Ellen Cantor

Publication focusing on Cantor's final project Pinochet Porn (2008–16)—an epic experimental film taking the form of a soap opera about the intimate life of people under the military dictatorship of Chile. A dramatic, transgressive and explicitly feminist work, embodying and radically extending Cantor's multifaceted artistic practice. 

Ellen Cantor combined ready-made materials with diaristic notes and drawings to probe her perceptions and experiences of personal desire and institutional violence. This book is concerned with, and a document of, Cantor's work through the lens of Pinochet Porn (2008–16) and its making—an epic experimental film embodying and radically extending her multifaceted artistic practice. Taking the form of an episodic narrative about five children growing up under the regime of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and shot between her dual hometowns of London and New York, history is observed through Cantor's fictive speculations on private experience within a totalizing political order. A history of the world as it has become known to me brings together writings and archival materials of Cantor's, including a reproduction in full of her drawing-based script Circus Lives from Hell (2004), alongside contributions by writers, artists, collaborators, and friends reflecting on Cantor's practice, Pinochet Porn, and a singularly transgressive vision: explicitly feminist, remorselessly emotional, dramatic in tone, and, as Cantor herself liked to put it, adult in subject matter.

Winter issue, featuring Mark Leckey, Ellen Cantor, Gertrude Stein, Piotr Uklański, P.Staff, Josephine Pryde, Blackhaine, Diego Marcon, Ingrid Wiener, Olivier Assayas, Jamieson Webster, Steven-Phillips-Horst...

Spike's latest issue is a beacon lit to rescue The Night. Long held under suspicion as the domain of outcasts and phantoms, the night has come under pressure to extend the horizon of work and production.

What faith, the state, and capital fear are the perils and promises of the dark's formlessness: to withdraw into the pure solitude of sleep and dreams' unreason; to blush with the pure elation of dance and a rave's ephemeral friendships; even to have one's edges undone by the murmurs of ghosts or a celestial sign.

Need a break from the tyranny of the sun? Then light a candle, a headlamp, a flare – anything but your phone – and grap your copy to follow us into the possibility of the night.