A Toast to St Martirià is an improvised speech given by the cult Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra at the St Martirià fiesta in Banyoles, the town of his birth. Transmitting his subversive attitude and impulsive lust for life, it is a journey through his formative years and early relationships – established in the nightlife of his hometown – that have shaped his particular conception of cinema, art and life. ‘Cinema should be this, making perception of time and space more intense.’

Translated by Matthew Tree
Afterword by Alexander García Düttmann

The Catalan artist and filmmaker Albert Serra was born in 1975. His films usually depict European myths and literature. In 2001, he co-founded the production company Andergraun Films. His Honor of the Knights was selected by Cahiers du Cinéma as one of the ten best films of 2007. For Story of My Death, Serra was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2013. For The Death of Louis XIV, Serra received the Prix Jean Vigo in 2016. Pacifiction was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022.

Matthew Tree was born in London in 1958. He taught himself Catalan in 1979 and moved to Catalonia in 1984. Since then he has published nine works of fiction and non-fiction written in Catalan, and five written in English. He writes regular columns for Catalonia Today magazine in English and El Punt Avui newspaper in Catalan. He has translated works by Jordi Puntí, Maria Barbal, Monika Zgustová, Joel Joan, Marta Marín-Dòmine and Albert Serra, among others. Two of his English novels, Just Looking and Almost Everything, will appear in Catalan translation at the start of 2025.

Rifqa is Mohammed El-Kurd’s debut collection of poetry, written in the tradition of Ghassan Kanfani’s Palestinian Resistance Literature. The book narrates the author’s own experience of dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah—an infamous neighborhood in Jerusalem, Palestine, whose population of refugees continues to live on the brink of homelessness at the hands of the Israeli government and US-based settler organizations. The book, named after the author’s late grandmother who was forced to flee from Haifa upon the genocidal establishment of Israel, makes the observation that home takeovers and demolitions across historical Palestine are not reminiscent of 1948 Nakba, but are in fact a continuation of it: a legalized, ideologically-driven practice of ethnic cleansing.

Mohammed El-Kurd is a Palestinian writer and poet from Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. He was pursuing a Master's in the United States before returning to Sheikh Jarrah to protest the ethnic cleansing of his family. He has gained prominence for his description of Israeli occupation as apartheid and settler colonialism.

Of course there is the practice of art by the artist, but an exhibition is even more so an engagement between people, places, institutions, projections, desires, coincidences, memories, and temporalities. In this monograph, artist Megan Francis Sullivan chooses the format of oral history, engaging various akteurs of the field to produce a web of language reflecting a shape of time.

In Lovebug, Daisy Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand human vulnerability and our intimacy with microbial life.

Turning to microbiology, mysticism, and psychoanalysis – as well as the raw materials of love and life – Lafarge navigates the uncomfortable intimacy between the human body and the many bacteria, viruses, and parasites to which it is host.

Lovebug is a book about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. How might we forge non-phobic relationships to our ‘little beasts’? How might we rewild our imaginations? In weaving the personal with the pathological, Lovebug complicates the idea of coherent selfhood, revealing life as a site of radical vulnerability and an ongoing negotiation with limit.

"The pathogen arrives anyway and takes a seat at the table. Conditioned to welcome damage, I am curious about this uninvited guest. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat".

Viscose is a journal for fashion criticism. The fifth issue of Viscose explores fashion’s multifaceted retail spaces and cultures. With the evolution of shopping in the 20th and 21st centuries as its focus, the issue looks at the shop as a central nexus where communities and identities are continuously produced and re-imagined through commerce. With a special attention to the role of fashion retail within urban spatial politics, we seek out histories of projects—often developed with or by artists—that have embraced the shop as a medium of both possibility and contestation. 

