassin.

Cover of What Is? - Nine Epistemological Essays

Cuneiform Press

What Is? - Nine Epistemological Essays

Johanna Drucker

Essays €30.00

In WHAT IS?, Drucker traces the invisible thread that links letters to writing to books to the digital age. In so doing, she makes sense of emerging technology and the way it has insinuated itself into the culture of book making, writing, and reading. Drucker's grand arguments are based on modest means. In this case she is starting with the humble letter. But, by probing the philosophy of language as well as the rhetoric of art, she builds toward a broader picture. In the end, her investigation concludes with nothing less than a new understanding of digital materialism.

Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. In addition, she has a reputation as a book artist, and her limited edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her most recent titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009), Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Pearson, 2008, 2nd edition late 2012), and WHAT IS: NINE EPISTEMOLOGICAL ESSAYS (Cuneiform Press, 2013). She is currently working on a database memoire, ALL, the online Museum of Writing in collaboration with University College London and King's College, and a letterpress project titled Stochastic Poetics. A collaboratively written work, Digital_Humanities, with Jeffrey Schnapp, Todd Presner, Peter Lunenfeld, and Anne Burdick was published by MIT Press in 2012.

Cover of Black Art Notes

Primary Information

Black Art Notes

Tom Lloyd

Essays €16.00

A prescient document of art-industry and museum critique from Black artists and writers.

A collection of essays edited by artist and organizer Tom Lloyd and first published in 1971, Black Art Notes was a critical response to the Contemporary Black Artists in America exhibition at the Whitney Museum, but grew into a "concrete affirmation of Black Art philosophy as interpreted by eight Black artists," as Lloyd notes in the introduction.

This facsimile edition features writings by Lloyd, Amiri Baraka, Melvin Dixon, Jeff Donaldson, Ray Elkins, Babatunde Folayemi, and Francis & Val Gray Ward. These artists position the Black Arts Movement outside of white, Western frameworks and articulate the movement as one created by and existing for Black people. Their essays outline the racism of the art world, condemning the attempts of museums and other white cultural institutions to tokenize, whitewash and neutralize Black art, and offer solutions through self-determination and immediate political reform. While the publication was created to respond to a particular moment, the systemic problems that it addresses remain pervasive, making these critiques both timely and urgent.

Cover of I hope We Choose Love

Arsenal Pulp Press

I hope We Choose Love

Kai Cheng Thom

What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith? 

In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author's characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as adrienne maree brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse.

Winner of Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender Variant Literature; American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book 

Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performer, and community worker based in Toronto, unceded Indigenous territory. She is the winner of the 2017 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBT Writers and a two-time Lambda Literary nominee. She has published widely, including the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, the poetry collection a place called No Homeland, and (with Wai-Yant Li and Kai Yun Ching) the children's picture book From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea.

Published 2019.

Cover of Selected Works of Audre Lorde

W. W. Norton & Company

Selected Works of Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde

A definitive selection of prose and poetry from the self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," for a new generation of readers. Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. Her incisive essays and passionate poetry-alive with sensuality, vulnerability, and rage-remain indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies.

This essential reader showcases twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems, selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.

The essays include "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," "I Am Your Sister," and excerpts from the National Book Award-winning A Burst of Light. The poems are drawn from Lorde's nine volumes, including National Book Award nominee The Land Where Other People Live. As Gay writes in her astute introduction, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde celebrates "an exemplar of public intellectualism who is as relevant in this century as she was in the last."

Cover of Plastic: An Autobiography

Nightboat Books

Plastic: An Autobiography

Alison Cobb

Ecology €18.00

In Plastic: An Autobiography, Cobb's obsession with a large plastic car part leads her to explore the violence of our consume-and-dispose culture, including her own life as a child of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were made. The journey exposes the interconnections among plastic waste, climate change, nuclear technologies, and racism. Using a series of interwoven narratives - from ancient Phoenicia to Alabama - the book bears witness to our deepest entanglements and asks how humans continue on this planet.

