Books

Moments Before the Wind is a heterogeneous collection of notes on scenography that offers a glimpse into the poetics and artistic practice of Jozef Wouters. These reflections on space, scenography, art making and institutional critique have developed over the years as they were written out loud in various contexts. Now settling on the page among built and unbuilt spaces, they’re an invitation to the reader to think along or against, and think up space for oneself. Edited by Jeroen Peeters; graphic design by Filiep Tacq.

Jozef Wouters is a scenographer and theatre maker based in Brussels, who develops work in collaboration with his Decoratelier. Decoratelier is also a workplace for set designers and artists, and provides room for cross-disciplinary ventures and social experiment.

Dries Segers photographed all tangible fungi organisms in Dudenparc Brussels. Fungi are the oldest living species on our planet. They build and spread their communities across human borders continents laws … They take over land without asking permission. They clean up toxic messes in disturbed landscapes and shake the land back to life to create livable grounds for animals plants and maybe humans. They have the power to transport energy between weaker and stronger trees to keep forests alive or to kill them. Their spores are invisible and spread and spread and spread.

“The uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift — and a guide — when the controlled world we thought we had fails.” — Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Published 2019
36 pages 28×42 cm
design: Chloé D’hauwe & Ine Meganck
text: Hannah De Meyer
print: Stockmans Duffel

Published in conjunction with the exhibition For a Time Light Must Be Called Darkness. Lina Selander in collaboration with Oscar Mangione held at Argos, Centre for Art & Media, Brussels, 24.09.2017 - 17.12.2017.

About the exhibition:
For a Time Light Must Be Called Darkness features six video installations, most of them made in collaboration with Oscar Mangione. These works take us to Bredäng (a suburb in south-west Stockholm), Berlin, the West Bank, Pripyat and Chernobyl. All of these places are the occasion and the starting point for broader reflections about our present in relation to historical facts. Selander visits these sites and like an archaeologist digs in their past, their monuments, museums and archives. She looks for visual documents, focuses on details and analytically sketches new hypothesis. In this way, she tries to retrace hidden links between distant imageries, correspondences and analogies, in order to create new narratives. In her essayistic approach, Selander combines her own texts and footage along with still images, quotes and archive material. In this way a constant tension springs within these multiple-layered audiovisual works and reminds us that seeing is never an innocent act.

Between 2014 and 2016, the artist Wendy Morris started off on different walks along the west coast of Europe, following the path of a family of Huguenots during the repression after the Edicts of Nantes at the end of the 17th century. Throughout her walks, Morris drew new maps and routes of the places visited by the Huguenot refugees, who just as today passed through Calais and Dunkerque in France, moving on to Blankenberge, Zeebrugge and then Vlissingen as their final destination in the Netherlands. Then and now again, these ports and places were known as escape routes towards a better future.

It is their experiences that Morris tries to elucidate via carefully selected texts fragments, recited psalms and testimonies that are juxtaposed with official publications and regulations dictated by the Catholic Church against these Huguenots. The artist also mapped her own route while simultaneously making notes and collecting samples of grass, trees, seeds, plants, and the like, which may have been used by the refugees to heal the daily injuries caused by the long trip.

Foundlings, a video film, was shot near Wexford, in the south east of Ireland where she grew up. This visual poem without a particular narrative and full of autobiographical elements is set at a very slowed down pace. Floating images and heavy voices are central to the associative strategy that is at work here. The images allow one to listen to a hypnotic voice, while at the same time allowing the eyes to wander... to daydream... to travel over drawn out time. The images are country images, images of repetitive calm, the kind of calm one finds between awake and asleep. The speed of the sea sets the pace, regular yet irregular. The images are inhabited by people who cannot speak. Who are busy doing nothing, except passing time. Silent brothers and sisters of the sea.

The soundsculpture Unsaid, a joint work by Orla Barry and Portuguese artist Rui Chafes (1964), is very opposite to the film. The film is full of open spaces and bright colours. The sculpture is black, closed and claustrophobic and on top of that it is housed in a narrow tower five meters tall. The visitor has to take place on a rather unconventional chair and put his head in a closed off sphere, surrounding himself by darkness and leaving him with his own heartbeat. A voice addresses the visitor directly on highly intimate terms. The seating is hard and uncomfortable. One has to be strong to experience this piece that is a perpetual struggle between body and mind.

