Books

Over the last few decades the term ‘bootlegging’—a practice once relegated to smugglers and copyright infringers—has become understood as a creative act. Debates about homage, appropriation, and theft that are common in the art world, are now being held in the spheres of corporate branding, social media, and the creative industry as a whole. Today, bootlegging has become fetishized as an aesthetic in and of itself, influencing everything from underground record labels to DIY T-shirts, publishing ideologies, to acts of high fashion détournement.

UNLICENSED contains twenty-one interviews with a range of creative practitioners on the topic of bootlegging. The conversations in UNLICENSED investigate bootlegging’s creative and critical potential, and explore new ways bootlegging can be deployed in order to thrive as an impactful cultural force.

Interviews with: A March Issue (Line Arngaard & Sonia Oet), Babak Radboy, Clara Balaguer & Czar Kristoff, BLESS (Desiree Heiss & Ines Kaag), Boot Boyz Biz, Akinola Davies Jr, Eric Doeringer, Experimental Jetset (Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers, Danny van den Dungen), Elisa van Joolen, Hassan Kurbanbaev, Urs Lehni & Olivier Lebrun, Jonathan Monk, Matt Olson, Online Ceramics (Elijah Funk & Alix Ross), Mark Owen, Printed Matter (Jordan Nassar & Christopher Schulz), Nat Pyper, Hassan Rahim, Shanzhai Lyric, SHIRT, Oana Stanescu

How To Become est une maison d'édition autogérée basée à Paris. Nous publions les textes d'auteuces engagés dans des pratiques féministes et peu diffusés par le réseau des grandes maisons d'édition françaises.

Créée en 2016, elle est composée d'artistes et écrivaires en majorité gouines, HTB publie de la litterature expérimentale née d'influences post-post- sapphiques ainsi qu'un choix de tradu d'auteuices non traduites en langue française. HTB s'articule autour d'ateliers d'écriture: How to Become a Lesbian, et d'une revue annuelle publiant les choses issues de l'atelier.

Traduction des extraits par Barbara Sirieix & Sabrina Soyer.

How To Become est une maison d'édition autogérée basée à Paris. Nous publions les textes d'auteuces engagés dans des pratiques féministes et peu diffusés par le réseau des grandes maisons d'édition françaises.

Créée en 2016, elle est composée d'artistes et écrivaires en majorité gouines, HTB publie de la litterature expérimentale née d'influences post-post- sapphiques ainsi qu'un choix de tradu d'auteuices non traduites en langue française. HTB s'articule autour d'ateliers d'écriture: How to Become a Lesbian, et d'une revue annuelle publiant les choses issues de l'atelier.

Ce numéro explore un thème croisé, l'histoire du cruising lesbien et la figure de la vampire (qui cruise partout pour se nourrir :)

Avec Felix Kazi-Tani, Nelle Gevers & Giulia Longoni, Lorca Coquelicot, Terri de la Peña, La Chocha, Lætitia Paviani, sabrina soyer, Mélanie Blaison, Dodie Bellamy, Martha Salimbeni, Joyce Rivière, Barbara Sirieix, Samuel R. Delany, slalomé·e, Sophie T. Lvoff, Lou·a, Növi Jacquet, Rachel Schenberg, Eleanor Arnasson, Estelle Benazet Heugenhauser.

Designé par la dandy des arts du caractère The graphiste Martha Salimbeni.

Hello readers,

In the essay "Conflict Embodiment. Notes from dancing on both sides of Atlantic" you are holding in your hands, I delve into the research project I am busy with, which departs from the dancing experience in processes of migration.

Frictioning different dance traditions understood as "folkloric", "popular" and "academic" from the souths and norths, these lines inquire about the potential of translation in dances and what mother tongues could be in dancing/performing. By trying to embrace the complexity of the untranslatable, I aim to unfold Conflicted Embodiment as a research device from the question: How does a body navigate migration, colonialism and dancing?

