Books

En sortant de l’école d’art, Élise Legal parcourt un monde de crises économiques, d’absurdités politiques et d’angoisses écologiques. Un monde dans lequel elle doit désormais légitimer sa démarche artistique dans des dossiers qui en font une fiction.

Problèmes de localisation contient sept textes, composés d’analyses critiques, de récits personnels et de poèmes, qui racontent cette entrée dans un environnement où circulent les corps, les marchandises, les informations et les capitaux. Élise Legal s’y déplace en voiture, en co-voiturage, en train, en bus ou en avion, découvrant ce que ce monde de transaction et de fluidité fait au langage. Elle cherche à comprendre comment il est incarné, échangé et habité dans les voix des pilotes d’avion, des startupers ou du président de la République, dans les textes de loi, les formulaires de demandes de bourses, la parole de ses enseigant·es, dans les textes de théorie critique comme dans la poésie des banquiers.

Élise Legal est artiste et autrice. Elle a étudié à l’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon et au Sheffield Institute of Arts. À travers une approche pluridisciplinaire qui mêle images trouvées, dessin et poésie, elle porte une attention particulière à la manière dont le langage et les corps coexistent. Elle poursuit également une thèse de recherche-création à Paris 8 qui porte sur l’agir politique de la poésie.

Graphisme : Olivier Lebrun

In the first monograph on the feminist conceptual artist collective Claire Fontaine, political theorist and somatic practitioner Anita Chari explores the artist's theoretical and political innovations to illuminate a more haptic, embodied approach to the practice of critical theory.

A User's Manual to Claire Fontaine explores the work of the feminist conceptual artist collective Claire Fontaine through the lens of her theoretical and political innovations, both inside and outside the context of contemporary art. Theorizing the ways in which Claire Fontaine's experimental approach can illuminate a more haptic, embodied practice of critical theory, this book delineates a series of theoretical techniques and procedures at the core of the artist's work, among them defunctionalization, Institutional Critique, human strike, tactile mimesis, desubjectivation, détournement, magic materialism, and feminist materialism.

Political theorist and somatic practitioner Anita Chari illuminates a larger field of practice for those working within the world of critical theory with this "user's manual" that seeks to reinvest theory with use value, drawing on the resources of critical contemporary art to engage with critical theory in ways that can become embodied, sensate, and tactile, and thus inform contemporary political practices.

"Fluently traversing critical theory, political philosophy, and artistic discourse, this is a brilliant, engaging book on the art and writings of Claire Fontaine—'readymade artist' and conceptual provocateur—as well as a vital elucidation of paths toward a transformative mode of living in the present. Writing with and through rather than, as usual, 'on' her subject, Chari provides her readers with a 'how-to' manual to Claire Fontaine's practice, finding in it a model for embodied resistance."—Tom McDonough, author of The Beautiful Language of My Century

Anita Chari is a political theorist and writer based in Portland, Oregon and is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon. Her work explores the significance of aesthetics, artistic practices, and embodiment for critical theory and practice.

Claire Fontaine is a feminist, conceptual artist, founded in Paris in 2004.

What it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture, edited by cult-favorite author Michelle Tea.

SLUTS, the first publication from vulgarian queer publisher DOPAMINE BOOKS, is an exploration of what it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture. Featuring personal essays, spilled secrets, fiction, memoir, and experimental works, SLUTS asks writers and readers to investigate the many ways the notion of the slut impacts our inner and outer lives, as a threat or an identity, a punishment or an aspiration, a lifestyle, an aesthetic, a philosophy and rallying cry. From hideous and terrifying first encounters to postapocalyptic polyamory, from unionizing sex workers to backstage tableaux of sex and drugs and rock and roll, SLUTS's stories probe the liberating highs and abject lows of physical abandon. Featuring work from performer Miguel Gutierrez, hailed by the New York Times as “an artist of ordered excess”; former Nylon magazine editor in chief Gabrielle Korn; award-winning author Brontez Purnell; Whore of New York author Liara Roux; National Book Critics Circle Award winner Jeremy Atherton Lin; and a host of additional artists and writers, SLUTS reveals the knowledges provoked by a dalliance with desire.

