Amazonia – Anthology as Cosmology

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.

I Want reviews the eponymous duo's double-projection film installation examining issues of gender, sexuality and performativity—and inspired by the words of punk poetess Kathy Acker and convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which was presented at their 2015 solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary.

The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors.

Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration. Alongside generous color documentation, written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse unpack and reflect upon both the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work.

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

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.

Thirty texts by cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon Jill Johnston.

Jill Johnston was renowned as a writer on dance, especially on the developments around Judson Dance and the 1960s downtown New York City scene, and later as the author of the radical-feminist classic Lesbian Nation (1973). This book collects thirty texts by Jill Johnston that were initially published in her weekly column for The Village Voice between 1960 and 1974. The column provided a format in which Johnston could dissolve distinctions between the personal, the critical, and the political. Her writing took turns and loops, reflecting its times and contexts, and set a stage for the emergence of Johnston as a public figure and self-proclaimed radical lesbian that defied any prescribed position.

Johnston's original texts are accompanied by three new contributions by Ingrid Nyeboe, Bruce Hainley, and Jennifer Krasinski, as well as an appendix with archival material related to a panel Johnston organized in 1969, titled “The Disintegration of a Critic: An Analysis of Jill Johnston.”

Edited by Fiona McGovern, Megan Francis Sullivan, Axel Wieder.
Texts by Jill Johnston; contributions by Bruce Hainley, Jennifer Krasinski, Ingrid Nyeboe.

A literary tribute to Sarah Lucas, at once an adroit art-historical study and a poetic travelogue.

“Distance is far, nobody said. (Somebody, surely.)” So begins Quinn Latimer's strange, elliptical account of an exhibition and a body of work by Sarah Lucas that the poet and critic has never seen, made and installed in a city she had not yet visited. In the spring of 2012 the renowned English artist's exhibition “NUDs” was mounted in Mexico City at Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli, the famed pyramid-like museum built by the muralist and architect Juan O'Gorman to house Rivera's approximately 50,000 Mesoamerican artifacts and objects. In the summer of 2012 Latimer found herself in Elba, the island of Napoleon's exile, where she embarked on this small, charged book. In four interconnected essays, the writer limns the myriad impressions, ideas, objects, personages, and histories relevant to Lucas's fantastically transparent yet complicated “NUDs,” and their storied making and installation in Mexico. Exploring shame, passivity, palindromes and fertility statuary, as well as notables including Antonin Artaud, Napoleon, Susan Sontag and Mary Wollstonecraft, Describe This Distance is at once an adroit art-historical study and a poetic travelogue, once or twice removed.

This monograph explores the work and the artistic activities of Italian radical performer, poet, visual artist and feminist Tomaso Binga through a specific lexicon (Agora, Biographies, the Corporeal Nature of the Word, Correspondences, Geographies, Vaginal Value), and also features a selection of poems by the artist.

The volume explores the key passages of Tomaso Binga's artistic practice, and as such is divided into three macro areas. The first, purely textual, following institutional introduction by the President of the Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee Angela Tecce, features texts by Eva Fabbris, Daria Khan, Quinn Latimer, Lilou Vidal, and Stefania Zuliani, as well as a conversation between the artist herself and Luca Lo Pinto. The second part brings together a series of short critical texts that offer an in-depth analysis of single works and small bodies of work by Tomaso Binga. These contents are further subdivided into six categories (Agora, Biographies, The Body of the Word, Correspondences, Geographies, Vaginal Value) with the aim of delving into the key areas of interest in Tomaso Binga's practice in chronological order. Critical contributions are thus provided by Marc Bembekoff, Barbara Casavecchia, Martina Cavalli, Chiara Costa, Anna Cuomo, Valérie Da Costa, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Daria Khan, Émilie Notéris, Raffaella Perna, Antonello Tolve, and Andrea Viliani. The third and final part is dedicated to the artist's visual poems. Each poem is accompanied by an English translation, in several cases published here for the first time.

Embedded in the language of visual and sound poetry, the practice of Tomaso Binga (Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, born 1931 in Salerno) is based on an ironic, insightful questioning of the idea of gender. In her work, this theme is not only a generator of identity, but also a way of looking afresh at the social roles, rights and opportunities traditionally available to women. Her decision to work under a male pseudonym from 1971 onwards was intended to parody male privilege and to provoke a barbed reflection on the political dimension of what it is to be a woman. Her attitude has served as a key marker within the gender equality issues at the center of the debate raging amongst the younger generations.

Edited by Eva Fabbris, Lilou Vidal, Stefania Zuliani with Anna Cuomo.

Texts by Tomaso Binga, Eva Fabbris, Daria Khan, Quinn Latimer, Luca Lo Pinto, Lilou Vidal, Stefania Zuliani.

Featuring Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Jimmy DeSana, Princess Julia, Olivia Laing, Simon Costin, Timothy Thornton, Mary Manning and many more. Published 2020.