With contributions by:
Dennis Brzek, Anastasia Howe Bukowski, Michael Bullock, Felix Burrichter, Canal Street Research Association, Noah Dillon, Harun Farocki, Anna Franceschini, Ignacio Gatica, Christian Hincapié, Juje Hsiung, Jessica Kwok, Rhonda Lieberman, Matthew Linde, Marge Monko, Cheuk Ng, Luis Ortega, Camila Palomino, Andreas Petrossiants, Leah Pires, International Library For Fashion Research, Vésma Kontere Mcquillan (International Library For Fashion Research), Rose Salane, Alice Sarmiento, Museum Of Modern Shopping, Jeppe Ugelvig, Sean Vegezzi, Post Vsop, Evie Ward, Leah Weirer

Toby Altman’s Discipline Park documents the demolition of Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago, a landmark of architectural brutalism designed by Bertrand Goldberg in the 1970s. Altman was born in the building, and years later, was employed by Northwestern University when they tore it down. His personal proximity to the site leads to a wider critical evaluation of the cruelty of a neoliberalism that asks us to draw sustenance from the very institutions that poison and erase our bodies, habitats, and histories. But, as it indicts the present and its claustrophobic, ruinous politics, Discipline Park also recovers or reinvents utopian vistas through an extended engagement with Goldberg's architectural practices.

A concept just short of a program, accountability has been taken up as a core principle within leftist organizing and activity over the past quarter century. While it invokes a particular vocabulary and set of procedures, it has also come to describe a more expansive, if often vague, approach to addressing harm within movement work. The term’s sudden, widespread adoption as abolitionist concepts began to circulate broadly in recent years cast light on certain shifts in its meaning, renewing the urgency of understanding its relation to militant history and practice.  

After Accountability is an oral history and critical genealogy of this decisive movement concept that gathers interviews with eight transformative justice practitioners, socialist labor organizers, incarcerated abolitionists, and activists on the left conducted by members of the Pinko collective. An investigation into the theoretical foundations and current practice of accountability, this volume explores the term’s potential and limits, discovering in it traces of the past half-century’s struggles over the absence of community and the form revolutionary activity should take. 

Pinko is a collective for thinking gay communism together. Pinko publishes a biannual print issue and periodic zines, and hosts irregular essays, translations, and archival material on their website.

The anthology Solidarity Must Be Defended brings together projects on gestures and alignments within the visual arts around transnational solidarity during the Cold War. In dialogue with, among others, the quietist tendencies of non-alignment and the radical vector of liberation movements, the book looks at both grand initiatives and tragic misfires from an entangled, decolonizing world. The point of departure for this anthology is a special issue of Mezosfera magazine (“Refractions of Socialist Solidarity”) edited in Budapest by Szakács in dialogue with Mohaiemen’s three-channel film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017).  This anthology proposes that transnational solidarity is always worth celebrating, but also extremely difficult to inhabit.

« Du fric ou on vous tue ! : j’ignore qui avait pu écrire ça sur un mur, au début des années 1980, à Marseille, mais j’avais bien aimé cette menace de braqueur qui résonnait là comme une injonction plus générale à ceux qui tiennent les cordons de la Bourse. »

Une association de hors-la-loi révolutionnaires, ainsi pourrait-on qualifier le groupe Os Cangaceiros, qui prit ce nom en hommage aux bandits du Nordeste brésilien. Ce livre raconte l’histoire de cette bande de jeunes qui, refusant d’aller travailler, s’était orga­nisée pour arnaquer les banques et prêter main-forte aux luttes qui secouaient alors les prisons, les usines et les banlieues.

Ce récit de première main peut être lu comme une contre-histoire de la dé­cen­­­nie 1980, durant laquelle se mit en place le régime de gouvernance que nous subissons depuis.

Alèssi Dell’Umbria est l’auteur de : Histoire universelle de Marseille. De l’an mil à l’an deux mille (Agone, 2006) ; C’est de la racaille ? Eh bien, j’en suis ! À propos de la révolte de l’automne 2005 (L’Échappée, 2006) (réédité et augmenté sous le titre La Rage et la Révolte en 2010 par Agone) ; Échos du Mexique indien et rebelle(Rue des cascades, 2010) ; R.I.P. Jacques Mesrine (Pepitas de calabaza, 2011) ;Tarantella ! Possession et dépossession dans l’ex-royaume de Naples (L’œil d’or, 2016) ; Istmeño, le vent de la révolte. Chronique d’une lutte indigène contre l’industrie éolienne, Livre-DVD (Collectif des métiers de l’édition / Les éditions du bout de la ville, 2018) ; Antimatrix (La Tempête, 2021).

