Artists' Survival Kit

A portrait of the cohesive community of women artists in Frogtown, Los Angeles, including Ruby Neri, Hilary Pecis, Megan Reed, Lily Stockman, and Austyn Weiner.

The Glover Group: A Los Angeles Story narrates the journey of an extraordinary group of artists who have nurtured their unique artistic voices within the same studio complex in Frogtown, Los Angeles. The Glover Group includes Ruby Neri, Hilary Pecis, Megan Reed, Lily Stockman, and Austyn Weiner, a coincidental yet cohesive community of women artists sharing a unique bond through their interconnected workspace.

This catalog, designed to document their collaborative exhibition held at MASSIMODECARLO in Milan during July and August 2023, features interviews to the artists by Cecilia Alemani, Alison M. Gingeras, Justine Ludwig, Marta Papini, and Heidi Zuckerman, together with photographs by Tracy Nguyen.

Contributions by Ruby Neri & Alison M. Gingeras, Hilary Pecis & Cecilia Alemani, Megan Reed & Marta Papini, Lily Stockman & Heidi Zuckerman, Austyn Weiner & Justine Ludwig.

Upside-down trees with roots reaching toward the cosmos, glasses, pitchers, transparent vessels, and bodies blending human and animal, male and female features populate Jacopo Pagin’s works. These figures reveal themselves in their decadent and symmetrical being, caught within a web of references centered on the evocative power of the gaze.

The first monograph dedicated to Jacopo Pagin, designed and edited by Ismaël Bennani and Orfée Grandhomme and featuring a critical contribution by Alessandra Franetovich, brings together over 200 drawings and paintings to explore the visionary, obsessive, and hypnotic qualities of the artist’s work and its profound connections with exotic, mediumistic, and new-age practices.

The book is co-published with Make Room, Los Angeles.

A contemplative photographic series by Jochen Lempert, created during a residency at the Moulin des Ribes in Grasse, a former mill nestled in the Provençal landscape.

Known for his background in biology and his distinctive analogue black-and-white photography, Lempert brings a scientific sensitivity and poetic restraint to his exploration of the site's immediate environment.

Shot entirely on location, the images focus on subtle interactions between natural forms and their surroundings. Rather than constructing grand ecological narratives, Lempert observes everyday life in and around the mill, drawing attention to the interdependencies and ephemeral presences that define a place.

With the intimacy of field notes and the tactility of silver gelatin prints, Local Ecology. Moulin des Ribes is both a document and a meditation. It reveals the overlooked ecologies that persist on the periphery of human attention, transforming the act of looking into a form of ecological engagement. In the silence of these photographs, Lempert proposes a different kind of knowledge—rooted in slowness, attunement, and care.

The photographs included in this publication were taken in the summer of 2021 during a residency at La Società delle Api, Moulin des Ribes, Grasse, based on an idea by Cristiano Raimondi.

Jochen Lempert (born 1958 in Moers) is a German photographer. Trained as a biologist specializing in dragonflies, he began his career as a photographer in 1989, at the age of 31, developing an artistic practice based on this scientific heritage, marked by images of nature where the animal and vegetal go hand in hand.

The ultimate ambition of this book-tool is to “disappear on the street”. Its pages collect words and stories of people whose right to exist and be visible in public spaces was forced to confront the concepts of “legality” and “justice”.

Considering the assumption that the law is a fluid parameter, which changes depending on where we are in the world, the historical period in which we live and the sort of privileges we enjoy, the law defines what is considered moral, licit, in other words, what is right. It distributes power and the perception of power in society, defining, categorizing, dividing and controlling.

WILL YOU MARRY ME? is a public lecture and an artist’s book by Sara Leghissa and Marzia Dalfini, investigating a specific portion of the spectrum of illegality, namely the relationship between illegal acts and public space. It explores how we can act disobedience before everyone’s eyes, suggesting possible forms of complicity and public resistance.

All the content was collected by the artist during meetings and conversations that took place in Prato, Milan, Ramallah, Marseille, Madrid, Nyon and Lausanne and with this book-tool their words become manifestos that the reader is invited to detach and relocate into the public space.

