Diagrams of Power

By way of archiving, digital translation and reproduction, Philip Poppek extracts from Magritte’s word paintings twenty-six letters; segmental symbols of a textual system form an alphabet of a, with a familiar apple punctuating a provisional end to the sequence. A poetic correspondence with the letter a speculates on the prehistory of this alphabet, as though searching for some indication as to how we may have come to where we are now, in this ‘post-factual moment’.

Maybe at some point we fell into the foxes’ den, only to re-surface in a landscape of ruins. This book poses a number of necessary questions, perhaps beginning with: ‘Which feminine noun trails after the title script ‘est pas une?

Pomme? Pipe? Histoire? Communauté?

‘Corrections and Clarifications’ is an ongoing newsprint project by Anita Di Bianco, an edited compilation of daily revisions, retractions, re-wordings, distinctions, and apologies to print news from September 2001 to the present. In essence, a reverse chronological catalogue of lapses in naming and classification, tangled catchphrases, and patterns of misspeak and inflection.

Previous editions have examined the printed news media in the United States and United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and other international press from Asia, Turkey, and the Balkans printed in English. The publication includes text contributions by Di Bianco and Francesco Gagliardi.

108 p, ills bw, 24 x 32 cm, hb, German/English

In Image Text Music, writer and editor Catherine Taylor explores the place where the visual meets the verbal. Taylor riffs on and subverts Roland Barthes’ classic 1977 essay collection Image Music Text using his title as playful points of departure for her thinking about the nature of image-text works and the music that might be made at their intersection.

Taylor rejects overarching statements about medium or genre in favour of observations of the particular. In the process, she reveals ways of reading that are at once erotic and political, familiar and disorienting. The book asks: as we shuttle between linguistic and visual modes of meaning-making, what is the purpose of reinventing forms if not to reinvent ways of living?

The Imaginary Republic is an artistic research project focusing on questions of social practice. In particular, it considers the creative and restless imaginaries underpinning our political selves and argues for a deeper engagement with what Elena Loizidou terms “dream-action”: the figurative and poetic staging of world making activity.

The publication brings together participating artists Tatiana Fiodorova, Octavio Camargo / Brandon LaBelle, the Sala-Manca Group, and Joulia Strauss, whose practices engage situations of struggle and autonomous cultures through a range of methods and approaches. From social fictioning to camouflaged interventions, collaborative pedagogies to gestures of care, their works propose unlikely paths of mutuality. The publication includes documentation of an exhibition held at Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen, as well as key essays and works by theorists and artists Rhiannon Firth, Hélène Frichot, Marysia Lewandowska, Gerald Raunig, Raimar Stange with Oliver Ressler, and Manuela Zechner.

published in June 2020

"These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut." So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. 

If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff: German Theater 2010–2022 is the first monograph on the work of the artist duo Calla Henkel (b. 1988, Minneapolis, MN) and Max Pitegoff (b. 1987, Buffalo, NY). Their manifold practices play out, live test, and fictionalize the mechanisms that shape creative communities. Chronicling over a decade of production in Berlin, the book is organized around the influential bar and theater spaces they ran there: Times Bar (2011–12), New Theater (2013–15), Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne (2017–18), and TV Bar (2019–22), and includes an interview with curator Fabrice Stroun and essays by David Bussel and Patrick Armstrong. Henkel and Pitegoff's photographs, plays, writing, and films address the complexity of collective action, painting a deadpan picture of the social and economic systems that sustain communal exchanges and their eminently fragile autonomy.

Edited by Fabrice Stroun
Design by Dan Solbach