New Grounds for Dutch Landscape

Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas, co-editors at INCA Press (along with Irena Borić), are the guest-editors of this issue of OEI: it contains essays, artworks, and archival materials by 21 artists, theorists, writers, and artist-run spaces (mostly from the Americas).

The subject of the issue is art and neoliberalism, and it encompasses essays, images and other works by Dorothée Dupuis, Max Jorge Hindered Cruz, Luciano Concheiro, Yvonne Osei, Diego Bruno, John Riepenhoff, Suhail Malik, Good Weather, The Luminary, Bikini Wax, Beta-Local and more.

Once more, an astonishing issue of OEI – a thrilling, compelling, stimulating feast of ideas regarding publishing and the book: the perfect big companion to read and hug in bed while the virus spreads outside.

Bringing together contributions from circa 130 publishing structures, publishing communities, magazines, small press endeavors, artists, poets, writers, editors, theoreticians, curators, scholars, and art bookstores, OEI # 86–87 reflects upon the challenges, pressures and possibilities of publishing and creating publics in different contexts and places in a time of far-reaching – economical, medial, political, social, technological – transformations.

The potential and the versatility of publishing open it to a diversity of practices and approaches in the arts, but as an eminently social form of art, a collective or micro-collective work with shared responsibilities, it is also a never-ending process of “crafting a variegated approach to how you create, publish, distribute, and build a social ecosystem around your efforts”, of trying to “build up and strengthen the community around these printed forms” (Temporary Services).

It is the conviction of OEI #86–87 that print has the power to play an important part in the construction of social spaces, of a social world. As Benjamin Thorel puts it in one of the essays in the issue, “conceiving of the dynamics of publishing as making publics as well as making things public is not a pun – insofar as the artists/publishers encompass, beyond the book itself, its possible ‘lives’, imagining the different spaces, and the different people, amongst whom a publication will circulate.” This is what Michael Warner has called “a public [as] poetic worldmaking”, implying “that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.”

This is also, as stressed by Annette Gilbert and others, what can make publishing such an active force, a force co-constituting texts and publications and publics. Indeed, with Michalis Pichler, it is tempting to say that in publishing as practice – perhaps more than in any other art field – “artists have been able to assert the aesthetic value of their own socio-politically informed concerns and to engage, often under precarious conditions, in cultural activities fully aligned with their political values.”

OEI #86–87 also includes sections on and with contemporary poetry from Canada; Fluxus publishing; Krister Brandt/Astrid Gogglesworth; Kalas på BORD (Öyvind Fahlström); Lars Fredrikson; Claude Royet-Journoud’s poetry magazines; Carl Einstein; Gail Scott; Ållebergshändelser; OEI #79: edit/publish/distribute!; “det offentligas försvinnande” and many many other things. [publisher’s note]

Design by Konst & Teknik

OEI #80-81 is not an anthological publication, and has no representative ambition. It is a montage-based publication trying, in as material a way as possible, to register, prolong, transform and reflect upon energies from the work of Portuguese artist Ernesto de Sousa and his fellows (Alberto Carneiro, Túlia Saldanha, Álvaro Lapa, Fernando Calhau, Lourdes Castro, Ana Vieira, Ana Hatherly, E.M. de Melo e Castro, António Barros...).

Ernesto de Sousa and his fellows defined themselves as aesthetic operators and worked as filmmakers, photographers, curators, critics, writers, folk art researchers, multimedia artists... OEI #80-81 also gathers texts on magazines such as Poesia Experimental, Operação, Nova, A Urtiga, and Alternativa; and works by artists from younger generations such as Isabel Carvalho, Paulo Mendes and Mariana Silva, in dialogue with that of de Sousa.

The new publication triangulates between geopoetics, geopolitics, and cultural geography; a 464 page issue with some 50 contributors as well as a large section on Swedish philosophical geographer Gunnar Olsson.

New York-based professor Lytle Shaw journeys to Italy in this adventurous exploration of the life and work of architect, designer, and photographer Carlo Mollino (1905–1973). In 1933 the young Mollino received a commission from Mussolini’s regime for his first building: an administrative centre in Piedmont. Later works include furniture and interior design, a book on photography, and an asymmetrical car that raced at Le Mans in 1955.

The book centres around Shaw’s realisation that this prolific talent’s conflicted legacy offers a unique window on the role that post-war Italian politics and culture played in the country’s reimagining of itself as a victim, rather than a proponent, of fascism.

This publication spans a decade of resilient artists and collectives in, around, and about China and the greater Sinosphere. Composed of essays, images, conversations, and projects, Shifting the Angle of Shine documents innovative tactics of artists and collectives as they weave relationships of mutuality and solidarity to thrive through the cracks.

Shifting the Angle of Shine explores how artists experiment with practices ranging from idiosyncratic business models to counterfeit and mimicry as tools for cultural change, from DIY collectives searching for stability to artists developing new ways to dance around the restrictive pressures of a capitalistic mainstream, and much more. In bringing these artists together to speak and lay compiled in this book, we ask ourselves: what kind of spaces are necessary to incubate productive conversations in an art world prone to creating destabilizing conditions?

Spanning the art nonprofit's decade of existence, a lot of the work has been documented in fragmented ways over the internet, on social media accounts, and in the memories of those there in person. Through materializing this project, this publication hopes to not only shine light on the work of some artists and collectives we admire, but also to archive their stories, processes, and methodologies that should be passed on.

Textdemic | A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments” Ed. by A.L. Steiner and GenderFail, a publication based on A.L. Steiner + Friends on Jenny Holzer at Dia Chelsea. This book is based on the Artists on Artists Lecture Series when the Dia Art Foundation invited Steiner to curate a public program based on a work of the artist's choice.

Steiner chose Jenny Holzer’s Laments and invited Morgan Bassichis, Riel Bellow, Gregg Bordowitz, Alexander Chee, Malik Gaines, Guadalupe Maravilla + Alexa Mishell Guillen, Lucas Michael, Eileen Myles and Pamela Sneed to present in Dia’s first in-person program after the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2021. This publication features records of the poems, lectures, and performances during this memorial program. The book's design plays homage to the 1990 Laments publication by the Dia Art Foundation.

For this publication, Steiner and GenderFail invited Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, Associate Curator at Dia Art Foundation and the organizer of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series, to write an afterword for the book. In this, she states: "Dispensing altogether with the monographic formula that characterizes the institution, for her Lecture A.L. Steiner convened a group of artists, writers, and activists to join her in responding to Jenny Holzer’s 1989 text-based installation, Laments. Holzer identified the thirteen texts that comprise Laments as 'voices of the dead,' a visual choir in response to the raging HIV/AIDS epidemic and government inaction. Over the protracted COVID-19 lockdown, Steiner developed the idea to organize an evening for the voices of the living to lament today's crises.”

The fight for prison abolition is a struggle for collective liberation: a transformative vision of a safer world, in which communities live free from exploitation on a thriving planet.

Drawing connections across social justice movements with a shared abolitionist ethic, this revolutionary book illuminates how harmful ideas of criminality and punishment can manifest in many ways beyond the prison industrial complex. This work is a collaboration with friends, mentors and giants fighting for housing justice, food justice, climate justice, migrant justice, justice for survivors of violence, and more.

With this insightful and generous book, now in its second edition, Cradle Community invites us to explore what it will take to dismantle structures of oppression, and to imagine the future we can rebuild together—brick by brick.

Cradle Community is a collective of organisers committed to radical education and building understanding of prison abolition and transformative justice. Brick by Brick is their first book.