Hardscapes / Here documents and brings together two exhibition projects by artists Nina Canell and Maria Hassabi. Produced on the occasion of the exhibitions of the same name curated by Samuele Piazza at the OGR Torino, the publication consists of two graphically specular books that merge into a single volume. Essays, unpublished materials and a rich set of photographic materials form the driving force behind two visual narratives that offer new keys to understanding the research of the two artists.

Hassabi's live installation Here calls on visitors to share space and spend time with six performers portrayed in a decelerated rhythmic choreography within a sculptural environment. In constant motion, the dancers contribute to a situation of shifting presence, demonstrating the contestable nature of the "here and now." Immobility and slowing down are thus used both as techniques and as subjects of representation: the performing bodies oscillate between dance and sculpture, subject and object, living body and static image.

Canell's Hardscapes combines two works that focus on the concepts of circulation and transformation as well as on unexpected forms of coexistence. Energy Budget (2017–18), a video that alternates between two subjects: a basement in which a leopard snail crawls over an electrical panel, and the gradual shifting of the frame away from "dragon gates"—portal-like openings in huge buildings on the Hong Kong waterfront. Muscle Memory (16 Tonnes) (2020–21) is a floor sculpture, decomposed and transformed by the density of moving bodies, which literally crumbles under the soles of passing visitors.

In addition to texts by the curator, the publication includes essays by Felicia Leu and Laura Preston, along with a conversation by Maria Hassabi and Nina Canell with Lorenzo Giusti.

Published on the occasion of the epoymous exhibitions at OGR Torino in 2022.

Edited by Samuele Piazza.
Texts by Lorenzo Giusti, Felicia F. Leu, Samuele Piazza, Laura Preston.

A kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 

Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, and mystery, Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman's long-awaited first full-length book: a kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Written over a short period "in the spirit" of RWF, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as Penman's equivalent of what Baudelaire was to Benjamin: an urban poet in the turbulent, seeds-sown, messy era just before everything changed. Beautifully written and extraordinarily compelling, echoing the fragmentary works of Roland Barthes and Emil Cioran, Eduardo Galeano and Alexander Kluge, this story has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema, and revolution.

This collection of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's film scripts vividly evokes the close connection between their influential work as theorists and their work as filmmakers. It includes scripts for all six of Mulvey and Wollen's collaborative films, Wollen's solo feature film, Friendship's Death (1987), and Mulvey's later collaborations.

Each text is followed by a new essay by a leading writer, offering a critical interpretation of the corresponding film. The collection also includes Wollen's short story Friendship's Death (1976), the outlines for two unrealised Mulvey and Wollen collaborations, and a selection of scanned working documents. The scripts and essays collected in this volume trace the historical significance of a complex cinematic project that brought feminist, semiotic and psychoanalytic concerns together with formal devices and strategies.

The book includes original contributions from Nora M. Alter, Kodwo Eshun, Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Esther Leslie, Laura Mulvey, Volker Pantenburg, Griselda Pollock, B. Ruby Rich and Sukhdev Sandhu.

Since its debut as a consumer medium in the 1960s, video has shaped our opinions, our politics and our societies. On our phones and computer screens, walls and streets, it defines new spaces and experiences—spreading memes, lies, fervor, fact and fiction. In other words, video has transformed the world.

Featuring works from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, this illuminating exhibition catalog—MoMA's first major publication on video art in nearly 30 years—explores the ways in which artists have both championed and questioned video's promise, some hoping to create new networks of communication, democratic engagement and public participation, others protesting commercial and state control over information, vision and truth itself.

Lavishly illustrated essays by esteemed scholars and artists—including Ina Blom, Aria Dean, David Joselit, Pamela M. Lee, Glenn Ligon and Ravi Sundaram—highlight video's widely varied formats, contexts and global reach. Signals is a manual for understanding the present, an era in which video has pervaded all aspects of life.

A multimedia meditation on the many meanings of the ocean across history.

This volume closely follows the development of Joan Jonas' (born 1936) multiformat project Moving off the Land. The artist's most recent body of work, it encompasses three years of research into the significance of the ocean throughout history, and features sculptures, drawings, sound and new video productions. Jonas combines poetry and prose by writers such as Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville with texts by Rachel Carson and Sy Montgomery, and with moving images filmed in aquariums and in Jamaica, where algae bloom and over-fishing pose urgent threats to the ecosystem. The monograph includes the complete script for the performance along with annotations, images of Jonas' live performance, and a complete chronology with documentation of the performance's history.