Designed by Marzia Dalfini. Published by NERO with the support of L’Altra.

Format: 42 x 29,7 cm
Pages: 28
Language: IT / EN
Year: 2021

Jochen Lempert brings his signature blend of scientific sensitivity and poetic vision to the remote Greek island of Kastellorizo.

Known for his black-and-white photographs and background in biology, Lempert turns his lens to the subtle presences of animal, vegetal, and mineral life on this isolated Mediterranean outpost.

Through a series of quietly observational images, Lempert documents the island's micro-ecologies with a field biologist's care and an artist's attunement to form and chance. As always, he eschews dramatic framing and post-production, relying on natural light, analog processes, and an acute sense of timing. 

What emerges is a slow, intimate portrait of a place, where natural history and everyday life are entangled, where the ephemeral and the enduring coexist. Not only a record of a particular geography, Local Ecology. Kastellorizo delves into themes of observation, belonging, and the delicate ecosystems that support life in isolated places.

The photographs included in this publication were taken in the summer of 2019 during a residency at La Società delle Api in Kastellorizo, Greece, based on an idea by Cristiano Raimondi.

Jochen Lempert (born 1958 in Moers) is a German photographer. Trained as a biologist specializing in dragonflies, he began his career as a photographer in 1989, at the age of 31, developing an artistic practice based on this scientific heritage, marked by images of nature where the animal and vegetal go hand in hand.

Antonio Obá: Rituals of Care traces the practice of the Brazilian artist since 2016, offering a broad survey of his recent work, dwelling on the recurring motifs and iconographic sources that feed the complex imagery of his painting. Extensively illustrated, the book returns the richness of Obá's paintings, with enlargements on some of the details woven into the pictorial texture that, in addition to showing his masterful technique, make certain elements of his visual vocabulary stand out.

The conversation between Andrea Bellini and Antonio Obá that opens the book offers the opportunity to learn, through the artist's voice, about the key passages of his research, and to examine his diverse cultural references—from the Baroque of Minas Gerais to traditional Chinese painting, from Rembrandt to the Catholic ex-votos—until we discover the Obá's civic vocation, of painting as a spiritual practice.

The two essays commissioned for the occasion analyze the complexity of these layered signifiers. Lorraine Mendes's essay "Every Boy Is a King" offers an in-depth analysis of Obá's religious syncretism. It suggests an interpretation of its layered symbols, particularly the sankofa and the deity Exú, both of which pay tribute to the artist's West African roots. Above and beyond the specific cultural contexts of this iconography, the author emphasizes the universal value of Obá's work, its evocative, transformative, dynamic power, which—like music or dance—knows no national boundaries or barriers.

Larry Ossei-Mensah's essay "Embodiment: The Art of Antonio Obá" investigates the complex cultural legacy that is intertwined with the artist's practice, connected to his Afro-Brazilian roots, to the social and political realities of the Black diaspora, and to Christian, Candomblé, and Umbanda traditions. In addition to examining the context in which Obá's work is rooted, the author situates it within a galaxy of artists who have focused on questions of identity, often using their own bodies as tools of social and cultural critique.

Completing the book is a chronology, compiled by Sara De Chiara, tracing the artist's formative years and exhibition history, accompanied by rich documentary materials.

Published on the occasion of Antonio Obá: Rituals of Care, the first mid-career survey in Europe dedicated to the Brazilian artist, curated by Andrea Bellini, at the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, in 2025.

Antonio Obá (born 1983 in Ceilândia, Brazil) lives and works in Brasília. His multifaceted practice encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and performance. His œuvre interrogates and subverts historical representations, reappropriating spiritual practices and stigmas of racism. Obá endeavors to reclaim his African heritage in a societal framework that has historically sought to dilute Black culture. His works therefore confront the violence inflicted over centuries upon African-Brazilian traditions and communities with new narratives.

This publication proposes a set of aural exercises that show readers how to disappear, reappear, join a group, or leave a group. Its annex is a lexicon of some of the sounds that dwell in or are banished from the middle-class household. 

