Ce qui fut et ce qui sera

Evol/Love is a project in three parts: a billboard series, installation and publication connecting 160 subtitled movie stills that all contain the word Love.

A collage of voices and definitions arranged in alphabetical order, from ‘Love is where you find it’ (A: A Date with Judy, US 1948, 00:22:37) to ‘But even if it’s a little late, love has a way of coming back to you’(Y: Yeonae/Love is a Crazy Thing, KR 2005, 01:38:02), but read backwards to sound like its antonym: evil.

Self-published: Stichting Mei, Amstelveen, NL 2020
19,6 x 19,6 x 2,3 cm
200 pages, 160 images
Japanese bound, buckram cover with flaps
Offset on pink paper (interior), screenprinted buckram (cover)

Graphic Design Vilmantas Žumbys, Vilnius

Edition of 666 copies

In April 2019, Sophie Nys presented the solo exhibition Family Nexus at KIOSK. In psychology, a family nexus stands for a vision that is shared by the majority of family members, often unconsciously and for several generations long, and is upheld in the context of events both within the family and in its relationship to the world. Among other, the monumental, stretched out net in the dome space was a symbol of this family dynamic. 

Two years later, the theme is still working its way through the above mentioned heads. The shared interest of Nys, Gourdon, Aerts and Peacock leads to a collaboration in the form of a book that, just like the exhibition, can be read as a net of (un)coherent intrigues and knots in which no position can be neutral. They set up a network of characters. Together they represent all kinds of (human) connections. Family Nexus is a story about everyone and no one in particular. Who in this book is playing the role of the Nobody, the household’s so-called 'identified patient', or scapegoat, and which pots and pans has slipped through this character’s fingers?

Co-production: KIOSK and BOEKS.

In Perpetuity is part of Ivey Wawn’s project of the same name. With contributions from those involved in the making of what would have been the live performance, it is an accumulation of thoughts, reflections and associated pieces of work that give some idea of what the work could, would, or may in the future come to be. 

In Perpetuity is an ongoing project that has taken a variety of forms, from publication, through video and into live performance.

sex and place is a series of workshops and publications exploring score-based and semi-anonymous writing as a tool for articulating shared concerns.

Vol. 1 ‘preliminiaries’ is written by Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen. In the midst of (learning) child care, (unlearning) performance and (experimenting with) sex, the publication interweaves three registers of writing as analogies and interruptions of each other.

The ‘sex and place’ series is part Domestic Anarchism, a project devoted to coalition-building beyond biological, chosen, or national conceptions of family. Dance serves as a set of tools and knowledge that can be applied beyond “the spectacle” to collectively study, write, and move. 

Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen are choreographers and they co-parent three-year-old Penélope Cleo. Andrea and Adriano use dance and choreography to think about the distribution of care and solidarity beyond ‘the family’, and in turn consider how such a distribution could inform their dance practice. Inevitably themes like sex, economy, gender, and class get activated. But also notions such as prefiguration, anarchism, clitoridian* thinking, zones of non-domination and coalition building. They see dance as a knowledge that can be applied to different practices. Some of these include: co-habitations, score based writing and dancing, self-organised study groups and publications, workshops and dance performances. 

The Posttraumatic is a newspaper created by creatives and artists. [eng, cast, cat]

Why a newspaper? The project believes that a newspaper is an important link between our social reality (built over the centuries by three-headed monsters and the occasional fairy godmother) and the individuals who live in it, because it is an essential communication element and because its content is a fucking drama almost always.

When Ulrich Beck, a literate man, assures us that “the media does not respond to the inspiration of the enlightenment but to that of the market and capital” we can only read the news with a distrustful and defenseless frown. Uncle Sam manipulates us to his likings and we satisfy our appetites by feasting on his words as if they were cocaine-coated cookies that only serve to fatten the need to win over arguments at our neighbor’s dinner-table conversations. We do not know if the information we swallow is invented, bought, if they are news clippings curated by a 4channer´s paranoid imagination, or if it is an objective, absolute, eternal truth.

Based on these fatalistic, dramatic and somewhat depressing theories on news and their consumption, 39 artists were contacted and each one was granted with a space, a sort of an article, to do whatever they wanted with it. It has not been intended to generate any specific ideological discourse and there is no gift flag.

With Contributions by: Escif, Ampparito, Aida Gómez, Mas Siedentop, Jofre Oliveras, Flavita Banana, Helen Bur, Michael Beitz, Biancoshock, Milu Correch, Luce, Marta Aguilar, Jan Vorman, Igor Ponosov, Ana Vilamú, Vas Ban Wieringen, Gigi Ei, Vlady, Val Rovatti, Octavi Serra, Nicolás Garcia, Valentina and the Electic Post and Others. 

Published 2021

The continuation and culmination of a vast project, articulated between an exhibition and a symposium, imagined by South African curator Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi), inviting 17 artists from Africa and its diaspora and a group of researchers to evoke black aesthetics and propose an alternative vision of a world without borders.