A fully-fledged artistic project expanded with writings, poems, and aphorisms by the artist alongside various interviews.

Traveling in the Dark is an exhibition and a publication by the world-renowned film director, poet, writer, music composer, literary critic, and art theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha. The book is a fully fledged artistic project conceived by Trinh from the script and visuals of her film What about China? and expanded with her writings, poems, and aphorisms as well as various interviews that investigate "a relationship to infinity," "memory of the mirror," and the "in-between." The book offers an experience with many possible entries, words, voices, thoughts, images, and pauses. As a visual, poetic, and philosophical experience, Traveling in the Darkinvites us to rethink and experience "reality" differently from an approach mainly based on knowledge and re-presentation that we already possess or that is imposed on us. In other words: How can we learn to see our world without a priori seeing and knowing? In a time when the "all-seen" and "all-told" invade and control our daily lives, our private spheres and urban spaces, where are the areas of invisibility and shadows that leave us autonomy to see and to think, to say and to represent, to remember and to imagine? Traveling in the Dark engages the visitor and reader in an open montage of visual, sonic, and poetic textures, whose resonances, vibrations, recollections, exchanges, brushes, reflections, and passages undermine any pretense of fixed identity, historical truth, or prescribed territory.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, in 2022-2023.

Born in Vietnam in 1952, Trinh T. Minh-ha is an artist, writer, music composer, filmmaker, and literary theorist, teaching as Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School in the departments of Gender & Women's Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco.

In Film Poems, readers find themselves with author Redell Olsen on the cutting-room floor of discourse, weaving together a manifesto of conceptual poetry that demonstrates the skipping and scratch of language. Just as really "seeing" a film is to experience our own vision—the technology that is always mediating our sight—really "reading" (a particular form of seeing) is to experience our own language as a constantly shifting medium; meanings emerge through ceaseless splicings and cuts.

Film Poems brings together Olsen's "Film Poem" works written for performance and installation in relation to films made and appropriated by her between 2007-2011. The five sequences splice together a range of contextual references from London landmarks, lace manufacturing, synchronized swimming, and the history of camouflage. Words unfold on the page as a film unspools from a reel, with particular attention paid to etymologies and polyvalences, to the process and performance of meaning-making and its relationship to physical manufacturing. "Words are the film between what is said and seen," writes Olsen, "and also the means of writing that something burning in the projector called language."

Redell Olsen's publications include FILM POEMS (Les Figues Press, 2014), PUNK FAUN: A BAR ROCK PASTEL (Subpress, 2012), Secure Portable Space (Reality Street, 2004), Book of the Fur (rem press, 2000), and the collaboratively produced Here Are My Instructions (Redell Olsen / Susan Johanknecht) (Gefn, 2004). Her film poems, and texts for performance and film, include: Bucolic Picnic (or, toile de jouy camouflage) (2009), Newe Booke of Copies (2009-10), Lost Pool (2010), and SPRIGS & spots (2011-12). From 2006-2010 she was the editor of How2, the international journal for modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics by women writers. She is the director for the MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

Strangers Within is an anthology exploring the idea of documentary as encounter through essays, stories, interviews and other creative responses by filmmakers, artists, and writers. The texts engage with the risks of encounter, unsettling assumptions about the distinctions between host and guest; stranger and friend; self and other; documentarian and protagonist. Opening up a series of questions about the mystery of another person, whose difference and unknowability is already a part of one’s self, the anthology offers a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the convergences between encounter, hospitality and autobiography.

With Khalik Allah, Ruth Beckermann, Jon Bang Carlsen, Adam Christensen, Annie Ernaux, Gareth Evans, Jane Fawcett, Xiaolu Guo, Umama Hamido, Therese Henningsen, Marc Isaacs, Mary Jiménez Freeman-Morris, Juliette Joffé, Andrew and Eden Kötting, David MacDougall, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Toni Morrison, Bruno de Wachter and Andrea Luka Zimmerman.

