Books

A critical exploration of the values and qualities inherent in independent educational organizations and the hurdles in the way of remaining "alternative" with the passing of time.

Grounded in empirical research, Alternative Pedagogical Spaces: From Utopia to Institutionalization is a critical inquiry into the establishment, development, and transformation of alternative pedagogical and social spaces. Written by Anna Colin, a former director and co-founder of Open School East, an independent art school and community space founded in London in 2013, this essay-length book explores the instituting factors, organizational life cycles, and alignments and misalignments between values and practices that permeate such a project. The essay delves into the qualities and prerequisites for what Colin calls "multi-public educational organizations." It also scrutinizes the hurdles associated with the effort to remain alternative, including processes of habituation, temptation or pressure to scale up, ethos-bending fundraising exercises, and long tenure, as well as the plain desire for stability and sustainability.

Alternative Pedagogical Spaces proposes where to look for a reconceptualization of waiting, slowness, and longevity, and asks how these ideas may benefit cultural practice and the design of future institutions (or the redesign of existing ones). Overriding the common assumption that success equals longevity, the author searches for institutional models that resist chrononormativity, drawing from social movements, psychotherapy, biology, and permaculture.

Mousse celebrates its 90th issue with a collectible edition, with a special design and format, entirely focused on fiction.

Bringing together a cohort of writers and artists, Mousse #90 – The Fiction Issue stems from the eponymous Fiction column that has dwelled in our pages for five years, and expands its scope. It was developed together with Rosanna McLaughlin, Skye Arundhati Thomas, and Izabella Scott, who collectively coedited the art and literature quarterly The White Review between 2021 and 2023.

Here you'll find reprints from both Mousse and The White Review as well as new stories and translations we have jointly commissioned. Seven interludes, intended to open up other worlds through images, feature portfolios of drawings by Atelier dell'Errore, Michael E. Smith, Camille Henrot, Michael Landy, Simone Forti, Adelaide Cioni, and Evelyn Taocheng Wang.

An analysis of Mike Kelley's work as a position in materialist philosophy, which appears as the feature that is most at stake in his artistic practice, focusing on the pieces he produced around the issue of memory––his leitmotiv from 1995 onward.

Mike Kelley is best known as one of the most influential visual artists of his generation. But he was also an insightful theorist who wrote profusely about his work as well as on aesthetics in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, an epoch marked, in his view, by victim culture and the pop psychology phenomenon known as repressed memory syndrome. Mike Kelley: Materialist Aesthetics and Memory Illusions presents the artist in a new light, almost as an empirical philosopher delivering his position through art as well as writing. In a meticulous and transdisciplinary approach, Laura López Paniagua presents Kelley's oeuvre as a stance in materialist aesthetics and weaves thoughtful relations between the artist's critique, statements, and comments and the theories of thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. López Paniagua focuses on Kelley's artistic production between 1995 and his death in 2012, analyzing these works vis-à-vis the concept of memory, one of the artist's obsessions and leitmotivs throughout his career.

Essay by Laura López Paniagua; introduction by John Miller.

The collected writings of artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, along with the stories behind them told by Alexis Vaillant.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz was an acclaimed visual artist known for his performances, installations and curatorial flair. He was also a writer. This volume, the first comprehensive collection of writings by the artist, includes seminal interviews, chitchats, jokes, performance reports, insightful statements and letters in essay form, as well as rare documents, such as early surviving leaflets, typewriter handouts and hard-to-find articles. Spanning 1971–2023, the book unlocks the work of an artist considered to be a refreshing role model for a new generation of culture mavens and style savants.

Drawing from literature, modernist architecture, interior design, art theory, glam rock and camp culture, the collection reveals the artist's inner self alongside the art, social flânerie and the goings-on of his time. Entertaining and witty, the texts stand out brilliantly with their early acumen and inclusivity, while setting a new template for an expression of queerness through writing. With access to Chaimowicz's personal material and photographs, curator and editor Alexis Vaillant is a guide to the artist's writings. Vaillant provides behind-the-scenes commentary and context—a time capsule of pleasure featuring Andy Warhol, Des Esseintes, Josef Frank, David Bowie, Vito Acconci, Eileen Gray, Alex Kapranos, Jean Cocteau, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean Genet, Bob Dylan, Emma Bovary and Roger Cook, among others.