At the occassion of Barry’s show argos editions published Foundlings, a combined artist book and catalogue that can be ordered through argos. The book includes a DVD.

Orla Barry (1969) is an artist who centres her practice on language, written and spoken. Her work is strongly poetic and lyrical, crossing a wide variety of media. Barry was born in Ireland, and the rhythm of her phraseology, the pictorial and narrative vernacular on which she draws, somehow evokes her homeland’s topography, climate and literary heritage. At argos the artist presented two new works.

Encounters. On three films by Manon de Boer, Marine Hugonnier, Sven Augustijnen, George van Dam, Tris Vonna-Michell and Helena Holmberg.

Awarded for the Fernand Baudin Prize 2013

This publication emerges from an effort to better understand the conditions of contemporary art in disparate places. Featuring new writings in a variety of discursive forms (commissioned essays, conversations, profiles), the book is organised around three key terms: local time, situated infrastructure, and “cotranslations”.

Furthermore, it gathers perspectives and approaches to “the local” from art initiatives that operate outside of conventional frameworks. As the authors consider place and context in terms of social, economic, political, and historical circumstances, their writings also reflect upon these notions as sites for different conceptions of the self in relation to the world.

This book is an artist’s guide to copyright, written for makers.  Both practical and critical, this book will guide you through the concepts underlying copyright and how they apply in your practice.

How do you get copyright? For what work? And for how long? How does copyright move across mediums, and how can you go about integrating the work of others? Because they get copyright too!

Copy this Book will detail the concepts of authorship and original creation that underlie our legal system. This way, it will equip you with the conceptual keys to participate in the debate on intellectual property today.

This sharp and useful book shines a light on the rights of all artists to protect—and share—their work. Eric Schrijver has produced an essential guide for navigating the new Commons and the old laws of copyright control.
— Ellen Lupton, curator and critic

Le Chauffage (french for “The Heater”) is an artist-run publication based in Brussels. It is conceived as a cross-continental, community oriented platform. Bringing together the work and writing of artists / friends from different cities, Le Chauffage intends to spark discussions and fuel casual forms of critical discourse.

Mystic Transport is an exhibition project initiated through a chance encounter between two artists, Koen Theys and Gülsün Karamustafa. Both are very much intertwined with the city they live in; Brussels and Istanbul and integrate visible and invisible materials and remnants from their immediate surroundings within their practice.

Intrigued by religious parades, the hamam, war propaganda, gender issues and the entertainment industry, Theys and Karamustafa use these phenomena as starting points for their video work, installations and performances. In doing so, both artists sketch a critical portrait of the society and culture in which we live and reside, reflecting on cultural canons and differing socio-economic realities. Mystic Transport thus results in unique crossovers.

This publication presents a survey of the work of Els Dietvorst from 2010 to 2014. This is also the period in which she left Brussels to live in a village on the south-east coast of Ireland, where she focused on projects such as The Black Lamb. The audio piece One was killed for beauty, another one was shot, the two others died naturally is included on an audio CD.

Els Dietvorst E.D. (2010–2014), Rolf Quaghebeur, Eva Wittocx, Katleen Weyts, Els Dietvorst, Brussels, 2014.

Diagrams of Power: Visualizing, Mapping, and Performing Resistance, brings together the work of designers, artists, cartographers, geographers, researchers and activists who create diagrams to tell inconvenient stories that upset and resist the status quo.

Edited by Patricio Dávila. Words and works by Joshua Akers, Burak Arikan, Josh Begley, Joseph Beuys, Alexis Bhagat, Vincent Brown, Bureau d’Études, Teddy Cruz, Department of Unusual Certainties, Peter Hall, Alex Hill, W.E.B. DuBois, Patricio Dávila, Catherine D’Ignazio, Forensic Architecture, Fonna Forman, Terra Graziani, Iconoclasistas, Lucas LaRochelle, Eliana MacDonald, Julie Mehretu, Lize Mogel, Ogimaa Mikana, Margaret Pearce, Laura Poitras, Philippe Rekacewicz, Sheila Sampath, and Visualizing Impact. 