In Zulu, imbizo means "gathering" which is called by the elders when there are communal problems so that everyone listens to each other to see how solutions can evolve. The book Globalisto. A philosophy in flux. Acts of an Imbizo is intended as a hybrid between a catalogue of the exhibition held at MAMC+ from 25 June to 16 October 2022 and the publication of the proceedings of the symposium held on 6 and 7 October 2022. The book is therefore in two parts.

The first part reports on Imbizo part 1: the opening, and on the exhibition curated by Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi) and Aurélie Voltz, director of MAMC+, which brought together artworks by seventeen artists: Sammy Baloji, Raphaël Barontini, Marie Aimée Fattouche, Sam Gilliam, Porky Hefer, Lubaina Himid, Arthur Jafa, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Samson Kambalu, Moshekwa Langa, Myriam Mihindu, Wilfried Nakeu, Otobong Nkanga, Josèfa Ntjam, Sara Sadik, Dread Scott and Gerard Sekoto. A 32-page glossy booklet follows the exhibition line-up, showing at least one reproduction of each artist's work. The playlist that was available to listen to in the first exhibition room has found its place in the book in the same way as a list of works—a flashcode link refers the person who wishes to read the book while listening to music.

The second part of the book, which is its main body, publishes a written transcription of the contributions of the speakers at Imbizo part 2: the symposium on "Art and (de)colonisation". You will find lectures by academics (Norman Ajari, Amal Alhaag, Christine Eyene, Elvan Zabunyan) as well as more visual essays, conceived as transpositions of performances (Jamika Ajalon, Elsa M'Bala) and a more oral proposition, a transcription of a podcast by the Piment collective that took place live in the MAMC+ auditorium. Three interviews introduce the proceedings. The first, with the curator Mo Laudi, is taken from a special issue of Le 1 Hebdo devoted to the "Globalisto" exhibition. The second is a continuation of the first, conducted by Aurélie Voltz, director of the MAMC+, who asks the curator about the follow-up to his project. The last is also a second publication, originally published in Le 1 Hebdo, in which journalists Iman Amhed, Laurent Greilsamer and Maxence Collin interview philosopher Achille Mbembé.

Contributions by Aurélie Voltz, Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi), Iman Ahmed, Maxence Collin, Achille Mbembe, Norman Ajari, Christine Eyene, Elvan Zabunyan, Jamika Ajalon, Amal Alhaag, Elsa M'Bala.

Through more than 500 images by 95 photographers, the Musée de Grenoble's collection of photographs from Antoine de Galbert's collection and his foundation offers an impressive panorama of our times and the decisive role played by photography in shaping our perceptions and contemporary mythologies.

Works by Aalam, Bani Abidi, Antoine d'Agata, Lucien Aigner, Pilar Albarracín, Yolanda Andrade, Sammy Baloji, Ion Bîrlădeanu, Eric Baudelaire, Philippe Bazin, Guillaume Binet, Alain Bizos, Antoni Campana, Mario Carnicelli, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Chieh-Jen Chen, Roman Cieslewicz, Christian Courrèges, David Damoison, Philippe De Gobert, Luc Delahaye, Bernard Descamps, Jean-Marie Donat, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Sandra Eleta, Fouad Elkoury, Charles Fréger, Alberto García-Alix, Laurence Geai, Agnes Geoffray, Julien Gester, Stephan Gladieu, David Goldblatt, Hengameh Golestan, Cosmin Gradinaru, Guillaume Herbaut, Chester Higgins, Kati Horna, John Isaacs, Olivier Jobard, Alain Keler, Yevgeny Khaldeï, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Oleg Kulik, Olivier Laban-Mattei, Stéphane Lagoutte, Dorothea Lange, Le Tiers Visible, Arthur Leipzig, Alexandre Lewkowicz, Pascal Maître, Yuri Mechitov, Davood Maeili, Edouard Méhomé, Georges Melet, Lívia Melzi, Boris Mikhaïlov, Lisette Model, Etienne Montes, Yan Morvan, Genevieve Naylor, Vladimir Nikitin, Martin Parr, Paolo Pellegrin, Mathieu Pernot, Gilles Raynaldy, Marc Riboud, Sophie Ristelhueber, Hugo Schmölz & Karl Hugo Schmölz, Chantal Stoman, Paul Strand, Mikhael Subotzky, Barthélémy Toguo, Tomasz Tomaszewski, James-Iroha Uchechukwu, Alex Van Gelder, Erwan Venn, Weegee, Where dogs run, Sue Williamson, Wiktoria Wojciechowska, Pavel Wolberg, Tom Wood, Patrick Zachmann, Miron Zownir.

Texts by Antoine de Galbert, Guy Tosatto, Noëlig Le Roux, Antoine Champenois, Joséphine Givodan.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the musée de Grenoble from December 2023 to March 2024.

The reading score for the presentation at rile*books on Sunday June 23, an A to Z of Indexing / Organising / Cataloguing BFTK for Two Voices.