Edited by Alexis Vaillant.

This publication is the fourth volume in a series that documents Tarek Atoui's project Waters' Witness. Created in collaboration with French photographer and Atoui's long-term collaborator, Alexandre Guirkinger, it is intended as a visual embodiment of the work's development for Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, from the research and recording in Sydney's Port Botany, La Perouse and Frenchmans Bay, to the installation as sculptural and sonic composition in the Museum's Macgregor Gallery.

Waters' Witness is an exhibition that combines elements of artist and composer Tarek Atoui's ongoing project dedicated to capturing the sounds of harbour cities, from Athens to Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Beirut, Porto, Istanbul and now Sydney. The project encompasses an installation, performances, an archive of sounds and publications, that continually evolve as each new harbour is added.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia publication Tarek Atoui: Waters' Witness is the fourth volume in an international series of photographic books that form part of the Waters' Witness project. Produced in partnership with Atoui's long-term collaborator, French photographer Alexandre Guirkinger, the publication captures and articulates the Sydney components of this dynamic contemporary artwork.

Texts by Suzanne Cotter, Tarek Atoui, Anna Davis.

An exploration of the soundscape of coastal cities by the French-Lebanese artist.

Tarek Atoui's exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Waters' Witness, is based on the artist's ongoing project I/E, initiated in 2015, in which Atoui documents the human, ecological, historical and industrial realities of coastal cities such as Athens, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Beirut or Porto by means of sound recordings.
As an accompaniment and an extension of the exhibition, Mudam is publishing Waters' Witness #02, the third volume in a series initiated by the Serralves Museum dedicated to this ambitious and collaborative project, which seeks to explore the different ways in which sound can be experienced.

This publication includes an interview between Tarek Atoui and his long-time collaborator, artist and musician Éric La Casa; a visual contribution by photographer Alexandre Guirkinger; a rich iconography including views of the exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg and an introduction by curators Sarah Beaumont and Joel Valabrega.

Notebook from the South African artist featuring fountain pen's drawings and writings with inserted typescripts.

William Kentridge is at the same time painter, sculptor, engraver, decorator, theater and film director, actor, poem-performer… In that way, he is a “total artist”, next of kin to Jan Fabre, but whose is mainly concern by apartheid, post-colonialism, general history and the drain of time.

Stop Here, written and drawn with a fountain pen, is published at editions jannink in the collection “L'Art en écrit”. The tree is the main figure of this book. Here we find the main codes which belong to the artist—palimpsest and repetition—through which we are plunged in a metaphoric reflexion. It creates an analogy between book and tree, which is represented as the mother-source of creation before being transformed in a gibbet. Kentridge pursues his meanders where he evokes at the same time the smell of bakelite, vermouth risotto, a cemetery in the Congo, Sibyl, Cranach, the Winterreise, as well as his father, lawyer of Nelson Mandela.

The Anarchist Review of Books publishes intelligent, non-academic writing with an anti-authoritarian perspective. We are dedicated to transforming society through literature and through open, incisive critique of the media, politics, history, art and writing that shape our world.

Cover image: Fever by David Wojnarowicz 1988-89. Gelatin silver prints. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P·P·O·W, New York

This book brings together a selection of photographs by artist Mekhitar Garabedian, documenting the warehouse of his late father’s company, Melantex, which exported second-hand clothing from Belgium to the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The images inspired a one-year sculptural intervention by Garabedian, commissioned by the Antwerp Public Art Collection.

Import—Export, Friperie tells a compelling personal and collective story of how displacement can be turned into economic livelihood while creating connections between old and new homes, languages, and textiles.

The photographs are accompanied by an in-depth conversation between Garabedian and curator Samuel Saelemakers about the relationship between photography and sculpture, public representation, and diasporic thinking.