You are warmly welcome to move desacatadamente with me.

cate

An inscription of time at the coast, singing crows, albatrosses and seagulls. STOP. Extracted from the earth a whole alphabet. The waves uplifted countries and washed mountains until the storm came undone. The plantation of tobacco was maintained among the meadows and cafes flourished as the core of erudition, the power was theirs - you could see it in cinema- the actors spoke feverishly with enthusiasm, rather than breathless, meticulous and austere. The scars healed on mysterious skin that came out of the shadow to cross the day.

This publication presents research conducted by choreographer Mor Demer over two years, in the frame of the exerce MA in choreography and performance (National Choreographic Center of Montpellier / Occitanie). Against the backdrop of her artistic process, Mor Demer unfolds a reflection on the production and configuration of choreographic materials, as well as on the body and the practices and fictions of which it is composed.

Contributions by Anne Kerzerho, Christian Rizzo, Rostan Chentouf, Alix de Morant, Laurent Pichaud, Myrto Katsiki, Jocelyn Cottencin.

Mor Demer is an Israeli-born, Berlin-based choreographer and dancer. She is engaged in a holistic ecosystem of movement and performance practices with solo and collaborative works (she works with Tino Seghal, Meg Stuart / Damaged Good and Peter Player as a dancer and performer). His artistic approach cultivates and engenders states of high exposure, friction, poetics and precision. Mor crosses other forms of artistic expression alongside his dance practice such as writing, drumming, drawing, walking, running and stillness. Her global artistic research is at the crossroads of the profane and the sacred. She explores existential questions, probing endless possibilities in states of being.

Alice Notley is considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets. Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of poetry that often take the form of prose sentences, in an effort "to change writing completely." The title piece, a folksong-like lament, makes a unified tale out of many stories of many people; the middle section, "The Black Trailor," is a compilation of noir fictions and reflections; while the shorter poems of "Hemostatic" range from tough lyrics to sung dramas. Full of curative power, music, and the possibility of transformation, In the Pines is a genre- bending book from one of our most innovative writers.

Alice Notley's two books collected here, CLOSE TO ME & CLOSER... and DESAMERE, are works that are wholly their art, meaning they occur as their language shape measure. She's invented a measure. The text is a rich current crossing, as at the moment of imagining, into being in death and in an expanded life. Notley transgresses conventional contemporary categories of genre; rather than genre, the form of the writing is the mind's inner sense and motion.

"Alice Notley is, I think, the most challenging and engaging of our contemporary radical female poets...infused with uncommon verbal originality, intelligence and joyous playfullness, full of heart, intensity and wonder, provocatively addressing forever unsolved questions of form and identity, life and death, imagination and gender, Notley's poems are unsettling and inspiring"—the San Francisco Chronicle. 

The first comprehensive monograph and critical survey of American artist Pippa Garner, Act Like You Know Me surveys fifty years of her radical and transdisciplinary art practice, from the late 1960s to the early 2010s, through ca. 400 photographs, illustration, ephemera, and original writings.

Encompassing Garner's most iconic works, from the Backwards Car to the Half-Suit, alongside never-before-seen photographs and ephemera, Act Like You Know Me serves to introduce a highly-influential, under-recognized artist whose uncompromising approach to life and practice has allowed her to interact with the worlds of illustration, editorial, television, and art without ever becoming beholden to them.

Published on the occasion of Pippa Garner's travelling exhibition at Kunstverein Munich, Kunsthalle Zurich, Frac Lorraine (Metz) and White Columns (NYC).

Born in the suburbs of Chicago in 1942, Pippa Garner (formerly known as Philip Garner) has satirized American-style consumerism for decades, reifying the joys of everyday life and personal liberation along her way. With her prankish sense of humour and conceptual dedication to experimental engineering, she has altered materials of mass production—from Fordism through the pharmacopornographic era—subverting commercial binaries to reveal the transitory nature of material life and her own transpersonal identity.

