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Cover of Barge Life: On Jean Vigo's L'Atalante

Punctum Books

Barge Life: On Jean Vigo's L'Atalante

Florian Deroo

€21.00

How to live together in cramped quarters? How to create a microcosm against hostile surroundings? In Barge Life, Florian Deroo tackles these questions by looking at a mythical classic of French cinema: Jean Vigo’s 1934 film L’Atalante. A work brimming with the energies of surrealism and anarchism, L’Atalante follows a young couple, two shipmates, and a clowder of cats who dwell in the belly of a river barge. Deroo offers a wide-ranging essay on the film, revealing how it lovingly delineates a small group that withdraws from the rhythms of modern life to establish a different kind of existence elsewhere. In L’Atalante’s most riveting moments, the river barge becomes a vehicle for a powerful fantasy: a supple and mobile collective life, lived in sensuous interdependence.

Combining film criticism, philosophy, and biography, Deroo’s Barge Life reconsiders an important forerunner to the French New Wave and the early death of its director. Drawing readers into the intimately cramped living spaces of L’Atalante, Deroo explores the allure of retreating into a self-sufficient shelter, along with its intractable problems.

Published in 2025 ┊ 96 pages ┊ Language: English

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Cover of Snaturamenti

Light Cone

Snaturamenti

Flatform

A workbook by Flatform on displacement, conceived and curated by Giuliana Prucca.

The book is published under four different covers and with four different layouts, randomly distributed.

Founded in 2006 and based in Berlin and Milan, Flatform is a video and media arts collective, at the border between experimental cinema and contemporary art, that creates time-based works, film events, and installations, most of which revolve around landscape and biopolitics. Distributed by Light Cone in Paris and by Video Data Bank in Chicago, works by Flatform have competed in major film festivals including Cannes, Rotterdam, Venice, Toronto, and have been shown worldwide in art venues such as Centre Pompidou, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hirshhorn Museum, MAXXI Museum, Eye Filmmuseum, Wexner Center for the Arts and Garage Center for the Arts.

Co-published by Light Cone and Avarie.

Cover of Dolce Stil Criollo Issue 5: Extraordinarily Apotropaic

Dolce Stil Criollo

Dolce Stil Criollo Issue 5: Extraordinarily Apotropaic

Dolce Stil Criollo’s fifth issue, "Extraordinarily Apotropaic," aims to rethink reality in its current ordinary form by discovering and creating charms and rituals for changing it into one where there is less harm. The issue features poems in multiple languages; a map of dreams; a video game-turned-manga; a section that functions as a kineograph; a collaboration with the Huni Kuin people; and more. We also curated a collective project, “Cinema of Hope,” which brings together 11 moving image artists in search of the apotropaic moment, caught on film. 

The cover of our fifth issue features one of five “santinho” inserts. Designed like prayer cards, they contain a collaged portrait of a musical artist (Pivaratu, Pivete Nobre, Iya, Swatch, Devil Gremory) on the recto and the rap lyrics they wrote in response to our theme on the verso.

Contributors include Andrés-Monzón Aguirre, Aykan Safoğlu, Azul Caballero Adams, Belinda Zhawi, Daniel Machado, Daniel Moura, Devil Gremory, Enorê, Esvin Alarcón Lam, Gabriel Massan, Hick Duarte, Itamar Alves, Iya, Jennifer Pérez, Jesse Cohen, Johan Mijail, Juan Pablo Villegas, Kasra Jallilipour, Kent Chan, Keratuma (Mileidy Domicó), Laura Huertas Millán, Lucía Melií, Lucía Reissig & Bernardo Zabalaga, Maria Thereza Alves, Masha Godovannaya, Mayada Ibrahim, Najlaa Eltom, NIna Djekić, Ophelia S. Chan, Pivaratu, Pivete Nobre, Ricardo Pinheiro (Ganso), Roberto Tejada, Sofía Córdova, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Swatch, Thales Pessoa, and Thiago Martins de Melo.

Languages: Spanish, 
Portuguese, English, Japanese and Arabic

Cover of Segunda Vez: How Masotta Was Repeated

Oslo National Academy of the Arts

Segunda Vez: How Masotta Was Repeated

Dora Garcia

Publication documenting the research made by Dora García for a video project on Oscar Masotta, pioneer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Latin America and influential art critic.

It features a selection of Masotta's writings as well as contextual essays on his work.Segunda Vez is an art research project centered on the figure of Oscar Masotta (Buenos Aires, 1930, Barcelona, 1979), an author of groundbreaking texts about the Happening, art, and dematerialization, a pioneer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the Spanish-speaking world, and a happenista. The project has yielded a full-length and four medium-length films by Dora García, two Cahiers documenting the research, and this book. Segunda Vez: How Masotta Was Repeated offers a selection of Masotta's writings, including his early study of Argentinean author Roberto Arlt, as well as texts that contextualize Masotta's thought and broaden the reach of his reflections on the intersections between performance and psychoanalysis, art and politics.

Edited by Emiliano Battista.
Texts by Dora García, Oscar Masotta, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Jinkis, Inés Katzenstein, Ana Longoni, Emiliano Battista, Aaron Schuster, Julio Cortázar.

English edition

13,5 x 21 cm (hardcover)

320 pages (color & b/w ill.)

Cover of Grandma’s Story

Silver Press

Grandma’s Story

Trinh T. Minh-ha

Essays €11.00

‘May my story be beautiful and unwind like a long thread . . .’, she recites as she begins her story. 

The storyteller is the living memory of her time: at once an oracle, weaver, healer, warrior, witch, protectress, teacher and great mother. Her powers are to do with passing on – not only the stories but transmission itself: ‘what grandma began, granddaughter completes and passes on to be further completed.’

In contrast to the idea that a story is ‘just a story’, pioneering postcolonial feminist theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha recodes ideas about truth and fantasy to tell a different story about power, civilisation, history, medicine and magic. Grandma’s Story shows how creative speech is connected to women’s powers of enchantment, drawing upon and speaking with storytellers including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Clarice Lispector, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko and Zora Neale Hurston – all who may be known as ‘she who breaks open the spell’. 

The story as a cure and a protection is at once musical, historical, poetical, ethical, educational, magical, and religious.

Cover of A Seed Under Our Tongue

Marsilio Arte

A Seed Under Our Tongue

Saodat Ismailova

Set in various Uzbek landscapes spanning time and place, Ismailova's films weave a storied tapestry of ancestral folklore, traditional craft and colonial resistance. By Saodat Ismailova, with Roberta Tenconi, Erika Balsom, Marcella Lista, Dilda Ramazan and Rolando Vázquez.

Uzbek artist Saodat Ismailova (born 1981) is part of the first generation of Central Asian filmmakers following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her films emphasize long shots that evoke the aesthetics of slow cinema, often combined with archival footage and installed within textile sculptural elements drawn from vernacular traditions, as in the exhibition at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan, which this volume refers to. Exploring the collective memories of her home region, Ismailova interweaves myths with personal dreams to address social issues such as women's emancipation, identity and the colonial past.