The Earth Dies Streaming collects the best of A. S. Hamrah's film writing for n+1, The Baffler, Bookforum, Harper's, and other publications. Acerbic, insightful, hilarious, and damning, Hamrah's aphoristic capsule reviews and lucid career retrospectives of filmmakers and critics have taken up the mantle of serious American film criticism pioneered by James Agee, Robert Warshow, and Pauline Kael and carried it into the 21st century.

Taken together, these reviews and essays represent some of the best film criticism in the English language. The Earth Dies Streaming showcases a remarkable critical intelligence while offering a cultural history of the cinema of our times.

French/English paperback with essays by Raymond Bellour and Laurent Roth on Chris Marker's Immemory. 

'Chris Marker's CD-ROM Immemory is most easily imagined as a digitally stored attic room, divided into zones of memories. Those zones show (fragments of) photographs, engravings, paintings, films, texts, edited or annotated, which are plotted along a number of virtual trajectories that one can traverse: Le Voyage, Le Musée, La Mémoire, La Poésie, La Guerre, La Photo, Le Cinéma.

The central question, borrowed from Marcel Proust, is also the heading of the La Mémoire section: "Qu'est-ce qu'une madeleine?" What charges something with the affect of memory? Why is that one detail, that one book, poem or painting the emotional and essential among all others?' (Witte Raaf 1999)

Yves Gevaert publisher, co-published with the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

This book introduces camera-based practices at the intersections of artistic and ethnographic research that critically examine the means of their own production and social embeddedness.

In shared practices such as recording in the field, editing in post-production and modes of presentation, the camera is involved as an agent rather than an innocent device. How does the camera grapple with the invisible and how does it reveal what the camerawoman is unable to see? How do films, videos and photographs provide access to vulnerable knowledges and what presentation formats can extend the linearity of narration?

Taking account of their own situatedness and the limits of representation, many of this book's contributors attempt to speak with—rather than about—the other. These negotiations appearing in the featured projects open up a shared field of artistic and ethnographic inquiry, whose potential—for experiments and reflections—is far from exhausted.

Contributions by Sepideh Abtahi, Shirin Barghnavard, Laura Coppens, Louis Henderson, Heidrun Holzfeind, Mina Keshavarz, Daniel Kötter, Jürgen Krusche, Bärbel Küster, Bina Elisabeth Mohn, Laura von Niederhäusern, Uriel Orlow, Barbara Preisig, Rani al Raji, Nahid Rezaei, Anette Rose, Sahar Salahshoori, Christoph Schenker, Amira Solh, Lena Maria Thüring, Zheng Mahler.

The independent British film journal Afterimage published thirteen issues between 1970 and 1987. International in scope, it surveyed the many forms of radical cinema during an extraordinary period of film history.

Having emerged in the wake of post-1968 cultural and political change, Afterimage charted contemporary developments with special issues on themes such as the avant-garde, Latin American cinema and visionary animation, and also looked back at early film pioneers. It published many of the leading critics of the period and vitally provided a forum for filmmakers’ writings and manifestos.

This indispensable collection includes texts by scholars Noël Burch, Roger Cardinal, B. Ruby Rich and Peter Wollen, filmmakers Jean Epstein, Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman and Jan Švankmajer, plus extended interviews with Hollis Frampton and Raúl Ruiz, and more.

The Afterimage Reader is edited by Mark Webber and features new contributions from two of the journal’s editors, Simon Field and Ian Christie.

Telling Invents Told is the first collection of writings by artist and filmmaker Lis Rhodes.

It includes the influential essay Whose History? alongside texts from works such as Light Reading, Pictures on Pink Paper and A Cold Draft, together with new and previously unpublished materials. Since the 1970s, Rhodes has been making radical and experimental work that challenges hegemonic narratives and the power structures of language. Her writing addresses urgent political issues – from the refugee crisis to workers’ rights, police brutality, racial discrimination and homelessness – as well as film history and theory, from a feminist perspective.

An important figure at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, Rhodes was also a founding member of Circles, the first British distributor of film, video and performance by women artists.

Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016 is a collection of essays by Peter Gidal that includes “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film” and other texts on metaphor, narrative, and against sexual representation.

