Deculturalize

Regions surface often in this issue—across arts, tales, and gatherings of individuals and meanings—as a possibility to bypass the borders of nation-states and the meta-geographies of colonial modernity.

Slavs and Tatars; Hera Chan on Stephanie Comilang; Stephanie Bailey on Ho Tzu Nyen; Drifting into the Atmospheric by Sohrab Mohebbi; Lauren Cook contributes nine newly commissioned note-like fiction pieces; Asad Raza on Édouard Glissant; Mira Dayal in conversation with Shanzhai Lyric, TJ Shin, and jina valentine; Temporary Communities, Four Points on Radically Public Institutions by Elvira Dyangani Ose; A Signature Truer Than the Name by Dani Blanga Gubbay; tidbits: Ruoru Mou by Amy Jones; Virginia Ariu by Brit Barton; Bagus Pandega by Harry Burke; Ceidra Moon Murphy by Alex Bennett; Oshay Green by Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi; Shafei Xia in conversation with Danielle Shang; books by Christian Rattemeyer; Guest Design: Lamm & Kirch.

This issue comes with different covers, randomly distributed.

Mousse is a bimonthly contemporary art magazine. Established in 2006, Mousse contains interviews, conversations, and essays by some of the most important figures in international criticism, visual arts, and curating today, alternated with a series of distinctive articles in a unique tabloid format.

Ding Dong Bell is an invitation to cross the threshold into a world that belongs not only to the imagination, but also to the concrete possibility of a different way of inhabiting reality. In this space, details weave together landscapes and reveal characters, hinting at unexpected encounters in a continuous search for shapes and textures, in a chromatic immersion and a sequence of perspectives on a syncretic and archaic world, on an alchemical pictorial practice, where the complex figurative iconography of living beings and cosmic constellations is progressively enriched with tonal stratifications and semantic density.

The collection of paintings outlines universes in which plants, animals, human beings, and subtle presences coexist outside any pre-established hierarchy. The forms cross each other lymphatically and transform without ever being fully accomplished, metamorphically generating a visual ecosystem based on the continuous exchange of substances and the visceral mixture of matter. In this fluid chorus, everything is constantly redefined in the process of becoming, yet without losing its identity. What emerges is a symbolic horizon that becomes a universal hope: an invitation to living beings, witnesses of contemporaneity, to cultivate mutual respect and nurture a providential alliance, where the different planes of existence vibrate in resonance.

The titles of the works, inspired by traditional English nursery rhymes, and the accompanying texts take the form of ancient and surreal chants, capable of evoking both the childhood of the world and its possible future. Their language, closer to illuminated manuscripts than to linear narration, constructs a vivid imaginary world in which whirlwinds and impulses evoke the idea of original totality: at the end of this long succession of worlds, everything seems to tend towards a single, shared substance of being.

Barbara Cammarata (born in 1977) lives and works in Catania (Sicily).

A photographic archive of the transgender community in Bologna in the 1980s. With critical texts by scholars and queer theorists.

This book is inspired by the pictures that Giordano Bonora, a young streetcar operator and aspiring photographer, took of Bologna's small transgender community in 1980 (although it would be more correct to speak, in this case, of proto-Transgenderism). Reproduced here for the first time, these raw and gilded images reflect—during a period in Italy characterized by subversive movements and political revolts that were not just rooted in questions of identity—attempts made by T* people at a construction of the self outside the binary logic of the genotypically XY male/genotypically XX female. By people like Valérie—a woman's face, a hairless chest with no breasts, a fleur-de-lis tattooed on the shoulder, and two pairs of pantyhose—for whom “gender” is not determined biologically but something to be embraced depending on the circumstances. A box containing a jigsaw puzzle with a picture that is constantly changing. Bundled with the photographs, a handful of texts set out to explain how the question of gender involves two cultural levels of sexual difference, the normative and the dissident, and how the decision-making power over organs outside heteropatriarchal systems of sexuality and processes of disidentification are the stakes in the new “somato-political” struggle against hegemonic regimes of oppression conducted by enchanting, allied, opaque, and vulnerable bodies.

Texts by Paolo Barbaro, Paul B. Preciado, Helena Velena, Salvatore Vitale, Wendy Vogel.

First monograph dedicated to the American artist, poet, and activist John Giorno, this publication introduces some of the many ways Giorno wove poetry into all aspects of daily life—by putting words on the wall, on the performance stage, on LP vinyl records, or on the telephone, in the context of the iconic Dial-A-Poem, one of his most celebrated works. A wide range of archival documents, images, and ephemera also form an intimate portrait of Giorno as an activist, performer, Buddhist practitioner, collaborator, and friend.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous retrospective exhibition at the MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, in 2026.