Edited by Fiona Alison Duncan and Maurin Dietrich.
Texts by Pippa Garner, Shola von Reinhold, Dodie Bellamy, Fiona Alison Duncan.

A dialogue between Camille Henrot's images and Estelle Hoy's texts, a visual and verbal exploration of melancholy, failure, injustice, and hope.

Since late 2021, the artists, united by a close friendship, have been sharing hundreds of images and exchanging thousands of messages via WhatsApp, Instagram, shared Google Docs, voice messages, and live conversations. Result of this correspondence, Jus d'Orange includes a series of Henrot's paintings inspired by Hoy's texts and vice versa.

This editorial project, developed together with the artists, is thus a homage to this mutual and continual contamination between their works, and to the personal and professional relationship between them.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Fondazione ICA Milano in 2023.

This publication presents research conducted by Berlin-based choreographer and performer Jule Flierl over two years, in the frame of the exerce MA in choreography and performance (National Choreographic Center of Montpellier / Occitanie). This text manages to maintain a sense of orality, of vocality, within a written format. It is at once a description, an analysis, a score, a piece of music, a voice, etc.

Jule Flierl is an artist from Berlin who works with choreography and the voice. Using choreography and somatic singing methods, her scores unsettle the relationship between seeing and hearing: What you see is not always what you hear, and what you hear is not always what you see. Through her work and practices, she proposes that the voice itself is dancing.

Contributions by Anne Kerzerho, Christian Rizzo, Rostan Chentouf, Alix de Morant, Laurent Pichaud, Myrto Katsiki, Jocelyn Cottencin.

This publication presents research conducted by visual artist and choreographer Clarissa Bauman over two years, in the frame of the exerce MA in choreography and performance (National Choreographic Center of Montpellier / Occitanie). Here, writing becomes movement, a weaving of words, gestures, images, and drawings that rub against each other in a dialogue articulated from page to page.

"The choreography of small, overlooked gestures from moments of boredom, letting loose, detours. The finger sliding along the table, the arm coinciding with the back of this wooden chair. The coincidence of a gesture with an image, and the instantaneous disparition of this image in the body, as it transforms into the sketch of another movement. Contours, strokes, perspective lines, everything sinuous, asking at what moment does the image appear, emerge, and then become undone? The impossibility, within the body, of an image being fixed, still, one. (…) At this point in the writing, I perceive text less as a desire to organise, sediment, or give form to something, whatever it might be, but rather as a desire to find the outlines of connections between materials left hanging in the room I share with them, the tight space around the table, the images pinned to the walls in front of and behind me, the markings layered, scratched, or sketched in notebooks, the pages from books insistently revisited these last months, the memories that wane, escape, or insinuate themselves between these spaces. Developing a strategy for distracted observation."

Contributions by Anne Kerzerho, Christian Rizzo, Rostan Chentouf, Alix de Morant, Laurent Pichaud, Myrto Katsiki, Jocelyn Cottencin.

Poems presents four unpublished poems by American writer and actress Zoë Lund (1962–1999), written in the 1980s. An incandescent voice emerges, revealing the might, sincerity, and precision of her expression, as well as her vulnerability and defiance in the face of death. This is the first publication dedicated to her work.

Translated into French by Stephanie LaCava and Manon Lutanie, and presented in a bilingual volume (English, French), the poems are introduced by Stephanie LaCava, who retraces their genesis and examines the personality of their author:

"She is unsure of her identity, but hints at certain proclivities: action as the only true form of activism (sustained readiness to strike); a taste for contradictory characters (strength exists where there is also cowardice); romance. [...] Uninterested in mute beauty, Lund wanted to write and produce her own projects. In a news clipping from 1983, titled 'Young Political Filmmaker Shooting at Mount Holyoke,' there is a striking picture of Lund 'working on a film about the radicalization of a young woman,' per the caption. The article talks of her 'uncompromising idealism' and feelings about the naïveté of both American liberals and leftists.

