We are not where we need to be but, we ain't where we were is the first volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against that reports on active research engaged within the artistic professions and institutions since 2017. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world, by orienting our object of study towards the struggles that impact it. With this publication, our hope is to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the visibilization of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It is the result of militant experiences, at the convergence of our individual experiences and collective questionings.

With texts by Tiphanie Blanc, Antonella Corsani, Fanny Lallart, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ramaya Tegegne and an interview with Outrage Collectif.

Where Do You Draw The Line Between Art and Politics? consists of a series of interviews with individuals who have been active in various capacities at the intersection of art and politics. Between historical documentation, political memory, dialogic reflections and motivational support, the publication focuses on the experiences, commitments, and feelings that animate and inform aesthetic priorities in social spaces both within and outside of art institutions; a repository designed to inspire and enourage the politicization of aesthetics, as opposed to the aestheticization of politics. 

Davide Tidoni is an artist and researcher working with sound and listening. With a particular focus on direct experience, observation, and action, he creates works of different formats that include live performance, intervention, walk, video, audio recording, and text scores. He is interested in the use of sound and music in counter-culture and political struggles and has published a sound based field research on the northern italian ultras group Brescia 1911 (The Sound of Normalisation, 2018).

Published 2021.

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

Dutch/English.

Published 2020.

Everything Passes Except the Past takes an artistic and discursive approach to coming to grips with a colonial past that remains present in ethnographic museums, public space, and image archives.

The contributions in this book propose visionary theoretical, practical, and ethical foundations for future museums based on artistic and curatorial remediation of ethnographic collections. They also cover the role of colonial films in our collective and national memory, as well as the challenges and perspectives of tearing down or replacing monuments and renaming streets.

Contributions by Yaa Addæ Nantwi, Lotte Arndt, Andrés Antebi Arnó, Bianca Baldi, Daniel Blaufuks, Filipa César, Didi Cheeka, Clémentine Deliss, Karfa Diallo, Sally Fenaux Barleycorn, Alessandra Ferrini, Fradique, Pablo Gonzáles Morandi, Guido Gryseels, Jana J. Haeckel, Didier Houénoudé, Duane Jethro, Christian Kopp, Yann LeGall, Alberto López Bargados, Eloy Martín Corrales, Grace Ndiritu, Inês Ponte, Linda Porn, Tamer El Said, Bénédicte Savoy, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Mnyaka Sururu Mboro.

Graphic design: Caroline Wolewinski.

Paul Celan, arguably one of the mid-20th century's most important German-language poet, is commonly pigeonholed as a poet of the Holocaust, a term, however, he never used. Undoing facile assumptions about Celan, CORONA charts a more idiosyncratic and personal path through Celan's large oeuvre, choosing 103 poems from among the more than 900 Celan published.

The bilingual selection includes work from all of Celan's periods and genres. Without ignoring the poet's well-known work of memory and memorialization, it seeks to open a space for new appreciation of Celan's love poems, as well as his poems on political events, painful reflections on his stays in mental hospitals, and quasi-burlesque verse.

Susan H. Gillespie's translations are characterized by their ease of diction and their attention to the "somatic" and rhetorical aspects of Celan's lines, their sound, gait, tone, and gravity, as well as to their internal and external echoes. The latter, elucidated in notes to the poems, include references to other poets and to Celan's wide readings of everything from specialized dictionaries to other writers, what Roman Jakobson called their "poetic etymology." "Here, poetry is not what gets lost in translation," writes Gillespie in the Introduction, "it is, itself, an act of translation, of experience and thought, into new language."

Looking at cartographies through sexual dissidence facilitates a process of resignification that speaks in other terms, deals with other territories and breaks away from the hegemonic ideals of cartography. These are maps that do not intend to be utilitarian objects, but rather an exchange of perspectives and experiences around other ways of thinking of and occupying space. Being critical of hegemonic cartography entails questioning the forms of representation that are characterised by fixed categories of analysis. A non-representational cartography is interested in that which is not palpable; the invisible, the affectionate, the performative, the virtual and the fictional. These cartographies are born out of a curiosity to generate other spaces and other norms while creating and looking for other codes and other ways of narrating.