Emerging from the New York downtown scene of the 1960s, John Giorno (1936–2019) developed a singular artistic voice at the crossroads of poetry, performance, painting, and political activism over the course of more than six decades. By bringing the written word off the page and into performance, technology, and visual art, Giorno consistently challenged disciplinary boundaries and advanced a radical vision of language as central to human expression. Though often positioned at the margins of multiple downtown scenes—the Beats, Andy Warhol's Factory, punk music, queer counterculture, anti-war activism—he was in fact an influential presence within all of them, operating as a conduit between coexisting cultural communities. His collaborators included Robert Rauschenberg, William S. Burroughs, Laurie Anderson, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ugo Rondinone, among many others.

The first monograph dedicated to the Neapolitan feminist and pacifist artists' collective: unpublished documents, images, photographs, and manifestos are accompanied by new creative, political, and historical contributions, evoking the collective joy of Le Nemesiache's history so as to bring a sense of myth back into the world, rewriting and embodying it anew.

Nemesiache is an informal feminist group co-founded in Naples in 1970 by the multidisciplinary and visionary artist and writer Lina Mangiacapre (1946-2002). The collective, which included up to twelve women (centered around Claudia Aglione, Fausta Base, Silvana Campese, Consuelo Campone, Conni Capobianco, Bruna Felletti, Anna Grieco, and Teresa Mangiacapre), fostered an experimental artistic practice and a way of being in the world rooted in feminism, mythology, folktales, sci-fi, and radical imagination, while also introducing "transfeminism" in the early '80s. 

Throughout their long-lasting practice spanning several decades, the group retrieved an androgynous mythosophy to transcend art as mere representation and challenge the feminine as a modern identity category. Their distinct transformative approach within both Italian and Western feminist art history led not only to the emergence of an interdisciplinary practice—encompassing film, performance, writing, rituals, poetry, music, collage, costumes, protests, and conferences—but also the creation of a new political language, grounded in cosmological creativity and justice through mythological rituals.

Edited by Sonia D'Alto.
Texts by Chiara Bottici, Federica Bueti, Cairo Clarke, Sonia D'Alto, Giulia Damiani, Giusi Palomba, Imma Tralli & Roberto Pontecorvo, Elvira Vannini, Giovanna Zapperi, Arnisa Zeqo.

Recorded and transcribed throughout the 1960s, Carla Lonzi’s Self-portrait ruptures the narration of post-war modern art in Italy and beyond. Artmaking struck Lonzi as an invitation to be together in a ‘humanly satisfying way’, and this experiment in art-historical writing is a testament to her belief. Lonzi abolishes the role of the critic, her own, seeking change over self-preservation by theorising against the act of theorising.

The life and work of Carla Lonzi (1931–1982) is inseparable from the cultural, political, and social history of Italy in the decades following the Second World War; she occupies a singular position, which today merits reevaluation. A reputed art critic of the 1960s artistic scene, both friend and collaborator of such figures as Carla Accardi, Luciano Fabro, Giulio Paolini, and Jannis Kounellis, she wrote “Autoportrait” in 1969, a “love letter” to the artists and to creation, but also a farewell chorus to art criticism and the art world. The following year she founded Rivolta Femminile, an active feminist collective, thus becoming the central figure of Italian feminism.

Interviews with Carla Accardi, Getulio Alviani, Enrico Castellani, Pietro Consagra, Luciano Fabro, Lucio Fontana, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Nigro, Guilio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Mimmo Rotella, Salvatore Scarpita, Guilio Turcato, Cy Twombly.

Afterword by Claire Fontaine.
Translated by Allison Grimaldi Donahue.

978-1916425088
105 b&w illustrations
21.6 x 13.9 cm
364 p.
Paperback
November 2021

Superior and Inferior presents a facsimile reprint of Italian abstract artist and feminist Carla Accardi's provocatory publication Superiore e Inferiore and the first ever English translation of the full text.

"In this book, I have bought together the transcripts of dialogues I recorded on tape in three girls' classes from the first, second and third year of a state middle school. For having proposed this unauthorised activity, I was dismissed from teaching in the light of a formal complaint". – Carla Accardi introducing her book Superiore e Inferiore, 1972.

First published in 1972 by Carla Accardi, the book Superiore e Inferiore features discussions among girls at a middle school—all between 10 and 13—about society's discriminatory behaviour towards women. They also commented the Manifesto of the revolutionary feminist group Rivolta Femminile—collectively written by Accardi, art critic and feminist activist Carla Lonzi, and Elvira Banotti—which first appeared posted on city walls in Rome in July 1970. For having discussed sex-related issues with pupils, Accardi was fired and permanently suspended from teaching. (Her letter of dismissal issued by the Italian Ministry of Education forms part of the introduction to the book.) Along the lines of Pasolini's Comizi d'Amore (Love Meetings), Accardi's own voice is secondary in the book, giving way to the thoughts, narratives, opinions, and debates expressed among girls on the role of women and girls, family conflicts and intimate relations.