Compiling works from nearly five decades, Headwaters (and Other Short Fictions) provides the first comprehensive overview of the narrative and experimental writing of Lucy R. Lippard. While she is best known for her pioneering work as an art writer and activist, Lippard’s fiction helps frame her broader impact on contemporary culture.

Headwaters anthologizes over fifty short works, many previously unpublished. These often experimental vignettes showcase the range of her literary voice while also challenging our understanding of her oeuvre. Sometimes speculative or fragmented, yet always compelling, these pieces range from short-form narrative stories and conceptual fiction to visual essays and political prose.

Included are excerpts from two never-released novels, as well as collaborations with artists Robert Barry, Sol LeWitt, and Jerry Kearns.

Lucy Lippard is author of thirty books on contemporary art and cultural criticism. She has curated some fifty exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

Edited by Jeff Khonsary

This idiosyncratic publication assembled by Berlin-based dancer and visual artist Emma Waltraud Howes and her collaborators operates from the viewpoint that embodied history offers important information for survival. Through live performances and material works, Howes explores how notation and scores can be used to navigate the everyday and act as a basis for practical exercises that help to maintain a tether amidst the chaos. The paginated choreography Scores for Daily Living is the second K. publication by Howes, following Ankyloglossia (2014); by relaying variations on rhythm and gait, gravity and grace, this new volume shares with readers a series of poetic engagements focusing on different states of self-empowerment and the connections between labor, ritual, and civilization.

Emma Waltraud Howes works as a translator between movement and form. Her focus is on the development of an expanded choreographic practice that incorporates public interventions, kinaesthetic and architectural research, and graphic scores for performances. Her interdisciplinary works are informed by her background in dance, performance theory, and the visual arts and are guided by observations of bodily gestures.

Emma Waltraud Howes, Scores for Daily Living. With texts by Federica Bueti, Emma Wolf-Haugh, Anna Karpenko, and Maria Veie Sandvik. With editing by Mark Soo and photography by Trevor Good. German translation by Isabel Bredenbröker and Verena Buttmann. Concept & design by Emma Waltraud Howes and Franziska Morlok.

What do we start with when telling a story — What tensions activate it — What does it promise — What do we want from it — How do we deliver it — Must it have an end — What about a story which never began — Stories we wish were told — Stories which have always been there — Stories we don’t know how to start.

Beginnings is a collective attempt at questioning protocols and forms of narration, initiated by Manon Michèle. The publication gathers textual and visual works from twenty-nine artists, writers and collectives. With two covers, ninety-six pages, and no end, the publication remains in flux, with no definitive conclusions but the shape of an ongoing question: Where do we start and where might the act of arriving lead.

There’s bodies thrusted through motion, accelerations, collapses, into the folly of life, death, borders and language. There’s following intuition, rabbits, leaders, and the shape of clouds, switching from script to script to escape latched circles and compliance. There’s braiding together clashing dimensions and vital landmarks, processing ghosts to reclaim space, feeding them to trusted spirits. There’s foreseeing new shapes, and believing in what grows. There’s the poetry of saving what can be saved and the pull of letting go. There’s so much to begin with

Contributors
Alice dos Reis, Anaïs Fontanges, Anna Bierler, Auriane Preud’homme, Bravas Graphix, Calli Uzza Layton, Clara Pasteau, Cleo Tsw, D-E-A-L, Elina Birkehag, Eliott Déchamboux, Emilie Pitoiset, Heleen Mineur, Hyo Young Chu, Josefina Anjou, Juliette Lepineau, Kimberley Cosmilla, Manon Michèle, Maria Paris, Marie-Mam Sai Bellier, Mathis Perron, Mia Trabalon, Pablo Bardinet, Pays de Glossolalie, Philip Ullman, Raphaël Massart, Sanae Oujjit, Silvana Mc Nulty, Yunie Chae

Beginnings was edited and designed by Manon Michèle and Oliver Boulton, and published by Ex. Coda, 2025.

Acting like an academic endpoint, cuneiform everything.