Contributors
DL Alvarez, Vera Blossom, Chloe Caldwell, Cristy Road Carrera, Sam Cohen, Tom Cole, Lydia Conklin, jimmy cooper, Lyn Corelle, Jenny Fran Davis, Cyrus Dunham, Hedi El Kholti, Robert Glück, Miguel Gutierrez, Gary Indiana, Taleen Kali, Cheryl Klein, Gabrielle Korn, Jeremy Atherton Lin, Nate Lippens, Meredith Maran, Carta Monir, Amanda Montell, Carely Moore, Bradford Nordeen, Baruch Porras-Hernandez, Kamala Puligandla, Brontez Purnell, Liara Roux, Andrea Sands, Daviel Shy, Jen Silverman, Anna Joy Springer, Laurie Stone, McKenzie Wark, Zoe Whittall.

Tropical Reading: Photobook and Self-Publishing illustrates the photography practitioners and artist collectives from each city in Southeast Asia, examining why they chose to get into self-publishing. It explores how independent art bookstores came to be the social parlours of the self-publishing crowd. Furthermore, observes how the outsider artists, archives and arts initiatives of Southeast Asia came to shape the face of photography and self-publishing in their respective cities.

The index is a compilation of our project field research, condensing the profiles of all the interviewees – from people to bookstores to organisations – to make a kind of alternative Yellow Pages for the Southeast Asian art scene.

Comes with pink, green and yellow covers. Colour covers supplied randomly.

artwork
black throughout, blue dust jacket
risograph, paperback
saddle stiched
clorine & acid free glassine sleeve

28 pages + dust jacket
152 x 280 mm

first edition, edition of 100
signed

"…this collection of some twenty-eight artworks, being automatic, incongruent — graphite, charcoal, ink — rigid, finite and complete — convey an underestimated and complex sense of play, by which the author — simply Cosi (as if distilling the self in a single word could be conceived as simple) — becomes a diagrammatic example of a brilliant and full-cream adult, so disinterested in the conformity of adulthood that more difficulty is placed within the absurd notion itself" (note from the publisher)

Since 2015, Wen-You Cai has returned on multiple occasions to her parents' hometown of Quanzhou, Fujian, to attend the funerals of her deceased relatives. The ceremonies in the Minnan region unfold like grand dramas in which she is both an observer and a participant. Throughout the ceremony, Wen-You is enveloped in the unknown; everything seems meticulously arranged. Amidst the overwhelming grief of losing loved ones, there exists a feeling of confusion, and taking photographs was one of the ways for her to engage in the funeral process.

For this photo series, Wen-You was initially confronted by her own fear of death, intertwined with her bewilderment and curiosity about the complex funeral rituals and its uniqueness inherent to Minnan culture. To demystify these subjects, Wen-You, joined by te editions, interviewed a funeral director who provides comprehensive “one-stop services,” a monk who hosts Buddhist ceremonies, and a folklorist of Minnan rituals. Minnan Exit can be interpreted as many things–a family album, a curated collection of photographs, an unfinished journey of discovery, as well as the process of  Wen-You's reconciliation with her mortality.

Minnan Exit was designed by an independent graphic design studio, RELATED DEPARTMENT. Through the artist's lens, the design team sought inspiration from funeral objects and rituals, to create a visual concept for the publication's structure and layout with the regional characteristics of Minnan.

Special Interviewees: Chen Huaxian, Master Puyuan, You Gongchu (A-Bue)

In this follow-up to her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney proposes a link between style and survival, even in the gravest of circumstances. Setting herself the task of writing a poem a day and accepting a single icon as her starting point, however unlikely—River Phoenix, Mary Magdalene, a backyard skunk—McSweeney follows each inspiration to the point of exhaustion and makes it through each difficult day. In frank, mesmeric lyrics, Death Styles navigates the opposing forces of survival and grief, finding a way to press against death’s interface, to step the wrong way out of the grave.

A recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, Joyelle McSweeney’s published works span poetry, prose, drama, translation, and criticism. Her debut volume The Red Bird (2001) inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series; her verse play Dead Youth, or the Leaks (2012) inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Playwrights; and her most recent double-collection, her co-translation with Jack Jung, Don Mee Choi, and Sawako Nakayasu of Yi Sang’s Selected Works received numerous recognitions, including the 2021 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. Her influential volume The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014) counters conventional ecopoetics by locating aesthetic and political possibility in such signature Anthropocene phenomena as mutation, contagion, contamination, and decay. McSweeney is a Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

The continuation and culmination of a vast project, articulated between an exhibition and a symposium, imagined by South African curator Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi), inviting 17 artists from Africa and its diaspora and a group of researchers to evoke black aesthetics and propose an alternative vision of a world without borders.