Allison Cobb (she/her) is the author of After We All Died, Plastic: an autobiography, Born2, and Green-Wood. Cobb's work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, and many other journals. She was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and National Poetry Series; has been a resident artist at Djerassi and Playa; and received fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Cobb works for the Environmental Defense Fund and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she co-hosts The Switch reading, art, and performance series and performs in the collaboration Suspended Moment.

Published April 2021

Cover of Post-Comics. Beyond Comics,Illustration and the Graphic Novel

het balanseer

Post-Comics. Beyond Comics,Illustration and the Graphic Novel

Sébastien Conard

Essays €22.00

‘Post-comics are much more than just another way of making or telling comics. What post-comics are doing is transferring the art of comics to different fields, different contexts, if not different artistic, cultural, technological and industrial worlds. These new environments may challenge post- comics the same way they themselves have challenged their initial comics setting.’ Jan Baetens 

Cover of Small Gods — Perspectives on the Drone

Self-Published

Small Gods — Perspectives on the Drone

Alex Quicho

Essays €15.00

Since the first military drone strikes, the drone has been seen as emblematic of Western hegemony, emphasising the asymmetry of modern warfare. The military drone, whose combined surveillance and killing technology was first realised in the 1980s, has given rise to today’s consumer drone, even as drone warfare continues to incinerate civilians in areas of Asia and Africa. By exploring the use of the drone as medium in the works of three artists — Laura Poitras, Anne Imhof, and Korakrit Arunanondchai — Small Gods examines how the drone’s new, consumer format has not left this bloodied legacy behind, but instead imports it into everyday life. It presents a broad and detailed analysis of how socioeconomic and geopolitical concerns have shaped image-making practices, not only in concept but in form, and considers how this has changed our perceptions of humanity itself. More info via http://amfq.net/small-gods

Cover of Meet Me In The Present: Documents and their Afterlives

Self-Published

Meet Me In The Present: Documents and their Afterlives

Alex Quicho, Camilla Brown and 1 more

Meet Me In The Present: Documents and their Afterlives is an anthology of essays which examines the power of collective action. Spanning twenty-one acts of resistance — from letters exchanged between black power activists to the ethos of protest being brought into the Victoria and Albert Museum — and with an afterword by critic Orit Gat, these essays consider what it means to survive against all odds within a changing society. Drawing from the motives and experiences of those who have protected the right to access shared resources, Meet Me in the Present tells the stories of these diverse defenders. The book calls for public spaces, and for ideas to be made public in a time when ‘the commons’ is increasingly under attack.

Edited by Alex Quicho, Camilla Brown, Hatty Nestor, Laura Fava, Sarah Thacker, and Zachary Soudan
Design by Tom Finn and Jake Tollady

Cover of Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil

Verso Books

Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil

W.E.B. Du Bois

The distinguished American civil rights leader, W. E. B. Du Bois first published these fiery essays, sketches, and poems individually nearly 80 years ago in the Atlantic, the Journal of Race Development, and other periodicals. Part essay, part autobiography, Darkwaterexplicitly addresses significant issues, such as the oppression of women and Eurocentric standards of beauty, the historical rise of the idea of whiteness, and the abridgement of democracy along race, class, and gender lines. Reflecting the author’s ideas as a politician, historian, and artist, this volume has long moved and inspired readers with its militant cry for social, political, and economic reforms for black Americans.

Cover of Females

Verso Books

Females

Andrea Long Chu

Females is Andrea Long Chu's genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire.

Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas—the woman who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol—Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn. She even has a few barbs reserved for feminists like herself. Each step of the way, she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state and more a fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race— men, women, and everyone else. Or maybe she's just projecting.

A thrilling new voice who has been credited with launching the "second wave" of trans studies, Chu shows readers how to write for your life, baring her innermost self with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.

Cover of The Politics of Poetic Form

Roof Books

The Politics of Poetic Form

Charles Bernstein

Essays €21.50

The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry And Public Policy is a series of essays from a discussion that occurred at the New School for Social Research in New York. The discussion mines the relationship between poetic composition and political expression. Poetry's relationship to public policy typically has a questionable margin of relation. Not only does this volume posit that poetry is a dynamic medium for the consideration of political ideas, it focuses on the ideological weight specific formal innovations bring to poetry. Some of the writers include Jerome Rothenberg, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey and Charles Bernstein.

