The Annotated Reader (USB)

The first issue of the magazine made by artists, founded by Donatien Grau and Thomas Lenthal. Contributions by Mathias Augustyniak, Naomi Campbell, Théo Casciani, Michael Chow, Pan Daijing, Es Devlin, Claire Fontaine, Edwin Frank, Theaster Gates, Nicolas Godin, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Hedi El Kholti, Michèle Lamy, Paul McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Eileen Myles, Marc Newson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Diana Widmaier Picasso, Ariana Reines, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Julian Schnabel & Jason Momoa, Hanna Schygulla, Juergen Teller, Iké Udé, McKenzie Wark, Robert Wilson, Yohji Yamamoto.

Alphabet is the artists' magazine. Here, they run the show. They write, they make images, they select their own works, they interview the figures they admire, they tell us what we did not know about them nor could have ever fathomed about life. This magazine is conceived entirely to put them in the driver's seat, and to enable readers to become part of the unique vision of some of today's greatest luminaries.

It is a manifestation of the creative community, coming together from all fields, from all generations and threads of culture. Writers, musicians, designers, painters, sculptors, poets—artistic figures of every kind converse all the time in their lives, but they did not have a shared space for their editorial projects. This is it.

Everyone who finds their way into Alphabet has made a mark on life, art, and culture, in a way that signals their importance to the present. Some of the contributors may be world famous, others well respected, others on the way to becoming the legends they already are. Their relevance to culture is the same, and that is why they all belong here, in the endeavor of the creative community. There is no hierarchy of status, or domain, or apparent impact. Some of the greatest revolutions happen undercover. Some of the most established voices are still breaking ground. The magazine's premise is simple: the old opposition between pop and underground does not make sense anymore. There are many creative communities, each following its own rules, each inventing its own space. Here, wherever they come from, whatever their community, artists can exist together, with the same intention of changing, and improving, what life is; with the same belief that art matters more than anything else.

None of the contributors is here randomly. They keep life thrilling and exhilarating, challenge the perception of everything and anything. Their role in shaping every aspect of life can hardly be overstated. That is why they needed a place to elaborate their own alphabet, their way of ordering and structuring language, the world, and the fabric of life—a place of freedom, where everything would be done to highlight their visions, where the very design would be a shrine to their magic. Even the distribution of the magazine was conceived with artists—each contributor suggesting sites of their liking.

Alphabet is also the magazine of magazines. Here, readers find essays, fictions, poetry, visual projects, DIY methods, recommendations from those who know, even games and astrology—and an artist's alphabet, articulating an entire universe. Anything that has ever formed a section of a magazine could find its way here. Even the cover is conceived by an artist: it was conceived especially by the legendary Robert Wilson. Artists will rejuvenate what magazines are, and magazines will be kept forever young by and with them.

Founded by Donatien Grau and Thomas Lenthal, Alphabet is a bi-yearly art magazine. Not a magazine about art. It's a magazine made by artists. Each contribution like an œuvre, making it the ultimate collector piece. Each cover is designed, with the word Alphabet, by a different artist, initiating a cult series.

The most accessible introduction to the life and work of James Lovelock, and a guide to address today's "polycrisis."

There is no creation of the future if we do not sustain, at root, an intuition for invention. No one understood this better than James Lovelock, the most significant scientific thinker since Charles Darwin.

Over the course of his career, Lovelock set the terms by which we've come to understand life—biologically, societally, poetically—in the twenty-first century. He helped NASA complete missions to Mars and the moon; he invented devices that revealed the presence of harmful chemicals in the Earth's atmosphere, inspiring Rachel Carson to write Silent Spring; and he formulated the Gaia hypothesis, the deceptively simple idea that our planet could be viewed as a single self-regulating organism—everything entangled, everything acting upon everything else.

In September 2015, Hans Ulrich Obrist traveled to Dorset to visit Lovelock at his seaside cottage, where they spent nine hours discussing garden cities, frozen hamsters, rising temperatures, tiny widgets, the Space Age, the birth of modern science, the agonies of institutions, and the future of humanity. Ever Gaia presents this conversation as a celebration of Lovelock, who died in 2022 at 103, alongside contributions from two future pioneers of Gaia: Daisy Hildyard and Precious Okoyomon. As another of Lovelock's heirs, Tim Lenton, writes in his afterword, this encounter was pivotal in Lovelock's late intellectual life and, at the start of 2023, provides a guide—by way of Lovelock's Gaian approach—to address today's "polycrisis."

Ever Gaia opens the second season of isolarii as a tribute not just to Lovelock but to the late Bruno Latour, who introduced the series when we launched it two years ago. The second volume of a trilogy that started with the release of The Archipelago Conversations in 2021, Ever Gaia is the most accessible introduction to the life and work of Lovelock, whose way of seeing—"perhaps his greatest legacy," Obrist writes—will continue to shape our world and our place within it for decades to come.

In April 2019, Sophie Nys presented the solo exhibition Family Nexus at KIOSK. In psychology, a family nexus stands for a vision that is shared by the majority of family members, often unconsciously and for several generations long, and is upheld in the context of events both within the family and in its relationship to the world. Among other, the monumental, stretched out net in the dome space was a symbol of this family dynamic. 

Two years later, the theme is still working its way through the above mentioned heads. The shared interest of Nys, Gourdon, Aerts and Peacock leads to a collaboration in the form of a book that, just like the exhibition, can be read as a net of (un)coherent intrigues and knots in which no position can be neutral. They set up a network of characters. Together they represent all kinds of (human) connections. Family Nexus is a story about everyone and no one in particular. Who in this book is playing the role of the Nobody, the household’s so-called 'identified patient', or scapegoat, and which pots and pans has slipped through this character’s fingers?