Three years later, in 1986, 'Touchstone Levity' was written, and [...], the same year, "Opium Wars." The latter speaks to Lund's interest in drugs (she had a taste for heroin and would die of heart failure at thirty-seven)."

Printed offset in Italy on a matte, natural paper, stapled, the book also features black-and-white pictures of Lund taken in Paris by the filmmaker, critic, and activist Édouard de Laurot, then the author's partner, in the early 1980s. It's striking to see her in Paris on these images, smoking and posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, disheveled in a nightclub, caught on camera at a shooting range, at such a young age—when we know she would die in Paris fifteen years later. It seemed right to choose these images to accompany the poems, which were written in the same decade, and in the context of this French-American publication.

The current ecological crisis brings about a new relational landscape: an unprecedented collapse of distances creates interspecies promiscuities and a crisis of the human scale. In Inclusions, Nicolas Bourriaud proposes that artists are the anthropologists of this new era.

"Today, the ecological catastrophe challenges us to rethink the space our societies have assigned to art. Creativity, critical thinking, exchange, transcendence, the relationship to the Other and to History are values intrinsic to artistic practice that will soon be of vital importance for the future of mankind. We need art to give a meaning to our lives, and the banks will not supply that. By attempting to unfold a few of the aesthetic figures floating in the global imaginary, this book intends to describe what is at stake in artistic activity in the age of the Capitalocene and to argue for it as a vital need."

Nicolas Bourriaud (born 1965) is a French curator, theoritian and writer.

Composed of stories, fragmentary essays, and even press releases Stagg has been commissioned to write, Artless captures the media landscape lived and generated in New York during the past half decade. Since the 2016 publication of her debut novel Surveys, Stagg has positioned herself as an in-demand expert on, and critic of, the psychic experience of self-mythology within the cruelly optimistic metaverse of infinite branding. Part voyeur and part participant, Stagg continues her exploration of the branded identity and its elusive, bottomless desire for authenticity.

Natasha Stagg is the author of a novel, Surveys, and a collection, Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019. Her essays have appeared in the books Excellences and Perfections, Link in Bio: Art After Social Media, You Had To Be There: Rape Jokes, Intersubjectivity Vol. II: Scripting the Human, and 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art: The Present in Drag, among others.

Borderline Visible begins as a journey from Lausanne to Izmir in 2022 by two artist friends, one of whom experiences health problems halfway and has to stop. As the other continues towards Turkey, suddenly alone, the narration grows into a moving and troubled psychogeography as it shifts between “we” and “I”, present and past, piecing-together value and meaning from the very human ruins of aspiration, history, and language. Ant Hampton’s careful, at times miraculous, process of reconnection gradually lights up a constellation: voices and earthquakes, the Sephardic diaspora, tourism and forced movement, breakdowns and dementia, the end of the Ottoman Empire, swifts and swallows, Eliot’s The Waste Land and an urgent insight into hidden atrocities at the edge of Europe being funded from its centre.

Borderline Visible is created by the artist Ant Hampton, who is also co-director of the Time Based Editions series. With a deep focus on liveness, his performance work since 1999 has often involved guiding people through unrehearsed situations using automated devices and a subtle use of instructions and narration.

As with all Time Based Editions, an audio track combines narration, soundscape, and instructions that guide you over a given time through the book.

Moulded from clay, between 2021 and 2023, The subtle rules the dense is a series of ceramic chest plates, by the artist Phoebe Collings-James. Inspired by Makonde and Yoruba body masks and Roman muscle cuirasses, the sculptures explore the interplay between ritualistic objects’ violent histories and their contemporary presentation as fetishistic ornaments. This publication brings together responses to the series from artists SERAFINE1369 and Rehana Zaman and geographer Professor Kathryn Yusoff; exploring layered references to tarot, Shakespeare and post-colonial theory; probing the materiality and extractive politics of geology; and reflecting the plural multifaceted nature of Collings-James’ practice.

A series by Phoebe Collings-James

With Texts by Serafine1369, Rehana Zaman, Kathryn Yussof.