Also discussed in their specificity are works by Samuel Beckett, Thérèse Oulton, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. Throughout, Gidal’s writing attempts a political aesthetics, polemical as well as theoretical. One of the foremost experimental film-makers in Britain since the late 1960s, Peter Gidal was a central figure at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, and taught advanced film theory at the Royal College of Art. His previous books include Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings (1971), Understanding Beckett (1986) and Materialist Film (1989).

The first monograph on the groundbreaking video artist and member of the seminal Video Venice News and Studio Z groups.

This is the first major retrospective on the groundbreaking Los Angeles-based video artist Ulysses Jenkins (born 1946). Since the 1970s, Jenkins has interrogated questions of race and gender as they relate to ritual, history and state power. From his work with Video Venice News, a Los Angeles media collective he founded in the early 1970s, to his involvement with the artists' group Studio Z (alongside figures such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger), to his video and performance works, Jenkins explores how white supremacy is embedded in popular culture. Beginning as a painter and muralist, Jenkins was introduced to video just as the first consumer cameras were made available, and he quickly seized upon the technology as a means to broadcast critical depictions of multiculturalism. This catalog features an extensive portion of Jenkins' archive, early documentary films, photographs and ephemera, as well as his video art.

This book offers intersectional, intergenerational, and international perspectives on nonfiction film- and videomaking by and about women, examining practices that range from activist documentaries to avant-garde experiments. Concentrating primarily on the period between the 1970s and 1990s, the contributions revisit major figures, contexts, and debates across a polycentric, global geography. They explore how the moving image has been a crucial terrain of feminist struggle--a way of not only picturing the world but remaking it.  

The contributors consider key decolonial filmmakers, including Trinh T. Minh-ha and Sarah Maldoror; explore collectively produced films with ties to women's liberation movements in different countries; and investigate the cinematic expressions of tensions and alliances between feminism and anti-imperialist struggles. They grapple with the need for a broader more inclusive definition of the term "feminism"; meditate on the figure of the grandmother; reflect on realist aesthetics; and ask what a feminist film historiography might look like.  

The book, generously illustrated with film stills and other images, many in color, offers ten original texts, two conversations, and eight short essays composed in response to historical texts written by filmmakers. The historical texts, half of which are published in English for the first time, appear alongside the essays.  

Contributors 
Helena Amiradżibi, Madeleine Bernstorff, Teresa Castro, Counter Encounters (Laura Huertas Millán, Onyeka Igwe, Rachael Rakes), Ayanna Dozier, Forough Farrokhzad, Safi Faye, Devika Girish, Elena Gorfinkel, Haneda Sumiko, Shai Heredia, Juliet Jacques, Sarah Keller, Nzingha Kendall, Julia Lesage, Beatrice Loayza, Janaína Oliveira, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Yasmina Price, Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto, Pooja Rangan, Lis Rhodes, Sara Saljoughi, Rasha Salti, Isabel Seguí, Chick Strand, Monika Talarczyk, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Françoise Vergès, Claudia von Alemann, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Shilyh Warren, Giovanna Zapperi

Jack Smith presented his performance Irrational Landlordism of Bagdad as part of the Cologne Art Fair fringe in the summer of 1977. Many other events were documented photographically and can now be found in the Cologne Art Fair archives - not so Smith's performance.

This book shows him in his fair stall and during his performance for the first time. The pictures are perfect documents of a completely eccentric transaction by this pioneering director and performance artist.

Based on questions raised by the work of filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, the second volume of the Wattis Institute's annual reader includes new writing and art by Ranu Mukherjee, Kathy Zarur, Shylah Hamilton, Astria Suparak, and Tamara Suarez Porras, as well as written and visual contributions by Trinh T. Minh-ha, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Sky Hopinka,Christina Sharpe, Christine Wang, Camille Rankine, Dionne Brand, Renee Gladman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Steffani Jemison, among others.

What does the promise of "speaking nearby" rather than "speaking about" look like today? What are the politics of hospitality? What are the problematics of "postfeminism," and how do we challenge the West as the authoritative subject of feminist knowledge? What are the ways that language can be a site of rupture? How do we generate mistrust in the "well-written," and how can poetry be a radical act of refusal? How can we be subjects that believe in land and not borders? What influence has technology and digital space had on the "making and unmaking of identity"? How do we navigate a cyclical eruption of decolonizations?