Co-production: KIOSK and BOEKS.

faits divers are the various reports in a news bulletin, miscellaneous human interest stories, theorised by Roland Barthes as ‘total’ and ‘immanent’ information.

ferrara deux (faits divers) scrolls around the discovered corpse of a talented street musician named Landau, mangled and sealed into vacuum bags in the walk-in of a modern Italian-American restaurant. Street performance is content for an attention economy, playing on authenticities and profiting from recognition.

In this debut novel, artist Ivan Cheng reconfigures recent performance texts into an approximation of a murder mystery.

Contributors to Starship № 20:

Rosa Aiello, Terry Atkinson, Tenzing Barshee, Gerry Bibby, Mercedes Bunz, David Bussel, Jay Chung, Eric D. Clark, Caleb Considine, Hans-Christian Dany, Albert Dichy, Nikola Dietrich, Martin Ebner, Ruth Angel Edwards, Stephanie Fezer, Jean Genet, Simone Gilges, Julian Göthe, Michèle Graf, Selina Grüter, Ulrich Heinke, Toni Hildebrandt, Beatrice Hilke, Karl Holmqvist, Stephan Janitzky, G. Peter Jemison, Charlotte Johannesson, Julia Jost, Julia Jung, Jakob Kolding, Nina Könnemann, Lars Bang Larsen, Anita Leisz, Norman Lewis, Elisa R. Linn, Sebastian Lütgert, Vera Lutz, Chloée Maugile, Robert McKenzie, Ariane Müller, Christopher Müller, Robert M. Ochshorn, Henrik Olesen, Kari Rittenbach, Nina Rhode, Ulla Rossek, Cameron Rowland, Mark von Schlegell, Ryan Siegan Smith, Philipp Simon, Valerie Stahl Stromberg, Josef Strau, Vera Tollmann, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Camilla Wills, Amelie von Wulffen and Florian Zeyfang.

"This is the 20th issue of Starship and we are proud and very happy to present it, and mainly want to thank all the artists, the contributors, the columnists, and the people who helped us gather images of exhibitions past, and gave us texts from books not yet published. Starship never starts with a clear concept about its future content, or what could be called a theme, but always with a sort of attentive interest. The theme may develop through its columnists—we now think it is easy to distinguish lines of thoughts, images, and texts answering each other. But it surely does so out of this editorial interest that wanders, and finds, and collects, is enthusiastic about artworks, and texts, and people, and then, well, brings this all together in a magazine. This was our working mode during the past year, and the responsiveness of those who regularly write for Starship (the columnists) has shown us that out there others are involved in thoughts that run very much in parallel. It is a strange form, a magazine like this, not getting funded, appearing irregularly, but still following a sort of conventional form that shows its consistency. It is at its core an excess of producing something that might prove itself valuable and liberating in the future."
—Ariane Müller, Henrik Olesen

The continuation and culmination of a vast project, articulated between an exhibition and a symposium, imagined by South African curator Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi), inviting 17 artists from Africa and its diaspora and a group of researchers to evoke black aesthetics and propose an alternative vision of a world without borders.

In Zulu, imbizo means "gathering" which is called by the elders when there are communal problems so that everyone listens to each other to see how solutions can evolve. The book Globalisto. A philosophy in flux. Acts of an Imbizo is intended as a hybrid between a catalogue of the exhibition held at MAMC+ from 25 June to 16 October 2022 and the publication of the proceedings of the symposium held on 6 and 7 October 2022. The book is therefore in two parts.

The first part reports on Imbizo part 1: the opening, and on the exhibition curated by Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi) and Aurélie Voltz, director of MAMC+, which brought together artworks by seventeen artists: Sammy Baloji, Raphaël Barontini, Marie Aimée Fattouche, Sam Gilliam, Porky Hefer, Lubaina Himid, Arthur Jafa, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Samson Kambalu, Moshekwa Langa, Myriam Mihindu, Wilfried Nakeu, Otobong Nkanga, Josèfa Ntjam, Sara Sadik, Dread Scott and Gerard Sekoto. A 32-page glossy booklet follows the exhibition line-up, showing at least one reproduction of each artist's work. The playlist that was available to listen to in the first exhibition room has found its place in the book in the same way as a list of works—a flashcode link refers the person who wishes to read the book while listening to music.

The second part of the book, which is its main body, publishes a written transcription of the contributions of the speakers at Imbizo part 2: the symposium on "Art and (de)colonisation". You will find lectures by academics (Norman Ajari, Amal Alhaag, Christine Eyene, Elvan Zabunyan) as well as more visual essays, conceived as transpositions of performances (Jamika Ajalon, Elsa M'Bala) and a more oral proposition, a transcription of a podcast by the Piment collective that took place live in the MAMC+ auditorium. Three interviews introduce the proceedings. The first, with the curator Mo Laudi, is taken from a special issue of Le 1 Hebdo devoted to the "Globalisto" exhibition. The second is a continuation of the first, conducted by Aurélie Voltz, director of the MAMC+, who asks the curator about the follow-up to his project. The last is also a second publication, originally published in Le 1 Hebdo, in which journalists Iman Amhed, Laurent Greilsamer and Maxence Collin interview philosopher Achille Mbembé.

Contributions by Aurélie Voltz, Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi), Iman Ahmed, Maxence Collin, Achille Mbembe, Norman Ajari, Christine Eyene, Elvan Zabunyan, Jamika Ajalon, Amal Alhaag, Elsa M'Bala.

Published as a precursor to BFTK#6, ‘In the Bag’ by Paul Buck is a pamphlet / essay / missive about rarities, the out of print, one-offs and those ‘oddities, oddments and ornaments’ that collectors and magpies seek, hoard and lose. Printed and numbered in an edition of 150, each copy comes with a violet insert featuring a photograph of a Gladstone bag by Valentine Day.