Carla Accardi (1924–2014) was an Italian abstract painter associated with the Arte Informale and Arte Povera movements, and a founding member of the Italian art groups Forma (1947) and Continuità (1961). She experimented with different forms of art, such as black and white painting and Sicofoil. During the late 1970s, she became part of the feminist movement with critic Carla Lonzi. Together, they founded Rivolta femminile in 1970, one of Italy's first feminist groups. Accardi's first solo exhibition in the United States was in 2001 at MoMA PS1.

Critical conversations and reflections about lessons learned at the intersection of social movements and artist production. 

Diversity of Aesthetics collects powerful and timely conversations among leading cultural critics, artists, and organizers to connect the threads between some of the most pressing social struggles and conflicts of our time: policing, war, borders and migration, economic crisis. 

Across three themes—infrastructure, migration, and riots—militant thinkers, artists, educators, and others discuss aesthetic production, forms of social organization, modes of struggle against gendered and racialized capitalism, and revolutionary theory. Common to all three conversations is a commitment to rethinking the relationship between forms of critique and forms of struggle undertaken by collective social practices, offering lessons for tactics, strategies, and practices.

With contributions by Claire Fontaine, Iman Ganji, Saidiya Hartman, Vicky Osterweil, Andreas Petrossiants, Christina Sharpe, Stevphen Shukaitis, Michael Rakowtiz, Shellyne Rodriguez, Jose Rosales, Rinaldo Walcott, Andreas Petrossiants, Jose Rosales

Andreas Petrossiants is a writer and associate editor of e-flux journal. His work has appeared in Historical Materialism, Social Text, New Inquiry, AJ+ Subtext, Frieze, Bookforum.com, Roar Magazine, the Verso blog, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic. He is a PhD candidate in performance studies at NYU where he is researching anti-eviction, squatting, and tenants’ movements as they relate to the production of social space.

Jose Rosales is an independent researcher and journalist based in Lisbon, Portugal. His work has appeared in e-flux notes, Lumpen: A Journal of Poor and Working Class Writers, and has contributed a chapter called “Communism As the Riddle Posed to History” in Double Binds of Neoliberalism (2022).

Le cinquième numéro de la revue d'art et de recherche « rétro-prospective » est consacré à l'artiste et performeuse Andrea Fraser, figure clé de l'art des années 1990 et 2000 et du courant de la « critique institutionnelle » (une monographie complétée par une grande enquête sur l'espace critique réalisée auprès d'une cinquantaine d'artistes, critiques et philosophes internationaux).

Avec contributions de Kader Attia, Eva Barto, Sophie Bonnet-Pourpet, Marie de Brugerolle, Gregory Buchert, Daniel Buren, Marie Canet, Gregory Castéra, Inès Champey, Thierry Chancogne, Claire Fontaine, François Cusset, Judith Deschamps, Paul Devautour, Philippe Durand, Joao Enxuto & Erica Love, Andrea Fraser, Nicolas Frespech, Dora García, Romain Grateau, Emmanuel Guez, Thomas Hirschhorn, Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quirós, Béatrice Josse, Franck Larcade, Ju Huyn Lee, Sven Lütticken, Fabrice Mabime, Bartomeu Mari, Chus Martínez, Gwenael Morin, Claire Moulène, Jean-Luc Moulène, Yan Moulier Boutang, Vincent Normand, François Pain, Gerald Petit, Anne Querrien, Thierry Raspail, Sinziana Ravini, Delphine Reist & Laurent Faulon, Christophe de Rohan Chabot, Phillippe Roux, Jean-Baptiste Sauvage, Thomas Schlesser, Ida Soulard, Fabien Steichen, Michel Surya, Emmanuel Tibloux, Vier 5, Ulf Wuggenig, Italo Zuffi.

In the tradition of poets such as Charles Olsen, Alice Notley and Sappho, Allison Grimaldi Donahues poetry connects the history of breath and language with narratives about the discovery and loss of our own voice.

The Etruscan language knew no blank spaces, no breaks between words—its texture resembled an uninterrupted flow of speech; more singing than speaking, form rather than content. Only in the dictum of the pause, the meaningful fragmentation of the breath and the staccato of the Atemwende (Paul Celan) does language become comprehensible rhythmic expression.

In a world full of slogans and catchphrases, Allison Grimaldi Donahue defends the poetological demand of Sound over Content! The History of Breathing weaves linguistics and poetry, verse and song, meaning and sound into a dense narrative about breathing, rhythm, and the gaps in language that allow words to take on meaning in the first place.