The cartographies by Kyle Lasky, Lucas LaRochelle and nucbeade included here are cemented with collective memory, personal experiences, intertwined desires, and fictionalised accounts. They refer to the different ways of living and inhabiting space through testimonies, photographs or other records that tell stories; stories that speak from memory, intimacy, fiction, places of resistance and vulnerability.

From December 11, 2015, until April 10, 2016, the German Library in Guangzhou, China, became The German Library Pyongyang, a reimagining of an initiative of the Goethe-Institut that originally operated in North Korea between 2004 and 2009. This temporary intervention by Sara van der Heide is an imaginary transformation of the current geography of the German Library in Guangzhou. Van der Heide’s project is a contemporary version of the Goethe-Institut’s original library initiative in North Korea, devised as a vessel to discuss national cultural policy in a post-Cold War and postcolonial era that looks critically toward the parallel histories of Germany and the two Koreas. The German Library Pyongyang offers a space for critical questions, but it also functions as a context for transcending thinking that is prescribed by the lines of the nation-state, language, and geography. The several artistic, linguistic, and graphic interventions in the library merge with the continuing activities of the German learning center in Guangzhou, and all institutional printed matter in Chinese is replaced by Korean.

This publication brings together the four original exhibition booklets in German, Korean, English, and Chinese. An additional reader is included with critical reflections as well as documentation of the exhibition and the organized seminar.

Design by Dongyoung Lee
English/German/Korean/Chinese

ERRARE/WANDERING/WONDERING is a publication by Lucia Palladino that brings together exercises and notes for wild outdoor walking practices in Contemplative Activism. This publication can be used for improvisation and choreographic composition for dancers and actors, but can also be used by everyone as maps for disorientation and deep listening.

Contemplative Activism is an ongoing research in decolonizing, anti-capitalistic practices for the body in relations to the landscape they are immersed in. You find the manifesto of CA inserted in the publication.  

Concept and words by Lucia Palladino
Design by Marzia Dalfini
Proofreading by Sarah Cale
Bookbinding by La Rivière Sèche and Lucia Palladino

Co-produced by Nadine for the WAB 2021.

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

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

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

Live and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories is a bilingual edition of short writings by Roee Rosen. At the heart of this collection are three provocative texts extracted from important artworks by Rosen, offered here as genre-defying literature at the intersection between reality and fiction, speculative narrative and historical-political critique, humor and eroticism.
Live and Die as Eva Braun (1995–97) leads the viewer through a virtual-reality scenario in the role of Hitler's lover.

The project stirred a public and political controversy when first shown in Israel. It was later recognized by many as a watershed work concerning the representation of trauma, Nazism, and the Holocaust. When the work was presented in New York, Linda Nochlin wrote, “The experience of Live and Die, both textual and visual, is unforgettable, like nothing else.” The film The Confessions of Roee Rosen (2008) offers yet another uncomfortable doubling of identity, in which three illegal female migrant workers serve as surrogates for the character “Roee Rosen.” As a text, these highly condensed monologues reveal themselves to be disorienting subversions of the tradition of literary confession. Finally, the script of Hilarious (2010) offers a torturously bad attempt at dysfunctional comedy, set in the Twin Towers as they collapse.

These three texts are complemented by three of Rosen's short political-aesthetic essays, chosen to reflect the theoretical underpinnings of his approach. The volume concludes with a conversation between the artist and the historian Moshe Zuckermann, an insightful critic of the political instrumentalization of the Holocaust. Live and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories is published on the occasion of Rosen's first survey exhibition in Germany, at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg, and was edited by its curators, Edit Molnár and Marcel Schwierin.

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

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

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

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

Cinquième édition de la série des lecteurs.

Recherches du groupe EAAPES initié par Clara Pacotte et Charlotte Houette autour des questions queer et de féminismes dans la littérature de science-fiction/fiction spéculative.

Contient des traductions de nouvelles de plusieurs autriX tirées du recueil Sisters of the Revolution publié par Ann & Jeff Vandermeer, des interviews, des textes originaux, des articles plus contemporains, des extraits de fictions déjà publiées.

Les textes en langue étrangère sont tous traduits en français.