Le sonore excède nos capacités de pensée, il traverse toutes les échelles de la réalité et de la vie sociale, et nous permet d’expérimenter par avance les menaces du futur proche : ce sont les hypothèses que déploie dans sa Guerre sonore le DJ, producteur de bass music et théoricien Steve Goodman, mieux connu sous le pseudo Kode9, et formé au sein de l’Unité de Recherché sur la Cyberculture (CCRU) aux côtés de Kodwo Eshun et Mark Fisher. Guidé par les leçons des sound-systems et des raves, défiant le partage entre philosophie et science-fiction, il compose avec ce livre une vaste fresque fractale, qui analyse les limites de l’audible et les puissances sensorielles et spéculatives de la vibration. Guerre sonore décrit comment la maîtrise des infrabasses et l’occupation de l’espace sensoriel sont devenus l’enjeu d’une bataille secrète mais généralisée où les gouvernements, les spécialistes du marketing, les designers et les technoscientifiques s’affrontent au matérialisme des basses fréquences des artistes et des populations.

Steve Goodman (alias Kode9) est un musicien, écrivain et artiste. Il est l’auteur du livre Guerre Sonore et il codirigé les ouvrages Unsound : Undead (Urbanomic Press, 2019) et Ø (Flatlines Press, 2021). Il a fondé les labels Hyperdub et Flatlines, produit 5 albums, dont deux avec le regretté Spaceape (Memories of the Future, 2006 et Black Sun, 2012) et 3 en solo (Nothing, 2015, Escapology, 2022, Astro-Darien, 2022), de nombreuses compilations de mix DJ ; il a co-compilé et remixé Diggin in the Carts (2018), une collection de musiques rares de jeux vidéo japonais. Il a aussi, entre autres choses, conçu des installations sonores pour la Hyundai Commission à la Tate Modern en 2018 et pour l’exposition sur l’intelligence artificielle More than Human en 2019, au Barbican de Londres.

An Expert Array of Talks & Essays by One of Our Greatest Living Poets.

One of our greatest living poets, Alice Notley, the author of more than 40 books of poetry, has delivered an expert array of talks and essays over the last three decades.

The publication offers a significant contribution to literature, reimagining the possibilities of writing in our time and the complicated business of how and why writers devote their lives to their craft. Whether she is writing about other poets—Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Homer, bpNichol, Douglas Oliver, or William Carlos Williams—noir fiction, the First Gulf War, dreams and what they're for, or giving us insight into her own work, Notley's observations are original, sobering, and always memorable. This collection often eschews the typical style of essay or lecture, resisting any categorization, and is consciously disobedient to academic structures in form. The results are thrilling new modes of thinking that may change the ways we read and write.

Spanning more than three decades, In Part brings together a full spectrum of the New York-based artist, writer and activist Julie Ault's (born 1957) published texts through carefully selected extracts in a single volume.

Reprinted in chronological sequence alongside a selection of full-length texts, this series of excerpts offers a timeline of Ault's continuous artistic growth, longstanding political concerns and dynamic interpersonal affinities.

Beginning in the 1980s with texts written with her collaborators in Group Material, In Part highlights Ault's shift from exhibition making in the mid-1990s to include publishing and writing. Ault's dialogic practice extends to the present day through her sustained engagements and relationships with such artists as Corita Kent, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Nancy Spero, Martin Beck, David Wojnarowicz, Liberace and Martin Wong.

Lucy R. Lippard contributes an introduction.

The scarcity of resources, climate change, and the digitalization of everyday life are fuelling the economy of swapping, sharing, and lending—all of which are in some way linked to a culture of commoning. In this context, we understand commons as community-based processes that use, collectively manage, and organize generally accessible resources—referring to both goods and knowledge.