Text: Haytham El-Wardany
Editors: Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis
Translated from Arabic by Jennifer Peterson (Preliminary Exercises) and Robin Moger (Sounds of the Middle Classes)

Western societies have dismantled many of the prohibitions that ringfenced errant sexual drives in Freud’s time. The psychoanalytic project describes people caught between two fundamental and contradictory principles: One a relentless sexual drive, the libido; the other our species’ collective need for social order and harmony. Part of this harmony, for true Freudians, is embedded in the binary mutuality of men’s and women’s bodies, which remains indispensable for society to reproduce itself, even in our sexually liberated age. In this essay, Ahmari revisits the idea of ‘genitality’ arguing that perhaps the "heteronormative" orthodox Freudians were right about some things after all.

Precipitous philosophies. Synaptic-nerve narrations. Syntactic spirals. Hyper-coiled horizons. Will Alexander’s mental range has arrived. An anomalous scripting of the word “automatic,” Aunonomic Reasoning is a whirlwind of lingual torrents triggered by creative mishearing that at once exposes the occupations of orthodox surrealism, summons a voice for the scathed populace of imperial affliction, and forges new paths of phonetic potentiality to mend semantic injury. Pushing prosaic margins beyond their boundaries, these texts take on the etymological condition of the essay as “attempt” with iridescent siege, prepositional frenzy, paratactic provocation, noetic disreckoning, and a critical demand to dismantle: all of which signatures of Alexander’s unilateral poetic innovations.

Is it the computerization of the planet
Or a loosening of my fidelity to suffering
I don’t understand the intensity
I’ve hidden here but I know I despaired
Of finding a physical place to keep
My tears. Now what. Seas that go turquoise
When you stop looking at them . . .
 
Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.

Praise for Ariana Reines:

Ariana Reines is a go-for-broke artist who honors her traditions by being like no one else. Some of us have made a fetish of our stupidity, pretending to forget history, and some of us have made a fetish of despair, congratulating ourselves on melancholia, but Ariana is too brilliant and too alive for either of those sad luxuries... I am convinced of the authenticity of the summonses she receives and the summonses she issues and when I read her I am reminded that all of this is a calling before it's an identity or career. Her voice-which is always more than hers alone is a dialectic between the very ancient and the bleeding edge. - Ben Lerner

Reines's books are works of intellectual commitment and structural sophistication; at the same time, they allow the raw stuff of being, in all its messiness, to enter the page. -The White Review

Mind-blowing. - Kim Gordon

Her writing is queer and raunchy, raw and occult, seemingly never pulling away from her deepest vulnerabilities. Yet Reines simultaneously maintains a feeling of epic poetry, of ancient intention. She moves between worlds in search of the divine and the self. - The New York Times

These are the kinds of poems that reorient you in the world, make you understand how little you know, but how much is inside you. - NYLON

There is no such thing as a safe word. 

In Bad Language, So Mayer blends memoir and manifesto as they explore the politics of speech, while looking at how language has been used – and abused – in their own life. What is the relationship between language and sexual violence? And how can we ‘make ourselves up’ in language when words themselves are encoded by a dominant culture that insists we see ourselves as powerless listeners rather than active speakers? 

Examining the semantic traps of their multi-lingual childhood – and taking in texts from the Torah to Grimms’ Fairytales, from protest bust cards to the works of Ursula K. Le Guin – Mayer asks who gets to speak, and who is forced into silence. Bad Language calls out the harm that words can do, while searching for crafty ways through which we can collectively reclaim language for protest and pleasure. 

‘Mayer’s writing is generous, astute and sincere; in Bad Language, they choose their words carefully, using incantation and spell to distil a complex argument – the transformative power of language lay in its ability to shape sense perception. For Mayer, the task of ‘making ourselves up’ is another way of asking, what kind of world do we want to live in?’ – Lola Olufemi

SO MAYER is a writer, editor, bookseller and organiser. Truth & Dare, their first collection of speculative fiction, was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness and Edge Hill Short Story prizes. With Sarah Shin, they co-edited Ursula K. Le Guin, Space Crone, winner of the 2024 Locus Award for non-fiction. Bad Language is their second book for Peninsula, after A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing.