Born in Flames

This book brings together a selection of photographs by artist Mekhitar Garabedian, documenting the warehouse of his late father’s company, Melantex, which exported second-hand clothing from Belgium to the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The images inspired a one-year sculptural intervention by Garabedian, commissioned by the Antwerp Public Art Collection.

Import—Export, Friperie tells a compelling personal and collective story of how displacement can be turned into economic livelihood while creating connections between old and new homes, languages, and textiles.

The photographs are accompanied by an in-depth conversation between Garabedian and curator Samuel Saelemakers about the relationship between photography and sculpture, public representation, and diasporic thinking.

Slow Reading Club (SRC) is a semi-fictional reading group initiated and run by Bryana Fritz and Henry Andersen. Since 2016, in numerous contexts, they have rehearsed alternatives to the kinds of reading they were taught in school, actively suppressing semantic content through strobe lights, strange postures, sociality, and toxins. Operating at the contact zones between reader and text, text and text, reader and reader, they attempt to build a practice from within the unstable space of reading itself.

Répondeur is an extensive account of SRC’s practice in collective reading sessions, exhibitions, and textual bootlegging. Imagined as a scroll, with a rhyme structure and typesetting by Will Holder, the book brings together facsimiles of SRC readers, a wide-ranging interview by Alicja Melzacka, new texts by Joyelle McSweeney and Bill Dietz, and visual work and translations by SRC. These discrete elements are interwoven into a complex, shimmering whole, delighting in the ruptures and elisions of one text’s move into the next.

Stars at Midday –نجوم الضُهر is a personal diary in which the artist and filmmaker Noor Abed compiles visual and poetic notes from the production phase of her film A Night We Held Between, filmed in Palestine in 2023 with family and friends.

Like the film, the book interweaves narrative fragments, song and diaristic observations, creating a fusion of natural and composed sequences of movement, of documentary and fictional elements.

Through a choreography of bodies, sites, stories, and temporalities, Abed’s work prompts contemplation on the manifestations of social action and resistance in everyday life.

Retour is a book featuring a collection of drawings made on train journeys between Belgium and the Netherlands. It combines hand-written typography and train interiors, subtly highlighting cultural differences forming the countries’ border. 

This publication presents a survey of the work of Els Dietvorst from 2010 to 2014. This is also the period in which she left Brussels to live in a village on the south-east coast of Ireland, where she focused on projects such as The Black Lamb. The audio piece One was killed for beauty, another one was shot, the two others died naturally is included on an audio CD.

Els Dietvorst E.D. (2010–2014), Rolf Quaghebeur, Eva Wittocx, Katleen Weyts, Els Dietvorst, Brussels, 2014.

The text by Hiller navigates the boundaries between art, anthropology and psychoanalysis in relation to her installation at the Freud Museum in 1994 titled At the Freud Museum. Accompanying images included throughout from Book Works UK archive, the commissioner of the artwork and talks that this text is edited from.

Tongue Touching the Other / Dil Ötekine Değince is a result of a research project on the Turkish language and its exchanges mainly with Arabic, Farsi and Kurdish. Through language, it aims to follow a common, transnational history and how modern national identities affected our knowledge of that history, and sense of belonging. However, as much as commons, varied forms and dimensions of marginalization are also deeply embedded in our history, culture, language, and as a result, in our everyday lives and in our collective unconsciousness. This book is an attempt to rethink the social, economic & cultural contexts of identity and the concept of “othering” and reflect on inherited motives of imperial and colonial structures, racism, colourism, classism & gender roles.

The book was created through a multi-layered process involving research, conversations, and design. The research phase explored academic texts, etymology, and visual culture to uncover narratives of commons and division. Conversations with 18 people across 9 countries—based on trust and anonymity—provided personal, subjective insights, recorded between July 2022 and January 2025. These dialogues were transcribed and, rather than presented chronologically, were edited into a montage alongside archival visuals and texts, shaping the book's four-chapter narrative:

Yabancı / Stranger / یابان
Misafir / Guest / مسافر
Eğitim / Education
Temsil / Representation / تمثيل