The publication Actors & Extras appears following the exhibition of the same name at Argos. Five authors highlight the theme of characterisation from various angles. Georges Didi-Huberman’s contribution People exposed, People as Extras explores how cinema represents the masses. Sven Lütticken highlights the performance tradition in the visual arts in relation to the producing of subjectivity. On the basis of the classic cinema, in Figures of the Extra, Paul Willemsen composes a typology of the extra and subsequently gives attention to the aberrant status of the extra in modern cinema and contemporary art.

Thomas Trummer’s Volonté Générale. Extras in Film and Democracy questions the responsibility of the anonymous individual. With The Passing Actor: Sketch of a Renaissance Jean-Louis Comolli analyses how the concept of acting in a documentary has a different interpretation than in a fiction film. The last part of the publication describes the selected works in the exhibition.

Texts by: Clemens von Wedemeyer, João Onofre, Mark Lewis, Mike Figgis, Jeremy Deller, Irina Botea, Christian Jankowski, Aernout Mik, Krassimir Terziev, Julika Rudelius

Aphasia is a work of art about racism and intolerance, exposing the banality and triviality of evil. The films challenges us to look (literally) more attentively and to question our own individual and collective position. Aphasia is a call, not for punishment or outrage about the crimes committed during colonial times, the Holocaust or the atrocities in Bosnia during the Yugoslavian wars. Rather, it is a call to break the collective silence, and to actually look at the blind spots that seem to have become a fundamental part of our European identity.

Texts by Branka Benčić, Berber Bevernage and Eline Mestdagh, Jelena Jureša, Barbara Matejčić, Asa Mendelsohn, Rolf Quaghebeur.

Published on the occasion of the frame by frame restauration by argos of the videos that visual artist Lili Dujourie made from 1972 to 1981. Essays by Jean Fisher and Dirk Lauwaert, 52 black and white plates of video stills.

David Wojnarowicz's In the Shadow of Forward Motion was originally published as a photocopied zine/artist's book to accompany an exhibition of the same name at PPOW Gallery in 1989. Despite its meager print run of just 50 copies, the publication has garnered a legendary status, and for good reason.

In it we find, for the first time, Wojnarowicz's writing and visual art, two mediums for which he is renowned, playing off each other in equal measure. We glimpse the artist's now iconic mixed-media works, with motifs of ants, locomotives, money, tornados and dinosaurs, juxtaposed with journal-like texts or "notes towards a frame of reference" that examine historical and global mechanisms of power symbolized through the technology of their times.
Wojnarowicz uses the fractured experience of his day-to-day life (including dreams, which he recorded fastidiously) to expose these technologies as weapons of class, cultural and racial oppression. The artist's experience living with HIV is a constant subject of the work, used to shed light on the political and social mechanisms perpetuating discrimination against not only himself, but against women and people of color, who faced additional barriers in their efforts to receive treatment for the illness. Rooted in the maelstrom of art, politics, religion and civil rights of the 1980s, the book provides a startling glimpse into an American culture that we have not yet left behind. Félix Guattari provides an introduction.

Painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter and activist, David Wojnarowicz was born in Redbank, New Jersey, in 1954 and died of AIDS in New York in 1992. The author of five books—most famously Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration—Wojnarowicz attained national prominence as a writer and advocate for AIDS awareness, and for his stance against censorship.

THE AGAINST NATURE JOURNAL is a biannual arts and human rights magazine exploring “crime against nature” laws and their legacies, in print, in person, and online. Authors and readers from law, activism, social sciences, and the arts are brought together to foster dialogue on sexual and reproductive rights and rethink nature anew.

Émilie Notéris focuses her analysis on artworks created by women in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in a book that is at once literary, aesthetic and political.

On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, Paraguay creates a collection of essays and book-length interviews, published in, or translated into French. The books in this series are commissioned ones, books developed independently and freely, without a deadline. They articulate thoughts on art and political positions in the present through situated and experimental literary writing.

