Inclusions: Aesthetics of the Capitalocene

This book on the films of Anton Vidokle features essays and conversations by theorists, curators, and artists exploring the themes of technological immortality and resurrection informed by Cosmist philosophy.

Citizens of the Cosmos examines the artist Anton Vidokle's films and the Cosmist philosophy underpinning them. It features essays and conversations with Vidokle by seminal contemporary theorists, curators, and artists: Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Raqs Media Collective. This is the first book to survey Vidokle's Cosmism-related filmic output, begun in 2014, and includes full scripts from the films.

The book's contributors speculate on Vidokle's Cosmist conceptions of technological immortality, utopian resurrection, museology, and space travel, grappling with how these ideas embroil or crystallize contemporary theories, practices, and technologies: atmospheric manipulation, cryonics, biopolitics, extraplanetary prospecting, geo-engineering, transhumanism, genetics.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi disagrees with the Cosmist conjecture of death as a flaw in the conception of the human being. Elizabeth Povinelli digests the life-nonlife mattering of dust through relationships to and from the human and more-than-human ancestors to come.

Boris Groys contemplates the gravitational forces between Cosmism and communism according to cosmic and social orders, grounded as they are in the laws of both physics and socialist politics. Keti Chukhrov considers the formation of thinking through madness, dying, and reasoning according to Cosmist philosophical and religious debates and beliefs.

Raqs Media Collective and Anton Vidokle discuss different cultures of death, finitude, and rituals. Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins examine the in-betweeness of the categories of life and death through the designs of terraforming vehicles navigating interplanetary space travel.

Daniel Muzyczuk investigates Vidokle's interests in the context of the history of the collection at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, while Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle converse about filmmaking references and methods, from voiceover narrative to editing processes.

Edited by Miguel Amado. Contributions by Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Raqs Media Collective, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth A. Povinelli.

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

Elizabeth Povinelli's anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. In these essays, she considers the emergence of new worlds and the extinguishment of old ones, seeking to develop a social imaginary that can sustain radical potentiality without turning a blind eye to our deep interdependence.

A monograph / artists' book that engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists' investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances.

The book's title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories. Published following the exhibition “Patriarchal Poetry” at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27– November 24, 2013.

This book traces the legacy of Zona, Eastern Europe performance art festival that took place in Timișoara, Romania, between 1993 and 2002, years which were marked by a transition from communism to a new society built on different principles.

Bringing together artists from the former "Eastern Bloc," Zona became a space of encounters, a platform for theoretical discussions and postmodern art experiments, which displayed a remarkable diversity of artistic languages. The fall of the Berlin Wall, as Nicolas Bourriaud noted in his book "The Radicant", was the first decisive step towards globalization and the generalization of postmodern thought.

In the early 1990s, adopting subversive strategies helped artists overcome critical moments in totalitarian societies, which had been consolidated for decades in Eastern Europe. They combined techniques of expression such as pastiche, quotes, historical images, popular culture, or subcultures with personal mythologies. What resulted was often a critical mixture with an explosive effect. Body art became an appropriate language for critically analyzing stereotypes about the nation, religion, gender, or social prejudices and taboos. Body art facilitated the transfer of ideas and a dialogue with the audience, or it helped launch questions about identity politics. The concerns and intentions of the festival's protagonists were built around political, social, and artistic topics that were debated between the East and the West.

Essays by Ileana Pintilie, László Beke, Vladimir Bulat, Robert Fleck, Alexandra Titu, Berislav Valušek; artists' texts by Alexandru Antik, Matei Bejenaru, Ștefan Bertalan, Geta Brătescu, Oskar Dawicki, Ion Grigorescu, H.arta Group, Karen Kipphoff, Liliana Mericioiu, Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, Sorin Vreme.

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.

In this anthology of essays, twelve artists explore radically self-reflexive research attitudes integrating embodied experiences within the production of theory.

Standpoint Autotheory encompasses a multitude of manifestations of radically self-reflexive research attitudes. It traces research based artistic practices through twelve contributions that propose a performative integration of the personal within the production of theory and explore the entanglements of subjectivity with criticality aimed at social transformation by questioning dominant epistemologies.
The positions assembled in the book are permeated by different modes of thinking and practice such as autoethnography, practices of the self, auto-historia teoría, standpoint theories, strong objectivity and situated knowledge, self-authority, narrativity and storytelling, radical positioning, performative philosophy, autofiction, thinking-feeling, and other methods that, through the interrogation of embodied experiences, illuminate the connections between the personal and the political, as well as the individual and the communal.

Edited by Ana de Almeida and Mariel Rodríguez.
Contributions by Ana de Almeida, andrea ancira, Cana Bilir-Meier, Nina Hoechtl, Olena Khoroshylova, Sanja Lasić, Mai Ling, Stephanie Misa, Lena Ditte Nissen, Mariel Rodríguez, Ruth Sonderegger, Elif Süsler-Rohringer, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt.

Third edition featuring afterword by Alessandro Sbordoni & several appendices, including a new translation & edit of “Taylor Swift Does Not Exist”. 

This is a monumental and extensive work from someone who is arguably the most well-versed scholar of Baudrillard, Deleuze & Laruelle in the German-speaking world, Achim Szepanski, the original founder of Mille Plateaux, Force Inc Music Works and NON. This book is dedicated to Jean Baudrillard, who would be described by Achim as the most radical and advanced stimmung in Philosophy. Through this comprehensive and devouring analysis of Baudrillard’s work, the author presents a gripping account of their own philosophy; alongside his magnum opus Die Ekstasie der Spekulation, this book, In the Delirium of the Simulation, provides the strongest case for what might be called, in light of his passing, Szepanskism or Szepanskian Economics. 

From Finance, to non-philosophy and radical experimental music, Szepanski is an anomalous and unique theoretician with one hell of a history. 

CONTENTS:

• Metabox of Terms: Simulation, Code, Hyperreality, Fractal, Seduction and Implosion 
• Baudrillard's Maximisation Hypothesis: the System and the Other
• Baudrillard & Marxism: Signs, Production and Money
• Distinguishing the Consumer System (or Shopping Mall) from the Landfill
• Baudrillard & the Financial Simulacrum
• Excursus on Jonathan Beller's World Computer 
• Hyperreality & Artificial Intelligence
• Baudrillard & Quantum Theory
• Afterword: Hyperculture by Alessandro Sbordoni
• Appendix 1: Taylor Swift Does Not Exist
• Appendix 2: Baudrillard: After the Orgy
• Appendix 3: Imagination & Reality: Psychoanalysis vs Baudrillard