Commons in Design explores the meaning and impact of commons—especially knowledge-based peer commons—and acts of commoning in design. It discusses networked, participatory, and open procedures based on the commons and commoning, testing models that negotiate the use of commons within design processes. In doing so, it critically engages with questions regarding designers’ positionings, everyday practices, self-understandings, ways of working, and approaches to education.

Contributors: Rachel Armstrong, Errantry Media Lab (Max Stearns & Nathalie Attallah), Yuhe Ge, Juan Gomez, Luis Guerra, Katherin Gutiérrez Herrera, Cyrus Khalatbari, Rilla Khaled, Cindy Kohtala, Torange Khonsari, Álvaro Mercado Jara, Nan O’Sullivan, Victoria Paeva, Sharon Prendeville, Zoe Romano, Gregoire Rousseau, Daniela Salgado Cofré, Christine Schranz, Elpitha Tsoutsounakis, Eva Verhoeven, Jennifer Whitty

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

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.

A Community Writing Itself features internationally respected writers Michael Palmer, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Brenda Hillman, Kathleen Fraser, Stephen Ratcliffe, Robert Glück, and Barbara Guest, and important younger writers Truong Tran, Camille Roy, Juliana Spahr, and Elizabeth Robinson. The book fills a major gap in contemporary poetics, focusing on one of the most vibrant experimental writing communities in the nation. The writers discuss vision and craft, war and peace, race and gender, individuality and collectivity, and the impact of the Bay Area on their work.

Sarah Rosenthal grew up in Chicago and lives in San Francisco. She is the author of three chapbooks: How I Wrote This Story (Margin to Margin, 2001), SITINGS (a+bend, 2000) and not-chicago (Melodeon Poetry Systems, 1998). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals and have been anthologized in BAY POETICS (Faux Press, 2006) and hinge (Crack Press, 2002). She has taught creative writing at Santa Clara University and San Francisco State University. She has edited a collection of interviews entitled A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area. She is the recipient of the Leo Litwak Award for Fiction and grant-supported writing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Ragdale Foundation.

A collection (montage) of biographies and themes written by Jairus Banaji.
Wanting Something Completely Different discusses a range of political figures, themes, directors and writers in a series of brief, evocative descriptions ('vignettes') aimed at laying out a vision of a modern, cosmopolitan left that can think creatively about the world we live in. The political figures include both thinkers and activists from a wide range of backgrounds—from Frantz Fanon and the Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani to the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. The themes range equally widely from the death of Walter Benjamin (reconstructed here from a remarkable documentary on the same theme) and the slaying of Pasolini to the work of British Marxist Perry Anderson, or the corrupt nature of India's leading corporate groups, or the outstanding contributions of Italian and U.S. Black feminists to feminist theory. And under the rubrics which discuss film and literature, there is the same striving for diversity and depth.

The vignettes collected in this Rab-Rab book first circulated on Facebook over some seven years or more and are reproduced here with a new introduction and extensive bibliographical references and notes.

Jairus Banaji is a historian and revolutionary Marxist activist. He received the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2011. His academic work has ranged widely across sources and languages, with major books on Late Antiquity and commercial capitalism as well as numerous papers and articles.

A dazzlingly original reassessment of women's stories, bodies and art - and how we think about them.

For decades, feminist artists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their experiences as bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, racialised bodies, female bodies, what is their language, what are the materials we need to transcribe it?

Exploring the ways in which feminist artists have taken up this challenge, Art Monsters is a landmark intervention in how we think about art and the body, calling attention to a radical heritage of feminist work that not only reacts against patriarchy but redefines its own aesthetic aims.

Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous and Maggie Nelson, Lauren Elkin demonstrates her power as a cultural critic, weaving daring links between disparate artists and writers - from Julia Margaret Cameron's photography to Kara Walker's silhouettes, Vanessa Bell's portraits to Eva Hesse's rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann's body art to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's trilingual masterpiece DICTEE - and shows that their work offers a potent celebration of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political.

'Destined to become a new classic' - Chris Kraus

Productive Archiving discusses a variety of problems of archival organizations. It mainly focuses on the following three issues that are usually overlooked: first, the question of inclusion in or exclusion from the archive; second, the loss of individuality in the archive, the danger of homogenization; and third, that archiving may become a form of pigeonholing, boxing specific identities into a confined space.

