An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping

Hey culture worker! Are you feeling alone and afraid while the world burns? It’s Too Late. Do It Anyway! is two books in one, created for cultural workers who want to get off the racial capitalist high-speed-train-to-nowhere and start structuring revolution through collective care.

It’s Too Late. Do It Anyway! offers two routes into a fractal support network designed to shed absurd, useless forms of artworld prestige in favor of collectively producing a world organized to support caregivers.  It’s Too Late tells the true story of an exhibition about care that exposed the difference between making symbolic gestures and actually doing something. Do It Anyway! serves as a manual for The Hologram, a prism-shaped collective care protocol conceptualized by artist Cassie Thornton, inspired by the Social Solidarity Clinic of Thessaloniki in Greece, and now practiced by people all over the world.

In It’s Too Late. Do It Anyway! multiple voices weave The Hologram into the present, the past, and the future all at once, ultimately putting the story and the tools it describes into each reader’s life-wizened hands. This is not really a book;  it’s a pathway out of the tough spot we are all in right now. Anyone can make use of it, even you.

Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She was the first critic to identify postmodernism’s arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston’s entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston’s journalism and criticism—in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980—and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston’s appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular participation at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston’s criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston’s feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism’s roots in avant-garde art practice.

In recent years, collective approaches to curatorial practice have become prominent, and not for the first time. While the myth of the stand-alone curator has been largely dismantled in favor of recognizing the myriad other actors and agencies—from artists to installers, from gallery attendants to directors, and others—who make their work possible, contemporary curatorial practices encompass far more than bringing simply more collaborators together. Through a collection of essays and experimental texts, Not Going it Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating offers readers a layered and contextual understanding of this phenomenon, its debates, and possibilities across a range of temporalities, positions, and geographical perspectives.

Edited by Paul O'Neill with Gerrie van Noord / Elizabeth Larison

With contributions from:
Maria Berríos / Pip Day / Sofía Olasooaga
Nikolett Erőss / Eszter Lázár
Index and PRAKSIS Teen Advisory Boards
Elizabeth Larison
Nina Möntmann
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
Gerrie van Noord
Paul O‘Neill
Agnieszka Pindera
Serubiri Moses
Gregory Sholette

Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes — and dead calm — of grief. It is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author’s searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of a mother’s death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modelled the book’s formless form on Bourgeois’s Cells sculptures – at once channelling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.

Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorisable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past.

The apocalypse as such will not take place, as it is already finished. Today, there is no longer any difference between the end of the world and capitalism itself: from Britney Spears’ Till the World Ends to The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time, from Avenger’s Endgame to Donnie Darko, and all the way down to the internet’s Backrooms, the world never ends but is reproduced again and again according to the semio-logic of capital. 

In contrast with Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, Semiotics of the End is a manifesto for the imagination of another relationship with the end. If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as Slavoj Žižek, Fredric Jameson, and Mark Fisher put it, it is only because we have not imagined anything yet. The end is just the beginning.

With an Afterword by Matt Bluemink 

Looking at pictures, she was reminded of the lack of time. And anyway, where did all the time go?

In Day Book a woman artist looks at time in an address to quotidian events and their unfolding. Exploring motherhood, unpaid labour, childcare, and the time of the artist, she reads the work of contemporary women filmmakers through the earlier works of filmmakers, writers, and photographers, including Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras, Natalia Ginzburg and Christa Wolf, Bertien van Manen and Bernadette Mayer. The inability to capture the accumulation of days emerges—a form without form, day after day after day.