What is the relation between family misfortune and desire? Why must we bury the dead? What is to come for those unburied? How to distinguish the endless stream of graphic violence from violence that goes straight to the bone? How does language make up not only the law, but also unwritten laws?

In Let Them Rot Alenka Zupančič takes up the ancient figure of Antigone and finds a blueprint for the politics of desire. Not desire as consumption, enjoying what is offered, but desire’s oblivion to what came before. Such politics says: “No, this world must end and I will be the embodiment of that end.” This is not self-satisfied destruction for destruction’s sake; it is existence with consequences beyond the predictable. Zupančič asks: “Why desire?” And this question of desire, which may be the only question, takes the form of a no that is also an “I".

"Zupančič’s ideas are fresh, as if they hailed from some open air beyond the clutter of current theoretical quarrels. This brilliant account of Sophocles’s Antigone breaks new ground for philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political and feminist theory." — Joan Copjec, Brown University

"Writing my book on Antigone, I thought: “There we go, the subject is closed—let’s go to sleep.” And then along came Zupančič with her take and compelled me to rethink everything I did. In other words—and this is difficult for me to say—she is better than me here." — Slavoj Žižek

Alenka Zupančič is a Slovenian philosopher and social theorist. She is a professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts. She is the author of many books, including What Is Sex? (MIT Press, 2017), The Odd One In: On Comedy(MIT Press, 2008), and Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (Verso, 2000).

Mnemotope is a community magazine, published by bog bodies press. Mnemotope magazine takes this as its inspiration-it acts as a place in which lots of stories from across timelines and borders can sit together, and cultural memories can interact. It exists to create and hold the expression and knowledge of its diverse community, because of this, the contents of the magazine are wonderfully varied; some confessional poetry, some hastily notated recipes, some fiction, some history, lots of other things, all submitted during an open call. The format put spreads together of contributions that seem to somehow be in dialogue with one another.

The name of the magazine comes from a term that's used in writings about archaeological finds - it's a little complex when we speak about it abstractly, so take, for example, a bog body. A bog body is an object, but when we look at one it takes on another function as an image. This image is the part beyond the physicality of the object-it's what makes us think about what the world must have been like when this person was walking on it, what they looked like, what they did, who found them, how much the area they were found in must have changed and so on and so on and so on. A mnemotope is something that compresses time, and allows you to be in the bog two thousand years ago and in the museum looking at the body and at home reading about it all at once.

001 contributors:

kostek konopinski, zoé bruhat, pati fixl, franz, lucy hodge-sellers, mathieu kelhetter, nancy martin, åsa yli-luoma, lilou angelrath, camille, mahaut bonnel-emerand, alba ala-pietilä, réiltin o'hagan, joely lorenzen, tom shaw, weronika grec, sarah agerbæk, luca monnerjan, aleksandra fixl, lara, jonas dannacher, lucas garvey, iseult o'hagan, cami, sara blosseville, anwyn howarth, viivi yli luoma, alicja wawryn, kiki astner, boye leborg, melissa-poupouille and anonymous.

Première publication dédiée à l'œuvre singulière de l'artiste coréenne-américaine Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), à la croisée de la performance, de l'art conceptuel, de la vidéo et de la poésie, dont l'un des motifs principaux concerne sa représentation de l'Histoire, marquée par l'expérience de l'exil et de la migration, de la dislocation temporelle, culturelle, géographique et sociale.

Dans le courant de sa brève vie, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha a produit un travail artistique, littéraire et critique qui en fait une figure exemplaire, même si encore trop méconnue, de l'art contemporain américain. Est ici retracé ce parcours singulier qui se forge à la lumière d'une période exceptionnelle à la fois de l'histoire et de l'histoire de l'art. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha est à Berkeley en 1968, à Paris en 1976, à New York en 1980 et s'engage dans une pratique de l'art et de la pensée où sont brassés les concepts les plus novateurs des théories visuelles ou filmiques, de la philosophie, de la linguistique et de la littérature comparée. 