Avoiding the archive because of these problems is not an option, because archival organization is a basic symbolic mode on the basis of which we organize our lives, the past, the present and the future. What this book suggests is that it is best to explore constructive and creative solutions for these problems. Especially artistic archives seem to be able to develop these possible solutions, because they offer speculative, unexpected ways to order, select, and narrate specific information, and bring about new connections and archival organizations.

The fourth book in the annual series A Series of Open Questions published by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press is informed by themes found in the work of Lorraine O'Grady, including diaspora, Black female subjectivity, racial hybridity, translation, intersectional feminism, institutional critique, Black representation in the art world, archives, music, Conceptualism, and performance art.

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.

Contributions by The Allman Brothers Band, Charles Baudelaire, Selam Bekele, Martin Bernal, Linda Goode Bryant and Rujeko Hockley, Camille Chedda, Gabrielle Civil, Kathleen Collins, Erica Deeman, Jeanne Finley & John Muse, Jacqueline Francis, Edouard Glissant, E. Jane, Bec Imrich, Charles Lee, Darrell M. McNeil, Denise Murrell, Sawako Nakayasu, Lorraine O'Grady, Yétúndé Olagbaju, Hsu Peng & Allison Yasukawa, Lara Putnam, Trina Michelle Robinson, Legacy Russell, David Scott, Peter Simensky, Carrie Mae Weems, Judith Wilson, Alisha Wormsley.

An anthology of occult resistance: unpredictable and fascinating, at times hallucinatory, sullying politics, philosophy, cybertheory, religion, and music.

The End Times are here. The Digital Middle Ages approaches, the plague reaps its deadly harvest, climate apocalypse is around the corner, and fanaticism, fascism, and madness are rampant. The idea that we might gain the upper hand over the dark abyss into which the planet is tumbling is a form of magical thinking, laboring under the delusion that we can subdue eternity with relentless bloodlust, brutish exploitation, abuse of power, and violence. Revolutionary Demonology responds to this ritual of control, typical of what esoteric tradition calls the “Dogma of the Right Hand,” by reactivating the occult forces of a Left Hand Path that strives for the entropic disintegration of all creation, so as to make peace with the darkness and nourish the Great Beast that will finally break the seals of Cosmic Love.

Unpredictable and fascinating, genuinely bizarre, at times hallucinatory, sullying politics, philosophy, cybertheory, religion, and music alike with its fevered touch, this “anthology of occult resistance” collects together the communiqués of an arcane group who are already being hailed as the first morbid blossoming of “Italian Weird Theory”: a rogue contingent of theorists, witches, and sorcerers who heretically remix gothic accelerationism with satanic occultism and insurrectional necromancy.

A manifesto for the decolonization of art book fairs and publishing.

Can we decolonize art book fairs? Can we decentralize knowledge and deconstruct privilege in our contexts? Decolonizing Art Book Fairs aims to rethink through the existing and speculative frameworks of organizational practice in the art book fairs. This workbook attempts to introduce new narratives and help deconstruct the frontiers between north(s) and south(s), putting an emphasis on practitioners and initiatives from the African continent and diaspora. A workbook with (primarily newly commissioned) texts and interviews.

Contributions by Jean-Claude Awono, Yaiza Camps, Chayet Chiénin, Chimurenga, Renata Felinto, Wanjeri Gakuru, Moritz Grünke, Aryan Kaganof, Sharlene Khan, Grada Kilomba, Carla Lever, Fouad Asfour, Dzekashu MacViban, Gladys Mendía, James Murua, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Simon Njami, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Monica Nkodo, O Menelick 2Ato, Pascale Obolo, Michalis Pichler, Mario Pissarra, Sergio Raimundo, Djimeli Raoul, Flurina Rothenberger, Bienvenu Sene, Bisi Silva, Kwanele Sosibo, Parfait Tabapsi, Louise Umutoni, Zamân Books & Curating.