In Zulu, imbizo means "gathering" which is called by the elders when there are communal problems so that everyone listens to each other to see how solutions can evolve. The book Globalisto. A philosophy in flux. Acts of an Imbizo is intended as a hybrid between a catalogue of the exhibition held at MAMC+ from 25 June to 16 October 2022 and the publication of the proceedings of the symposium held on 6 and 7 October 2022. The book is therefore in two parts.

The first part reports on Imbizo part 1: the opening, and on the exhibition curated by Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi) and Aurélie Voltz, director of MAMC+, which brought together artworks by seventeen artists: Sammy Baloji, Raphaël Barontini, Marie Aimée Fattouche, Sam Gilliam, Porky Hefer, Lubaina Himid, Arthur Jafa, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Samson Kambalu, Moshekwa Langa, Myriam Mihindu, Wilfried Nakeu, Otobong Nkanga, Josèfa Ntjam, Sara Sadik, Dread Scott and Gerard Sekoto. A 32-page glossy booklet follows the exhibition line-up, showing at least one reproduction of each artist's work. The playlist that was available to listen to in the first exhibition room has found its place in the book in the same way as a list of works—a flashcode link refers the person who wishes to read the book while listening to music.

The second part of the book, which is its main body, publishes a written transcription of the contributions of the speakers at Imbizo part 2: the symposium on "Art and (de)colonisation". You will find lectures by academics (Norman Ajari, Amal Alhaag, Christine Eyene, Elvan Zabunyan) as well as more visual essays, conceived as transpositions of performances (Jamika Ajalon, Elsa M'Bala) and a more oral proposition, a transcription of a podcast by the Piment collective that took place live in the MAMC+ auditorium. Three interviews introduce the proceedings. The first, with the curator Mo Laudi, is taken from a special issue of Le 1 Hebdo devoted to the "Globalisto" exhibition. The second is a continuation of the first, conducted by Aurélie Voltz, director of the MAMC+, who asks the curator about the follow-up to his project. The last is also a second publication, originally published in Le 1 Hebdo, in which journalists Iman Amhed, Laurent Greilsamer and Maxence Collin interview philosopher Achille Mbembé.

Contributions by Aurélie Voltz, Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi), Iman Ahmed, Maxence Collin, Achille Mbembe, Norman Ajari, Christine Eyene, Elvan Zabunyan, Jamika Ajalon, Amal Alhaag, Elsa M'Bala.

The sixth issue of the transversal journal, at the crossroads of art and thought, political philosophy, gender studies and academic knowledge, delves into the various forms of mutation that ripple through our world.

In biology, a mutation describes an alteration of the genetic code that spurs change in a given organism. In linguistics, it generally triggers a modification of the structure of a word, often influenced by phonetic or morphological factors. In any case, mutations—steered by some ever-changing principle—always elude the spatio-theoretical framework which they are rooted in.

Therefore, the mutations composing this issue are different from those that preceded them, and still unlike the ones that will arise in the years to come. Mutabilities explores mutations operating in various fields of research that are precious to Klima—such as ecology, contemporary art, social sciences and politics, technology, or even language. Co-edited with curator Alicia Reymond, and in collaboration with graphic design studio Espace Ness, this new issue originates from an ongoing transformation process. Mirroring an exquisite corpse, Mutabilities unveils the interventions of contributors who position forms of radical mutation at the core of their own practice. The mutations driving them not only constitute subjects for theoretical analysis, but are actually the result, the consequence, and/or the fruit of embodied reflexions. What is a mutating practice?

Edited by Loucia Carlier, Alicia Reymond, Antonine Scali Ringwald.

Contributions by Karen Barad, Léa Bouton, Patrick Chamoiseau, Emma Bigé, Salomé Burstein, David Douard, Rita Elhajj, Kim Farkas, Gözde Filinta, Eva S. Hayward, Tishan Hsu, Bhanu Kapil, Veit Laurent Kurz, Yein Lee, Lionel Manga, P. staff, Diamond Stingily, Sabrina Röthlisberger Belkacem, The School of Mutants, Sarah Shin, Olivier Zeitoun, Joanna Zylinska.