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Berkeley, 1968 est aussi une réflexion inédite sur la représentation de territoires culturels déplacés et leur rapport à la mémoire.

Historienne de l'art contemporain, Elvan Zabunyan est maître de conférences habilitée à l'université Rennes 2 et critique d'art. Ses recherches portent sur l'art nord-américain depuis les années 1960 et notamment le tournant 1970 autour des questions raciales et féministes. Elle travaille depuis le début des années 1990 sur les problématiques issues des cultural studies, des théories postcoloniales et des études de genre en cherchant à construire, grâce à ces pensées critiques, une méthodologie de l'histoire de l'art contemporain articulée autour d'une histoire culturelle, sociale et politique. Elle a publié Black is a color, une histoire de l'art africain américain (Dis Voir, 2004), co-dirigé plusieurs livres et a écrit de nombreux articles dans des ouvrages collectifs, des catalogues d'exposition et des périodiques.

A wry, cinematic tour through multiple forms: the poem, the vignette, the play—all set in our laughably lamentable contemporary world.

In three poems, one play, and three short stories, Stéphane Bouquet's Common Life offers a lively, searching vision of contemporary life, politics, and sociality. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is increasingly threatened across the globe, this book is a necessary exercise of the literary imagination: what, it asks, does it mean to inhabit the world together today? With humor and sincerity, Common Life imagines the utopias of collectivity, friendship and love that might enable hope for the present and the future.

Translated by Lindsay Turner

Le cinquième numéro de la revue d'art et de recherche « rétro-prospective » est consacré à l'artiste et performeuse Andrea Fraser, figure clé de l'art des années 1990 et 2000 et du courant de la « critique institutionnelle » (une monographie complétée par une grande enquête sur l'espace critique réalisée auprès d'une cinquantaine d'artistes, critiques et philosophes internationaux).

Avec contributions de Kader Attia, Eva Barto, Sophie Bonnet-Pourpet, Marie de Brugerolle, Gregory Buchert, Daniel Buren, Marie Canet, Gregory Castéra, Inès Champey, Thierry Chancogne, Claire Fontaine, François Cusset, Judith Deschamps, Paul Devautour, Philippe Durand, Joao Enxuto & Erica Love, Andrea Fraser, Nicolas Frespech, Dora García, Romain Grateau, Emmanuel Guez, Thomas Hirschhorn, Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quirós, Béatrice Josse, Franck Larcade, Ju Huyn Lee, Sven Lütticken, Fabrice Mabime, Bartomeu Mari, Chus Martínez, Gwenael Morin, Claire Moulène, Jean-Luc Moulène, Yan Moulier Boutang, Vincent Normand, François Pain, Gerald Petit, Anne Querrien, Thierry Raspail, Sinziana Ravini, Delphine Reist & Laurent Faulon, Christophe de Rohan Chabot, Phillippe Roux, Jean-Baptiste Sauvage, Thomas Schlesser, Ida Soulard, Fabien Steichen, Michel Surya, Emmanuel Tibloux, Vier 5, Ulf Wuggenig, Italo Zuffi.

Publication accompanying the exhibition Gernot Wieland (08.02.-05.07.2020). 

One can summarize Gernot Wieland and his work as an intertwining of the man, the artist, and the artwork. With Gernot, we experience in his artwork and in his presence more of a quiet, constant fascination with what is around him and what has affected or influenced or indeed shaped him sinde his childhood. These impressions - whether quirky memories or indeed tragic experiences and the non-stop grappliing with what has happened - arise in his artwork or in his conversation, whether directly or not. Alongside self-analysis and presentation through his artwork is an analysis of societal norms and indeed repressed aspects of society as it expresses itself, even violently, in hegemonic structures - in the classroom and upon children, for example. From his sketches or film narratives we catch a powerful glimpse upon a concentration of trauma, repression, and guilt placed upon his generation, an Austrian condition manifesting itself in obscene and absurd ways.