Allison Grimaldi Donahue (born 1984 in Middletown, Connecticut, USA, lives and works in Bologna, Italy) works in text and performance exploring modes in which language and text can move between individual and collective experience. She is author of Body to Mineral and On Endings, and translator of Blown Away by vito m. bonito and Self-portrait by Carla Lonzi. She has given performances at Short Theatre, Almanac Turin, MACRO, MAMbo, Fondazione Giuliani, Kunsthalle Bern, Hangar Biccoca, and Flip Napoli.

Featuring writing and artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationship between bodies and land, A Grammar Built with Rocks explores artists’ engagement with sites of physical dispossession and socio-ecological crisis, highlighting how creative research methodologies can serve as radically new place-making practices. The publication brings together a range of feminist-decolonial texts and visual contributions that explore how movement, transience, and improvisation offer alternative ways of being-together while being-in-place.  

Contributions by: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with Fawz Kabra, Jheanelle Brown and Julien Creuzet, Carolina Caycedo, Ryan C. Clarke and Cauleen Smith, DAAR—Decolonizing Architecture Art Research with Nicola Perugini, Sandra de la Loza, Demian DinéYazhi’, rafa esparza, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Tia-Simone Gardner, Raquel Gutiérrez, Suzanne Kite with Mahpíy̌a Nážinn, Candice Lin, Jumana Manna, K-Sue Park, Christine Rebet, Susan Silton, and Asiya Wadud.

The book also includes a reader, with grounding texts, sources of inspiration, and research references, by Jason Allen-Paisant, Dionne Brand, Suzanne Césaire, Lisa Lowe, Camila Marambio and Cecilia Vicuña, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and K. Wayne Yang.

About the editors

Shoghig Halajian is a curator, writer, and artist whose work explores queer and diasporic imaginaries, place-based practices, and experiments in collectivity and collaboration. She is co-editor of the online journal, Georgia, which is supported by a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Select curatorial projects include: A grammar built with rocks (Human Resources LA, One Archives at the USC Libraries, and REDCAT, 2018); At night the states (Hammer Museum, 2017); DISSENT: what they fear is the light (LACE, 2016); and rafa esparza: I have never been here before (LACE, 2015). She was a TBA21 Ocean Space Fellow in Venice (2021) and a curatorial fellow at École du Magasin in Grenoble (2011), where she co-curated the exhibition, The Whole World is Watching, on the the collective Vidéogazette (1973–76), which organized a public access television program in the city. She received her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a specialization in Critical Gender Studies from the University of California, San Diego in 2024. 

Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles, where she serves as the Executive Director and Curator at JOAN. Her practice is invested in long-term collaborations with artists, critically engaging with the intersections of art, politics, and social histories. She explores strategies of image-making through the lens of colonial histories and contemporary surveillance states. Halajian has curated exhibitions and public programs at institutions such as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the Hammer Museum, and Human Resources Los Angeles, as well as Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York), Oregon Contemporary (Portland), Kunstverein (Amsterdam), UKS (Oslo), Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna), and the Sursock Museum (Beirut). She also serves on the Programming Committee at Human Resources and has worked with nonprofit organizations including the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles) and Ashkal Alwan (Beirut). Her curatorial work and writing have been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant—for Georgia, a journal she co-founded and co-edits with Anthony Carfello and Shoghig Halajian—and a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Halajian’s writing has appeared in ArteEast, BOMB, X-TRA, Ibraaz, and other publications. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and is currently a PhD candidate in the Film and Digital Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The clitoris was absent in anatomy books, in paintings and sculptures, absent in spirit and even body; it has long been the organ of erased pleasure. We assume that this oversight has been repaired in our times: today, the clitoris is not forgotten but honoured. Conferences, books, manifestos, works of art are all devoted to it. The autonomy of clitoral jouissance is recognized. The boundaries of feminism have also moved: queer, intersex and trans approaches claim that the clitoris is perhaps no longer the exclusive preserve of the woman. And yet, there remains a wounded space. Because genital mutilation is still common practice. Because millions of women are still denied pleasure. 

The clitoris continues to mark the enigmatic space of the feminine. Constrained by the extreme difficulty and the extreme urgency of returning to this scorched earth, it is time to give voice to an organ of pleasure which has still not become an organ of thought.

“A project whose glaring absence has been hiding in plain sight, clitoral pleasure has finally found its philosopher. Malabou tells us what we can do with our clitoral brain, uncloaking its agency and anarchic politics. Essential reading for anyone interested in interpreting sex otherwise than phallic and in relation to philosophy’s power to shape the soma.” - Emily Apter, New York University