Conlan Eliseu is a vampire and an out-of-vogue fashion stylist who takes a job as an advisor at the Gatlin Finishing School, a three-year vocational program for talented teens in a theatre town. Human teen Doeke Schreyer wants to be a star and isn’t afraid of hard work. He just can’t seem to get it. Will his corporeal charms help him exceed the curse on his name, inherited from his adoptive parents?

Confidences / Production deals with the process of keeping the past alive, whether as image or restaging. It is the fourth instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which uses the figure of the vampire as shorthand for cultural movement. Following Confidences / Baseline, Confidences / Majority, and Confidences / Oracle, this new episode contains excerpts or elements from scripts by the artist, as well as documents and reflections on the tradition and transmission of theatre. 

Ivan Cheng (b. 1991, Sydney) produces films, objects, paintings and publications as anchors for the staging of complex and precarious spectacles. His background as a performer and musician form the basis for his using performance as a critical medium and questioning publics and accessibility. He holds an MFA in Critical Studies from Sandberg Instituut. His performances, works and writings have been recently presented at Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; galerie Édouard Montassut, Paris; Villa Imperiale, Pesaro; OCTO, Marseille; Volksbühne Roter Salon, Berlin; gta Exhibitions, Zurich; and Mind Eater Festival, Oslo. In 2017 he initiated the project space bologna.cc in Amsterdam.

Confidences / Production is published in collaboration with Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Naarm/Melbourne, in conjunction with the presentation of the project, Ivan Cheng: NP in September 2024.

In this essay, written in English and French, Vilnius-based artist Anastasia Sosunova unfolds her research on the history of printing, from Daniel Hopfer’s etchings to underground printers from the Soviet era, and connected the printing “matrix” to the mother figure, referencing Ocean Vuong and Guadalupe Nettel.

Ocean Vuong writes, “I’m not a monster. I’m a mother”; Jeanette Winterson: “She was a monster but she was my monster.” And thus, the monster I refer to is the one that gives birth to the prints that shape the tongues, fears, and beliefs of vast groups of people. Books of marvels and beasts, now considered emblems of a dark age of ignorance and superstition, proliferated in the 15th and 16th centuries thanks to emergent printing technologies and the influential naturalists they helped create. In the illustrations of scientific explorations by Fortunio Liceti, Athanasius Kircher, or Ulisse Aldrovandi, the lines between fact and fiction were irrelevant as they were impossible to discern.

This chapbook is published as part of the project “Mi-Monstre Mi-Livre,” organised by After 8 Books, Ariel Ink, Publication Studio Paris and Six Chairs Books, during a residency at Aperto, Paris, in the framework of the Lithuanian Season in France.

Suzon — both a reprint of Raimundas Malašauskas sold-out book Paper Exhibitions from 2012 and a new collection of writings by the author that have happened since — offers a window onto Malasauskas' worldview, based on collective improvisation, congregation and continuous drift. It includes essays, exhibition guides, personal letters, song lyrics, an opening speech and a cocktail recipe offering a glimpse of what perhaps in a few years we will look back upon as L'esprit du temps.

The publication Suzon is printed on the reverse of the revised edition of Paper Exhibition, which was originally published in 2012 by Sternberg Press, Kunstverein Publishing, Sandberg Institute, and the Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt (Baltish Arts Magazine).

Editors: Tom Engels, Yana Foqué & Krist Gruijthuijsen
Design: Goda Budvytytė
Copy-editor: Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey
Printer: Graphius, Ghent
Publishers: KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Grazer Kunstverein (Graz), Kunstverein Publishing (Amsterdam), Baltish Arts Magazine (Vilnius) and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König (Köln).
ISBN: 978-3-7533-0767-1

The Queen’s Ball ingests taboo as fuel for a baroque and spiraling story of love in its most prismatic and absurd iterations. Through frightening distortions and hallucinogenic twists of fate, a demented circus of artists, writers, gender-hustling aesthetes, and religious fanatics collude in a glorious discombobulation of propriety and convention. I have never laughed this much at a novel that could somehow shock even the most irreverent of libertines, demanding, at times, absolute disgust. Truly nasty work. Iconic. —Juliana Huxtable