Émilie Notéris (born 1978) is an essayist, science fiction author, and translator.

This first comprehensive monograph encompasses the manifold painterly practice of Allison Katz. Gathering together Katz's successive bodies of works since the beginning of the 2010s, the publication includes essays by Oakville Galleries director Frances Loeffler, art critic Kirsty Bell, Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, and The MIT List Visual Arts Center Director Yuri Stone.

Texts by Kirsty Bell, Allison Katz, Frances Loeffler, Lisa Robertson, Yuri Stone, Camilla Wills.

Fatamorgana is both a political parody and a speculative comedy, in which historical and contemporary personalities narrate post–World War II global history and geopolitics, through a web of references and direct citations. The undercurrent is one of sense, illusion, and truth. Hanan — a Muslim cousin of James Joyce's Molly Bloom — finds herself, not sure how, in Beirut's Hall of Fame waxwork museum after its closing hours.

Like Homer's most virtuous Penelope, this woman waits for her husband; she appears to have set a date with him, but he has not arrived—where can he be? While waiting, she begins interacting with the wax figures in the museum's empty rooms, and the figures respond in turn. Blending and clashing sixteen differing languages, as well as a variety of fiction and nonfiction sources, Fatamorgana is a multidimensional space, a kind of experiment with truth, or a type of fiction that sets up a platform for the collision of multiple fragments, elements, stories, facts.

The publication is the final chapter in a longtime endeavor. Fatamorgana is a multiform project realized between 2016 and 2019, comprising a theatrical work, two films, two publications, and a sound installation. The current book is dedicated to the graphic translation of the text at the heart of the project, alongside a variety of related materials, including project notes and contributions from various authors, while providing online access to photographic, video, and sound materials, along with technical specifications for all of the project's component elements.

This collection of 20 poems by young poets Holly Miles and Joseph Dunkerley sheds a glimpse into the bizarre journey of two isolated souls in a time of global crisis. Read along in this 24 page zine as they chart their unique perspectives of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic!

A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora.

An important new anthology, the first of its kind, Dark Matter explores a century of fantastic fiction by preeminent and emerging luminaries of the African Disapora. A richly vibrant collection of stories and essays, it displays the brilliance of writers ranging from early pioneers such as W.E.B Du Bois, to famed authors including Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, to such luminaries of the literary tradition as playwright-critic Amiri Baraka and satirist Ishmael Reed, as well as a spectrum of acclaimed new writers. 

Astonishing, compelling, erotic, and profound stories of worlds within and beyond abound in Dark Matter. From the bittersweet legacies of Africa to utterly phantasmagoric future civilizations, here is a compliation of stories that transmute our human experience. 

Published 2001. 

Let a thousand verses bloom. Anthems of Resistance is about the iconoclastic tradition of poetry nurtured by Ali Sardar Jafri, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Javed Akhtar, Fehmida Riyaz and all those who have been part of the progressive writers' movement in the Indian subcontinent. It documents the rise of the Progressive Writers' Association, its period of ascendancy, its crucial role in the struggle for independence, and its unflagging spirit of resistance against injustice. In the process, the book highlights various aspects of the PWA's aesthetics and politics such as its internationalist ethos, its romance with modernity, its engagement with feminism, its relationship to Hindi cinema and film lyrics, and the vision of a radically new world which its members articulated with passion.

Part history, part literary analysis, part poetic translation, and part unabashed celebration of the PWA era, this book is truly a unique resource. This is a lucidly written account of a glorious chapter in the history of Indian literature. The powerful verses of the PWA poets are wonderfully translated and, along with the highly accessible transliteration, offer the general reader a rare opportunity to appreciate the writings that helped shape a nation. Anthems of Resistance is truly an inspiring and pleasurable read.

In Feminist, Queer, Crip Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances. This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world.

Alison Kafer is associate professor of feminist studies, and is the author of Feminist, Queer, Crip (Indiana, 2013). Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Disability Studies Quarterly, Feminist Disability Studies, the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Sex and Disability, and South Atlantic Quarterly. 

Published 2013.