Klima is an annual magazine dedicated to contemporary creation and academic research. It aims to democratize the academic world through a conversation with the world of contemporary artistic creation. Klima gives a voice to creative, singular and conscious individuals, by relating art, activism and academia.

This book on the films of Anton Vidokle features essays and conversations by theorists, curators, and artists exploring the themes of technological immortality and resurrection informed by Cosmist philosophy.

Citizens of the Cosmos examines the artist Anton Vidokle's films and the Cosmist philosophy underpinning them. It features essays and conversations with Vidokle by seminal contemporary theorists, curators, and artists: Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Raqs Media Collective. This is the first book to survey Vidokle's Cosmism-related filmic output, begun in 2014, and includes full scripts from the films.

The book's contributors speculate on Vidokle's Cosmist conceptions of technological immortality, utopian resurrection, museology, and space travel, grappling with how these ideas embroil or crystallize contemporary theories, practices, and technologies: atmospheric manipulation, cryonics, biopolitics, extraplanetary prospecting, geo-engineering, transhumanism, genetics.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi disagrees with the Cosmist conjecture of death as a flaw in the conception of the human being. Elizabeth Povinelli digests the life-nonlife mattering of dust through relationships to and from the human and more-than-human ancestors to come.

Boris Groys contemplates the gravitational forces between Cosmism and communism according to cosmic and social orders, grounded as they are in the laws of both physics and socialist politics. Keti Chukhrov considers the formation of thinking through madness, dying, and reasoning according to Cosmist philosophical and religious debates and beliefs.

Raqs Media Collective and Anton Vidokle discuss different cultures of death, finitude, and rituals. Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins examine the in-betweeness of the categories of life and death through the designs of terraforming vehicles navigating interplanetary space travel.

Daniel Muzyczuk investigates Vidokle's interests in the context of the history of the collection at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, while Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle converse about filmmaking references and methods, from voiceover narrative to editing processes.

Edited by Miguel Amado. Contributions by Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Raqs Media Collective, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth A. Povinelli.

A career-spanning catalogue featuring excerpts from Raven Chacon’s scores, musical prompts, and drawings interspersed with full-color documentation and descriptive texts of installations, sculptures, and performances. Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among land, space, and people.

In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined. In 2022, Raven Chacon became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2023.

Texts by Raven Chacon, Lou Cornum, Aruna D'Souza, Candice Hopkins, Anthony Huberman, Ingir Bål Nango, Marja Bål Nango, Dylan Robinson & Patrick Nickleson, Eric-Paul Riege, Sigbjørn Skåden, Ánde Somby.

Foreword by Katya García-Antón and Stefanie Hessler.

Melbourne designer and publisher Tim Coghlan has built his output around the results of both wayward and strategic Google Images searches. Amidst the morass of images that drown the digital present – not to mention the cloud of desensitisation that rises in its wake – some photographs still hold the acute charge and resonance they always did.

Filled with lo-res, amateur, and public domain photographs of burning churches found online, including screen captures from TV news broadcasts, this second volume of Coghlan’s investigative project continues to pose questions of iconography, typology, and the implications of images.

this simulation sux is a collection of speculative essays and personal observations commissioned by global cultural institutions and local counterculture zines between February 2020 and April 2021.

"During the moment of pause brought on by the initial lockdown, we chose to write as a form of self care and mediated therapy; writing, for us, is a way to process, orient, and grasp for a moment of clarity in the ever changing media and cultural landscape. In this informational era, in which our attention is in very high demand, the amount of content we are expected to consume is endless. Beset with political unrest, economic uncertainty, and waning emotional bandwidth, we have become datapoints in the vast and saturated marketplace presented to us as “society.”

[...]

Flânerie, the French term describing the act of walking and observing, became a part of our daily ritual; we lapped the outer edges of the island of Manhattan and exploring various neighborhoods during the peak of the pandemic. The images presented on this book’s jacket were captured on these walks, documenting the absurdities of everyday life in this fraying simulation. Personal, anecdotal narratives of an imagined reality are represented through the images, which are placed alongside our speculative observations derived from historical data.

We hope that these writings can provide others with prose and information that can be applied like an antidotal balm to treat our communal ailment of future shock."

—Ting Ding 丁汀 & DeForrest Brown, Jr. 

A complete documentation on a multimedia exhibition by Berlin-based artist Ixmucané Aguila, giving voice to voiceless descendants of victims of genocide in Namibia.