Avec les contributions de Alexia Foubert, Antoine Trapp, Ariane Sirota, Barbara Sirieix, Camille Pageard, Dora Diamant, Hélène Baril, Laetitia Paviani, Loraine Furter, Louise Truc, Luz De Amor, Mélodie Simonnet, Mirion Malle, Rosanna Puyol, Roxanne Maillet, Théo Robine Langlois.

Pub. dec 2018

Recherches du groupe EAAPES initié par Clara Pacotte et Charlotte Houette autour des questions queer et de féminismes dans la littérature de science-fiction/fiction spéculative.

Contient des traductions des essais de Joanna Russ du recueil To Write Like A Woman, des interviews à la Wiscon, des textes originaux, des articles plus contemporains, des extraits de fictions déjà publiées.

Les textes en langue étrangère sont tous traduits en français.

Avec les contributions de Adèle Iris, Adèle Rolland, Maïwenn Le Mouée, Esmé Planchon, Nana Benamer, Josèfa Ntjam, FLG.

Pub. 2018

"1 Million Roses for Angela Davis" traces Davis' immense influence and legacy as activist and scholar on contemporary artists today, while simultaneously teasing out the contradictions her presence and agenda posed to the GDR's interpretation and application of Marxism.

"A Million Roses for Angela Davis" was the motto of a 1970–72 solidarity campaign in East Germany in support of US philosopher, Communist, and Black Power revolutionary Angela Davis, who at the time was being held on terrorism charges in California.

The large-scale movement firmly anchored the "heroine of the other America" within the cultural memory of a now-vanished social utopia, which after her acquittal welcomed her as a state guest. For her part, Davis had hoped for an internationalist movement promoting a socialist, feminist, and non-racist democracy—the antithesis of her experiences of violence and oppression as a Black woman in the United States. This moment of hope provides the historical starting point for the exhibition at the Albertinum in Dresden. The group show features archival materials, historical portraits of Davis by state painters of the GDR, new commissions, and other works by an array of contemporary artists focusing on the issues that the now emeritus professor campaigned for at the time, which are still pressing today. It aspires to initiate discussion on the background, flaws, and unfulfilled potential of the unusual relationship between Davis and the GDR.

The contributions in this accompanying reader unfold how Davis's iconic image came to be inscribed within a global history of resistance, and introduce all of the participating artists with short texts.    

"And if we believe that revolutions are possible, then we have to be able to imagine different modes of being, different ways of existing in society, different social relations. In this sense art is crucial. Art is at the forefront of social change. Art often allows us to grasp what we cannot yet understand." —Angela Davis

Works by Yael Bartana, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sophie Calle, Contemporary And, Sadie Barnette, CHTO DELAT?, Melvin Edwards, Ângela Ferreira, Bernhard Franke, Coco Fusco, Ellen Gallagher, Claudia Martínez Garay, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Arthur Jafa, Steffani Jemison & Justin Hicks (Mikrokosmos), Iris Kensmil, Hassan Khan, Kapwani Kiwanga, Raja Lubinetzki & Petra Schramm, Julie Mehretu, Heinz-Detlef Moosdorf, Senga Nengudi, Ahmet Öğüt, Slavs and Tatars, Julia Phillips, Alex Martinis Roe, Elske Rosenfeld, Anri Sala, Willi Sitte, Cauleen Smith, Nancy Spero, Gabriele Stötzer, Strawalde (Jürgen Böttcher), Nasan Tur, Lewis Watts, Carrie Mae Weems, Christoph Wetzel, Charles White, Heinz Wodzicka. 

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, from October 10, 2020 to January 24, 2021.

Sanna Helena Berger, Costanza Candeloro, Yves Citton, Noémie Degen & Simon Jaton, Guillaume Maraud, Anna-Livia Marchionni, Deborah Müller, Benjamin Mengistu Navet, Madeleine Paré, Salome Schmuki, Fabrice Schneider, Alan N. Shapiro, Axelle Stiefel, Elisa Storelli, Eva Zornio.

Trilingual Edition 
FR/DE/EN

Editor Axelle Stiefel
Design Salome Schmuki

Aleen Solari’s work is shaped profoundly by insights into various subcultures. These insights are partly drawn from her own experiences, partly borrowed from members of certain scenes who she invites to be part of her work. Her sculptural practice moves in and out of life within these groups, and is full of codes and quotations from antifa members, football hooligans, bored youth clubs or those embedded in neonazi networks. 