Translated by Kit Schluter
Afterword and notes by Thibaud Croisy, translated by Olivia Baes

Set among the flamboyant demi-monde of the 1970s Paris underground, The Queens’ Ball follows the narrator Copi in his attempt to write a novel as life comes undone around him. His Roman lover Pietro is stolen by a Marilyn Monroe impersonator whose coterie take up residence in Copi’s flat and pump out low-budget pornographic rags and films. His friends leave him, burnt out from the theatrical excess of the decade. And worst of all his editor keeps calling him, demanding to know where the book is. Propelled by Copi’s careening prose and incisive humor, The Queens’ Ball swerves from Paris to Ibiza to New York and back again in a whirlwind frenzy of love, loss, and madness. Featuring an illuminating critical appendix by Copi’s current French editor, Thibaud Croisy, Kit Schluter’s rhapsodic translation marks the début of Copi’s world-renowned fiction in English.

The Queen’s Ball is a heedless novel of transformation of bodies and tenses, a novel of enormity and loss which is, in the end, about writing a novel. Copi is a feckless romantic-his theme is the persistence of love in the phantasmagoria. His tender psychos hurtle through increasingly outré adventures that seem to expand and contract like accordions. Here is crime à la française. Here is a great queen’s verbal aggression, radiant detail, and joyous destructive energy. —Robert Glück

The Queens’ Ball is probably Copi’s masterpiece... By 1978, Copi was already an aesthetic: The Queens’ Ball was the magnet, the inverted whirlpool that brought that aesthetic to the surface. —César Aira

This book is called Unconscious/Television; it is a book that is informed by my discontent with aspects of psychoanalysis, in both its clinical and theoretical dimensions, and the way Lacanian psychoanalysts deal with language. Also, this book aims at posing, because of psychoanalysis, philosophical problems—twisting concepts—that will entangle art and the production of thought.

Within the Lacanian framework, practices are too attached to a notion of the unconscious that is structured as language; especially in relation to the Lacanian proposition that followed Sigmund Freud. With structuralism, which highlights and strengthens the division between nature and culture, Jacques Lacan thinks that Freudian concepts, and his positioning of the unconscious as the cause, should be elaborated or reconfigured as language, with language being the structure of the unconscious, representation operating with signifiers within this structure, and the signifier representing the subject to another signifier.

Above all, what I have been concerned with is a certain relationship to the Other—that is the symbolic, alienation in language, the master signifier—and how stuck we are with this neurotic comprehension of the clinical and the theoretical, and how we need psychotic or perverse possibilities in order to invent new things, new lives, new bodies and worlds, new concepts and thoughts. (Note from the introduction)

Published by Art-O-rama, FRAEME, this book is not exactly a notebook, nor is it a portfolio, an archive, or a memoir. H. is the first volume of HaYoung. This monograph takes the form of a narrative puzzle, a journey through translations: from one language to another, from one medium to another and from one space to another. H. is the beginning of a pattern, a silence, non-binary code, an ego trip, a reflection on identity, a punchline, a love story, or even a hot potato.

In 152 pages, arranged by designer Chloé Delchini, HaYoung's drawings are superposed and become rhizomatic narrators evolving over the course of the nine chapters. In their work, in life as in this book, HaYoung's voice persists in the margins around Western structures. The artist's writing proliferates within this rigid system of grids, adapting to it, attempting to communicate, creating misunderstandings, and deconstructing it.

With contributions from Aude Christel Mgba, Nelle Gevers, Sarah Netter, Anne Vimeux and Théo Casciani. H. is a book of a voice that constantly updates itself.