Genocide in Namibia is an especially sensitive matter—its history has at times been ignored, underestimated, or even denied outright. In the artistic documentary Fraitaxtsēs sores tsîn ge ra≠gâ – Ondjembo yo Null Vier, Ixmucané Aguilar has worked in close collaboration with Nama and OvaHerero people who vividly evoke memories and rituals of mourning caused by human loss and land dispossession under Imperial Germany's violent occupation.
From these personal encounters emerge portraits, visuals and narratives as documental fragments, consisting of living voices which insist on defending memory as an invocation to witness and never to remain passive in the face of social injustice. Rather than a linear collection of data referring to distant places and its distant past, this work engages with stories as chronicles calling to be recognised as pieces of humanity and time.

Alongside Aguilar's portraits, this publication also contains contributions by human rights attorney Wolfgang Kaleck and the curator of the work Tristan Pranyko, along with poetry by Namibian artists Nesindano Namises, Fritz Isak Dirkse and Prince Kamaazegi, and narratives, testimonies, chants and mourning rituals shared by OvaHerero and Nama people in present-day Namiba.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at National Art Gallery of Namibia, Windhoek, in 2023

Ixmucané Aguilar (born 1983) is a Guatemalan Berlin-based visual artist/designer who, through multi-layered documentary photography, engages in extensive field research to put out installations and art publications to relay her work in an artistic language.

The first volume in a series devoted to Marion von Osten's archives, around the MoneyNations project, transversing between art, theory, and activism.

MoneyNations was an exhibition, a webzine, a radio, a conference, a video archive, a printed publication, an infrastructure, a counterpublic, an ongoing discussion, a transnational network of friends. Initiated by Marion von Osten as curator at the Shedhalle Zurich, the project evolved from an urgency to act against the hegemonic forces of "the West" within the radically changing condition of post-Cold War Europe. MoneyNations addressed—and intervened in—the interrelatedness between racist border policies and media representations, exploitative economic relations, and identity-forming processes. The applied methods of critique and organizing, transversing between art, theory, and activism, are made accessible in this volume through images, correspondences, and other ephemera, revealing their political potential for the present. It is contextualized by a conversation between Sezgin Boynik (Rab-Rab Press), Ferdiansyah Thajib (KUNCI Study Forum & Collective), Eleanor Ivory Weber, Camila Willis (Divided Press) and the editors.

The Material Marion von Osten series periodically publishes selected archival documents from von Osten's projects and contextualizes them with new contributions. Correspondences, drafts, scripts, photographs, videos and printed matter serve as the starting point for the publication series which maps the complexity of Marion von Osten's transversal cultural production in its details and specifics.

The artist, curator, researcher, and educator Marion von Osten (1963-2020) lived in Berlin since the early 1990s. Her always collaborative approach manifested in exhibitions, conferences, installations, as well as films, discussions, texts, teachings, or self-published journals. Her projects were all intertwined and carried by her specific way of working: through artistic research and feminist organizing, transnational and committed to the project of decolonization. Amongst her works are the international exhibition series bauhaus imaginista (2018-2020), Viet Nam Discourse (2016-2018) at Tensta Konsthall, Project Migration (2002-2006) in Cologne, and Sex & Space (1996) at Shedhalle Zurich. As collective infrastructures, her collaborations included Labor k3000, kleines postfordistisches Drama (Minor Postfordist Drama, kpD) and the CPKC Center for Postcolonial Knowledge and Culture.

Edited by Lucie Kolb, Jonas von Lenthe, Max Stocklosa.

Conversation between Sezgin Boynik, Ferdiansyah Thajib, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Camila Willis and the editors.

How to look at polycrisis without freaking out.

Eco ruin and refugeeism, illiberalization and inequality, hot wars and a New Cold War—the polycrisis hydra is always growing another head. But it's also a state of mind, an identity crisis brought on by paralysis and cognitive shock. Was it always like this, but with less media reach? Or is capitalism really burning itself out, just without any redemptive zest? The arts are expert at thematizing the woes that affect them—hello, Biennale and documenta—but maybe polycrisis is an instructive metaphor for what's breaking creativity: the commercial takeover of discourse, the bureaucratization of curating, and the dopamine highs of self-branding.