Charles Bernstein (born April 4, 1950) is an American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) poets. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005, Bernstein was awarded the Dean's Award for Innovation in Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also been a visiting professor at Columbia University, Brown University, and Princeton University.

Cover of Why Call it Labor? On Motherhood and Art Work

Mophradat

Why Call it Labor? On Motherhood and Art Work

Mai Abu ElDahab

Essays €10.00

This publication comprises four essays and one conversation with contemporary artists and curators discussing their experience of becoming mothers as professionals in the arts, its reality and effects. While their reflections represent a similar strata of art worker in terms of background, class, and career trajectory, the impact of instruments of patriarchy on rendering maternity invisible that they describe is recognizable and insidious.

Contributions by Mai Abu ElDahab, Basma Alsharif, Lara Khaldi, Mary Jirmanus Saba, and Mirene Arsanios with Nikki Columbus.

Edited by Mai Abu ElDahab
Published by Mophradat and Archive Books
Text design layout by Valerie Arif
Arabic and English

Cover of Book of Mutter

Semiotext(e)

Book of Mutter

Kate Zambreno

Biography €18.00

A fragmented, lyrical essay on memory, identity, mourning, and the mother.

"Writing is how I attempt to repair myself, stitching back former selves, sentences. When I am brave enough I am never brave enough I unravel the tapestry of my life, my childhood." - from Book of Mutter

Composed over thirteen years, Kate Zambreno's Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes, and dead calm, of grief. Book of Mutter is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author's searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of her mother's death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modeled the book's formless form on Bourgeois's Cells sculptures—at once channeling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.

Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorizable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past. Zambreno weaves a complex web of associations, relics, and references, elevating the prosaic scrapbook into a strange and intimate postmortem/postmodern theater.

Cover of Architectural Body

University of Alabama Press

Architectural Body

Madeline Gins, Arakawa

Essays €27.00

A verbal articulation of the authors' visionary theory of how the human body, architecture, and creativity define and sustain one another 

This revolutionary work by artist-architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins demonstrates the inter-connectedness of innovative architectural design, the poetic process, and philosophical inquiry. Together, they have created an experimental and widely admired body of work, museum installations, landscape and park commissions, home and office designs, avant-garde films, poetry collections, that challenges traditional notions about the built environment. This book promotes a deliberate use of architecture and design in dealing with the blight of the human condition; it recommends that people seek architectural and aesthetic solutions to the dilemma of mortality.  

In 1997 the Guggenheim Museum presented an Arakawa/Gins retrospective and published a comprehensive volume of their work titled Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die. Architectural Body continues the philosophical definition of that project and demands a fundamental rethinking of the terms "human" and "being." When organisms assume full responsibility for inventing themselves, where they live and how they live will merge. The artists believe that a thorough re-visioning of architecture will redefine life and its limitations and render death passe. The authors explain that "Another way to read reversible destiny... Is as an open challenge to our species to reinvent itself and to desist from foreclosing on any possibility."  

Audacious and liberating, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of 20th-century poetry, postmodern critical theory, conceptual art and architecture, contemporary avant-garde poetics, and to serious readers interested in architecture's influence on imaginative expression. 

Cover of Artists as Iconographers

Éditions Empire

Artists as Iconographers

Aurélien Mole, Garance Chabert

For over a century now, iconographer artists have fuelled their approach by tapping into the diversity of images produced by othersand spread through society by industrial means. From collage to the post-internet school, from archival installations to Appropriationist quotation and image constellations, the present book puts these art practices into perspective, focusing on the last forty years, an extraordinarily dynamic period that recently witnessed the invention and development of a new way of disseminating information and images, the internet. Through theoretical texts, artists’ interviews, and exhibition practices, the book maps the connections artists maintain with images and examines emotion as the driving force in our interactions with them.