‘Rave vertelt verhalen uit het leven in het diepst van de nacht.’ Er wordt gefeest, gedronken, drugs genomen. Er wordt gepraat over wil de ideeën en banaliteiten. Dansvloeren, nachtclub krochten, wc’s, parkings en achterafjes worden aangedaan in München, Berlijn, Ibiza. Er wordt gevreeën, op de dealer gewacht en bij ochtend krieken overlegd waar de afterparty voor de preparty voor de volgende party zal doorgaan. ‘Ieder uur sleept een van zo’n weekend in exces fataal verwoeste zich ergens over de heel normale dagdagelijkse mensenstraten f inaal afgemaakt voort.’ Daartussen samplet en mixt Goetz af en toe stemmen van bepaalde producers, tv en krantenredacteurs en andere mediaspelers die ook de realiteit van rave, een gesofisticeerd gecodeerd soort outsider kunst van allemaal insiders, denken te kunnen vatten. Voor lange scheldtirades is er, anders dan in Gestoord, geen plaats. Er moet immers gefeest worden. Rave: de zich steeds herhalende extase van het basale, rave als esthetische theorie en sociale praktijk, als radicale utopie, in de absoluut tegenwoordige tijd. ‘Kom hier, vallende ster.’

De Duitse cultauteur Rainald Goetz (1954) maakte naam als scherp zinnig waarnemer van media en popcultuur, in teksten waarin hij neo-expressionisme en sociaal realisme vermengt met de nerveuze schrijfsels van beat en popauteurs. Goetz is een van de belangrijkste en interessantste stemmen van de hedendaagse Duitse literatuur en ontving meerdere literaire prijzen, waaronder de Georg Büchner Preis 2015. Eerder verscheen bij het balanseer Gestoord, Sebastian Roths vertaling van Irre (1983).

Sebastian Roth (°1991) behaalde een bachelor Taal- en Letterkunde (Engels – Duits), een master Westerse Literatuur en een master Journalistiek. Hij schreef voor Knack Focus, vertaalde nieuwsartikels en reportages voor Knack en werkte mee aan Helblauw (2018), een vertaling van Hellblau (2001) van de Duitse auteur, dj en muzikant Thomas Meinecke door een vijftigkoppig vertaalcollectief.

What is breath for? What is archive? Why write a poem, instead of... something else?

Theophylline is a work of poetry motivated by asthma, seeking poetry’s futurity in a queer and female heritage. Moure crosses a border to engage the poetry of three American modernists—Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, and Angelina Weld Grimké—as a translator might enter work to translate it. But what if that work is already in English?

I looked for women who had made and were formed by
migrations, and who were in some way marked ‘qustionably’
by the socius, and I examined what I could of the forms and
shapes of their migrations—

Delving into the center of the endless webs of repression against our bodies, desires, politics, and imaginations, are those whose actions and motion cut away at the systemic limitations of society–this collection of poems was written with the inspiration and work of these people in mind.

As a working class queer poet, Conrad has had to fight through different stratifications of oppression his entire life. His poems vibrate with the flamboyant desire that manifests itself in queer culture, where the right to act on basic desires can become a battleground, and everyday acts of love and devotion must be enacted as a political form of defiance. Deviant Propulsion is dedicated to the elimination of fear. The title refers to the idea that those who are deviant propel the world forward at top speed. The poems that emerge from this life-long struggle illustrate the sharp edge of that defiance and desire, where joy is closely linked to death. In a world ruled by those who govern with fear, and in a landscape barbed with those who are terrified of desire, moving at speed of deviants is the only way to transform potential into action, and desire into positive change.

CAConrad is the author of nine books of poetry and essays, including their latest book JUPITER ALIGNMENT: (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals and While Standing in Line for Death, which won a Lambda Book Award. A documentary about their work, The Book of Conrad, is viewable online on their website.

Questions to open the portal into parallel lives. This book is comprised of the hypothetical questions that propose to imagine alternate realities. Best practiced with a partner, every question can be used as a conversation starter to explore a different version of yourself and of each other. By Dmitry Paranyushkin and Diego Agulló

On disastrology, unlucky stars, paradoxes of fate seducing chaos and other impossible love stories.

This text finds the intimate affinity between dance and philosophy in the concept of problem and invites the reader to perceive dance and philosophy as a form of ballistics: the art of throwing.