Direct Into Chaos is a book that dives deep into these worlds, shape-shifting between fiction, documentation and artwork. In ghost written texts, Solari fictionalises her own artistic biography, morphing interviews with football hooligans who had their phones tapped by the police, into a dream world where they receive generous compensation for years lived under surveillance. 

In this publication – in a chaotic, dreamlike state of mind – fiction and documentation, art and activism meld into something new.
Aleen Solari is an artist who lives in Hamburg, Germany

how to become a motherfuckinelegist est une revue créée par un collectif de gouines & féministes à Paris. Elle publie les recherches menées pendant les workshops d’écriture & traduction : How to become a lesbian. Ces ateliers sont gratuits et se déroulent toutes les deux semaines à Paris, en non-mixité (pas d'hommes cis).

Being is een tijdloze liefdesbrief en handleiding van en voor zwarte vrouwen. Dit boek is een collectie van reflecties over vrouw- én zwart-zijn in België. In de twee landstalen Nederlands en Frans verenigen wij, zwarte vrouwen, non-fictie essays, literaire beschouwingen, poëzie, activistische en academische teksten rond onze zoektocht naar vrijheid. Dit boek is een eerbetoon aan onze ouderen, onze heldinnen en onze zusters.

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Nous sommes des Femmes Noires, poétesses, militantes, universitaires, littéraires et essayistes engagées dans des causes afroféministes, antiracistes et décoloniales.

Nous sommes ces Afro-belges néerlandophones et francophones indignées par des siècles d’esclavages coloniaux, de violences et de discriminations raciales.

Nous sommes ces Afrodescendantes qui marquent ici le refus des diverses formes d'impositions qu’elles subissent structurellement et quotidiennement.

Nous sommes ces Femmes aux identités Tierces que l’on oppresse et qui pourtant, à l’aune de l’érosion du pouvoir des bourreaux sur nos corps, nos âmes et nos esprits, réfléchissent à leur condition et travaillent à leur empowerment.

Nous sommes ces Africaines stigmatisées, invitées à rejeter nos origines et qui pourtant vous livrent ici une lettre d’amour intemporelle à toutes les Femmes Noires, à celles qui ont peur et celles luttent.

Nous sommes ces immortelles qui rendront hommage à nos aînées, nos héroïnes, à notre filiation de Résistances. Ce manuel d’émancipation trace les chemins de notre liberté et de notre résilience ; par nous, pour nous !

Impose our freedom.

- Mireille-Tsheusi Robert

Auteurs

The first monograph on Christiane Blattmann takes its title from her solo show Un-Break My Walls at Kunsthalle Münster in 2019. Blattmann intricately interweaves, intermeshes, combines, compounds, merges, and processes in her work not only materials but also structures, things, stories, characters. The volume includes extensive illustrations of exhibitions, projects, and works, and a great number of black-and-white images capture the artist’s studio practice. The interactions of materials, along with theoretical and literary references, serve as important points of departure, and the emblematic outcomes involve text and texture as material structure and patterned surface; vivid condensation and entanglement; and invitations to exploration and reflection. The book compiles different elements designed on a series of shifting layers. Texts by Merle Radtke and Chloe Stead and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark provide insight into Blattmann’s art, complemented by a piece of fiction by Huw Lemmey.

Texts by Merle Radtke, Huw Lemmey, and Chloe Stead, and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark

Femme Ghosts is the result of Mona Kareem’s residency at Poetry International 2019, published in collaboration with Publication Studio Rotterdam. In this series of eight poems, Kareem continues her echoing of women’s voices—the pirate women, busy with their dreams, dwelling on future pasts, indulging in their loneliness. Femme Ghosts is double-direction bound trilingual publication, and includes Kareem’s poetry in Arabic, English and Dutch. 

Companion reader for Under Current, an exhibition and film by Alice dos Reis. With 'Blue Carbon' by Holly Childs, 'Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water' by Astrida Neimanis, 'King Tide' by Sophia Al-Maria, 'Notes on a Dotted Red Wave' by Danea Io, 'Smart Oceans, Alien Times: Octopi Engineering' by Bogna M. Konior, 'To a Current's Ear' by Alice dos Reis and more. Bilingual edition (Spanish-English).