Editors: Garance Chabert & Aurélien Mole
Texts: François Aubart, Garance Chabert & Aurélien Mole, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Jan Verwoert.

Interviews: Pierre-Olivier Arnaud, Barbara Breitenfellner, Céline Duval, Haris Epaminonda, Aurélien Froment, Wade Guyton, Camille Henrot, Thomas Hirschhorn, Pierre Leguillon, Jonathan Monk, Clément Rodzielski, Linder Sterling, John Stezaker, Oriol Vilanova, by Timothée Chaillou.

32 pages leaflet, Turmoil, Batia Suter, 2020, layered reproductions excerpt from a series in progress, various size. Courtesy of Batia Suter.

Cover of The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-To-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future

Pluto Press

The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-To-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future

Cassie Thornton

In an era when capitalism leaves so many to suffer and to die, with neoliberal 'self-care' offering little more than a bandaid, how can we take health and care back into our hands? In The Hologram, Cassie Thornton puts forward a bold vision for revolutionary care: a viral, peer-to-peer feminist health network. The premise is simple: three people - a 'triangle' - meet on a regular basis, digitally or in person, to focus on the physical, mental and social health of a fourth - the 'hologram'. The hologram, in turn, teaches their caregivers how to give and also receive care; each member of their triangle becomes a hologram for another, different triangle, and so the system expands. Drawing on radical models developed in the Greek solidarity clinics during a decade of crisis, and directly engaging with discussions around mutual aid and the coronavirus pandemic, The Hologram develops the skills and relationships we desperately need for the anti-capitalist struggles of the present, and the post-capitalist society of the future. One part art, one part activism, one part science fiction, this book offers the reader a guide to establishing a Hologram network as well as reflections on this cooperative work in progress.

Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist from the US, currently living in Canada. She refers to herself as a feminist economist, a title that frames her work as that of a social scientist actively preparing for the economics of a future society that produces health and life without the tools that reproduce oppression, like money, police or prisons. 

Cover of Slow Down and Walk: A Conversation

Ugly Duckling Presse

Slow Down and Walk: A Conversation

Nadina George-Graves, Okwui Okpokwasili

Essays €12.00

In a conversation that took place in August 2020, during a global pandemic and in the wake of mass uprisings across the US against systemic racism and police brutality, scholar and choreographer Nadine George-Graves and performance-maker and dancer Okwui Okpokwasili discuss ideas of collaborative practice, radical forgiveness, virtuosity, and community. Reflecting on Okpokwasili's and Peter Born's practice and installation from March 2020, Sitting on a Man's Head, the two women consider how art making reflects the kind of imagination of how one might live in the world, proposing modes of relation that are neither predatory nor transactional, but grounded in care.

This conversation originally took part as an event for 50WomenAtYale150, and was co-sponsored by Yale Women, the Yale Alumni Association, and the Yale Black Alumni Association.

This pamphlet is part of UDP's 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral.

Okwui Okpokwasili is a performer, choreographer, and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces that draw viewers into the interior lives of women of color, particularly those of African and African American women, whose stories have long been overlooked and rendered invisible. Her formally experimental productions include Bronx Gothic, Adaku's Revolt, Poor People's TV Room, and Sitting on a Man's Head, and bring together elements of dance, theater, and the visual arts (with spare and distinctive sets designed by her husband and collaborator, Peter Born).

Cover of Design Struggles - Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, And Perspectives

Valiz

Design Struggles - Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, And Perspectives

Claudia Mareis, Nina Paim

Essays €27.50

This publication offers a critical assessment of the complicity of design in creating, perpetuating, and reinforcing social, political, and environmental problems, both today and in the past. It proposes going against the grain by problematising Western notions of design to foster situated, decolonial, and queer-feminist modes of disciplinary self-critique, and looks at design through the intersections of gender, culture, ethnicity, and class. Applying robust scholarly insight with engaging and accessible modes of conveyance and storytelling, an urgent and expansive array of voices and views emerge from those engaged in struggles with, against, or around the field of design.