Maybe we're at a crossroads between recovery and death. But Spike #79 is clear-eyed about the fact that pessimists are never disappointed.

With Henrike Naumann, Shirin Neshat, Roberto Villanueva, Ben Davis, Mire Lee, Precious Okoyomon, Ivan Cheng, Nil Yalter, Anselm Franke, Anna Jermolaewa, Catherine Liu, Oliver Ressler, Morag Keil, Jeppe Ugelvig and many more.

Founded by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, Spike (Spike Art Quarterly) is a quarterly magazine on contemporary art published in English which aims at sustaining a vigorous, independent, and meaningful art criticism. At the heart of each issue are feature essays by leading critics and curators on artists making work that plays a significant role in current debates. Situated between art theory and practice and ranging far beyond its editorial base in Vienna and Berlin, Spike is both rigorously academic and stylishly essayistic. Spike's renowned pool of contributing writers, artists, collectors and gallerists observe and reflect on contemporary art and analyse international developments in contemporary culture, offering its readers both intimacy and immediacy through an unusually open editorial approach that is not afraid of controversy and provocation.

In March 2020, Sora Y. Han learned her father was dying of cancer just as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived on California's shores. These two events led Han to introspection: “Who have I been writing to?” and “Who have I been writing for?” In her observance of the 49 days of mourning in Buddhist tradition, answers come in the form of mu – no thing, nothingness.

Han’s poetic meditations on freedom struggle come alive in the empty spaces between words, letters, and pictograms spanning her many languages—English, Korean, Chinese, jazz, law, and poetry.

Transliterating and dystranslating the writings of Fred Moten, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, and others through the Korean alphabet, Han weaves the DMZ, Betty’s Case, the Thirteenth Amendment, Afro-pessimism, and psychoanalytic desire together into the open field of Bay Area radicalism. Mu is both a loving homage to and a playful subversion of political inheritances and the unsayable beyond law.

In Brutalism, eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism to describe our moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale.

Just as brutalist architecture creates an affect of overwhelming weight and destruction, Mbembe contends that contemporary capitalism crushes and dominates all spheres of existence. In our digital, technologically focused era, capitalism has produced a becoming-artificial of humanity and the becoming-human of machines. This blurring of the natural and artificial presents a planetary existential threat in which contemporary society’s goal is to precipitate the mutation of the human species into a condition that is at once plastic and synthetic.

Mbembe argues that Afro-diasporic thought presents the only solution for breaking the totalizing logic of contemporary capitalism: repairing that which is broken, developing a new planetary consciousness, and reforming a community of humans in solidarity with all living things.

Sometimes I pretended not to notice it (the black hole), but I knew it was always there. To tell the truth, I started to like having it around. I stuck quite close to it. Not too close, mind you. But it was useful, above all, to have somewhere to put things. Unwanted things. I am attracted to your attraction, he said. (I put it in the hole.) Night by night it got a little bigger.

Holes splices forms of fiction and nonfiction. The narrator, a researcher of limits at an unidentified university, figures her entanglement with an unobtainable love object as the descent into a black hole. Everything she reads seems to shed light on the non-events that comprise their relationship, and study collapses into life as she struggles to separate events and forms, reality and ideation. Holes is a study in thematic fixation, engaging a range of ‘obsessional artists’ (including Yayoi Kusama, from whom the term is borrowed, Lee Bontecou, and Carolee Schneemann) for whom holes—as idea, imagery, philosophy—have proved evocative, inviting, and occasionally obliterative.

Hilary White is a writer and researcher, currently an IRC postdoc at Maynooth University, Ireland, working on a project entitled Forms of Sleep. She co-ran the experimental poetry reading and commission series, No Matter, in Manchester, and co-edited the zine series, Academics Against Networking. Her writing appears in MAP, Banshee, zarf, and The Stinging Fly. Holes is her first novel.

La philosophe Sara Ahmed se présente parfois comme « une rabat-joie féministe, une alienne affective, une femme queer racisée en colère ». Depuis plus de dix ans, elle tient un blog, feministkilljoys.com, où elle publie des morceaux de ses livres et de ses conférences. Dedans, on trouve des bouts de rages - contre le harcèlement sexuel à la fac où elle enseigne, contre le racisme institutionnel, contre le capitalisme carcéral... — mais aussi des célébrations des solidarités et des activismes transféministes. De là sont extraits les trois textes rassemblés dans ce court recueil, « Vandalisme queer », « Usage queer» et « La plainte, méthode queer»; des textes qui ont tous pour point commun de réfléchir aux potentiels d'interruption du mot queer. Queer, oblique, pas droit.e.s, déviant.e.s : des termes pour se mettre en travers des chemins trop bien tracés. Des textes comme autant d'appels à multiplier les existences vandales.