The Wattis Institute's annual reader, A Series of Open Questions, provides an edited selection of perspectives, images, and references related to the Wattis's year-long "On our mind" research seasons. Each volume includes newly commissioned writing by members of the research season's core reading group, as well as text and visual contributions by a diverse range of other artists and writers. The title of each reader takes the form of a question and becomes, as new books are published, a gradually evolving series of open questions.

If it can be said that experimental filmmakers are "expanding" the artistic field through an exploration of the potencies, modes of dissemination, or even performance of the moving image, in the Anthropocene age, these practices hope for another kind of expansion: to expand our experience of nature.

Appending flowers to the film strip or burying it in the ground, inventing observation devices, allowing the camera to be affected by natural forces, engaging one's own filming body in a symbiotic relationship with the environment, reconstituting ecosystems at the moment of projection: the ecologies of experimental cinema presented in this book constitute forms of practice and engagement that awaken a heightened sensitivity to the living world through cooperative links, casting other beings as subjects and agents of filmic processes, and, finally, reshaping the economy of filmmaking. Thus, ecologies of perception, medium, production and multinaturalism are deployed, contributing to the restoration of our sensory bond with the natural world.

Addressing technical, aesthetic and anthropological issues of cinema, Expanded Nature – Écologies du cinéma expérimental (Ecologies of Experimental Cinema) considers how filmmakers and collectives from different parts of the globe form communities with other non-human beings and work through their films to deconstruct human privilege. At the crossroads of disciplines, anthropologists, philosophers, filmmakers and artists, and researchers in visual studies come together and investigate a different history of cinema, written from the point of view of nature.

Texts by Elio Della Noce, Scott MacDonald, Jean-Michel Durafour, Kim Knowles, Philip Hoffman & Janine Marchessault, Karel Doing, Chris Dymond, Alice Leroy, Rose Lowder, Chris Welsby, Yaniv Touati, Bidhan Jacobs, Lucas Murari, Teresa Castro, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Gérard Leblanc, Frédéric Brayard, Jacques Perconte, Vincent Deville, Lukas Brasiskis & Charlie Hewison. 

Terwijl film station per station de moderne tijd bracht, verdween schijnbaar natuur steeds meer uit ons blikveld. Tegelijk zorgt film tot op vandaag voor nieuwe manieren om natuur te portretteren. Op het kruispunt van verdwijnen en verschijnen vinden we in film en landschap compagnons de route die elkaar slechts zelden uit het oog verliezen.

“What happened to my book?”

This was the last email we received from Nick, in December 2021. A short, concise demand, which we responded to, telling him that the transcription was coming soon and that Marie was finalising the introduction. Little did we know, what Nick surely already knew: he was dying. The urgency should have given it away, but Nick was always blunt in our email exchanges.

Nick passed away on February 27th, 2022. We regret not getting the transcription to him while he could still edit it, so this book in your hands remains an unabridged testament.

The only thing he did edit were his final words, in an unsolicited email in September 2021:

“I was thinking about when you asked me if I had any final words, that it would be better to have me say: Freedom or death. At the crossroads. With a key.”

So we leave you with this; a homage to the legendary founder of the Cinema Of Transgression - a brilliant artist, a sharp mind, a loving father, a kind revolutionary, a boot stamping on the face of modernity forever, an underground phenomenon.
Nick Zedd, rest in peace.

[Note by the publisher.]

With a foreword by Goswell Road. Includes a conversation with Nick Zedd, and the manifesto 'Cinema of Transgression'.

Softcover (11 cm x 18 cm)
84 Pages
75 copies
Language : English

Compiled on the occasion of a Sandra Lahire retrospective at Courtisane festival 2021. This cahier was developed in collaboration with Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian). Edited by María Palacios Cruz and Charlotte Procter.

Living on air: the films and words of Sandra Lahire is the first monograph dedicated to the work of Sandra Lahire and brings together new and existing texts on Lahire as well as writing by herself, with contributions by Gill Addison, Jo Comino, Pam Cook, Laura Guy, Maud Jacquin, Julia Knight, Michael Mazière, Sarah Pucill, Irene Revell & Kerstin Schroedinger, Lis Rhodes, Selina Robertson & Ricardo Matos Cabo (with So Mayer), Vicky Smith, Sarah Turner and Ana Vaz.