Un tuyau percé peut mener à un autre; il peut le faire et il le fait. Il suffit parfois de desserrer un écrou, un petit peu, juste un tout petit peu, pour que l'explosion ait lieu. Et nous avons besoin de plus d'explosions. Les usages queers, les usages obliques, décrivent ce potentiel d'explosion. Ils décrivent la manière dont les petites déviations, les petits desserrements, la création d'une issue de secours, l'ouverture d'une échappée, peuvent aider à multiplier toutes sortes de fuites et de sorties.

Machteld Rullens' second publication with Zolo Press documents three years of works, friends & family moments, and travels in Senegal, NYC, LA, and Vincent van Gogh's house…

"A friend told me my works are "warmly laconic" without becoming ironic or cynical. They show serious material research with humor and a dark side. In this book, I share my personal life and way of working. It might clarify my obsession with art, art history, the studio, travels I made, and the way I use my analog camera. My work has become more mature and I've turned a little grey myself. In the work I use all the possibilities of the box. Paint and surface become one. The cardboard is not a background that is separate from the paint. In this way, I expand my visual research, which I do not only as a painter but also as a sculptor. The pictures taken over the past years were made while spending time in a small village in Senegal, in Vincent van Gogh's house, my studio in The Hague, Los Angeles, Brussels, and my friend's place in Germany." — Machteld Rullens

Machteld Rullens (born 1988 in The Hague, Netherlands) works with sculptural elements that have a strong link with painting but are rarely applied with a brush. She uses everything that's available and that reflects her basic mood. That mood is a reflection of the time and of the world that, in spite of all its beauty, is overstimulated and possible even bored. Her wall objects, made from found cardboard boxes and epoxy resin, are full of emptiness. Rullens started painting on cardboard boxes when she ordered art supplies for the studio and noticed that the boxes could be tackled in a far more aggressive and impulsive way than for example a blanc canvas. She shapes and rearranges the cardboard boxes, something that was once fragile into something sturdy, relating to elements of play, composition, and architecture.  

A lively and spontaneous interview with Etel Adnan about her absolute belief in the beauty of the world, the beauty of art.

In these interviews conducted by journalist Laure Adler, poet and painter Etel Adnan recounts the foundational experiences of her artistic approach shortly before her death in Autumn of 2021. From her youth in Lebanon, through her years in New York and California, and her late-in-life discovery at Documenta in 2013, this intimate conversation revisits and questions the sometimes difficult destiny of women.

This collection of writings by artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia (born 1988) gathers six essays that offer a framework for fugitive cinema. Written in the wake of the 2019-20 Hong Kong Protests ignited by the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement, Sia's writings survey the rise of a new documentary vernacular being produced by a wave of emerging filmmakers breaking from the nostalgia of Hong Kong's cinematic golden age. As a practitioner and thinker, Sia has been at the forefront of a nascent generation of artists working to trace social unrest and political crackdowns. Drawing from personal experience and historical study, her writings offer urgent reflections on a cultural landscape changed by censorship and surveillance.

An essential counterpart to her oeuvre, this volume is a critical intervention into global film studies, the politics of film/photographic practices and experimental approaches to documentary. Film stills from filmmakers Chan Tze-woon and the anonymous collective Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, photographs by artist An-My Lê and images from Sia's short film The Sojourn (2023) are interspersed between each essay, inviting the reader to consider a cinema by other means.

New York-based professor Lytle Shaw journeys to Italy in this adventurous exploration of the life and work of architect, designer, and photographer Carlo Mollino (1905–1973). In 1933 the young Mollino received a commission from Mussolini’s regime for his first building: an administrative centre in Piedmont. Later works include furniture and interior design, a book on photography, and an asymmetrical car that raced at Le Mans in 1955.

The book centres around Shaw’s realisation that this prolific talent’s conflicted legacy offers a unique window on the role that post-war Italian politics and culture played in the country’s reimagining of itself as a victim, rather than a proponent, of fascism.