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Cover of Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist 1

K. Verlag

Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist 1

Nadia Kamies

€11.00

Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist is a series of small chapbooks designed to bring collaborators, audiences, and readers together within the project Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a 17th Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape. Initiated by South African artist Wendy Morris, Nothing of Importance Occurred is an artistic project recuperating missing narratives at the Cape through speculative investigations of plants-as-archive and storytelling as method. It has as its focus the retrieving of a library of botanical-medicinal knowledge that might have informed Morris’s enslaved ancestor, Maaij Claesje of Angola, midwife in the Company Slave Lodge in Cape Town.
 
The investigation follows streams of contraceptive plant knowledge that flowed to the Cape through the bodies of enslaved women from Angola, Moçambique, and Madagascar, and from India, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, as well as through the bodies of women emigrating from the Netherlands, and Huguenots fleeing France. The investigation traces practices already existent at the Cape in the healing ecologies of Khoi, Nama, and San women. Because upwards of four million Angolans were trafficked to the Americas, the project follows recorded practices among women there too. This project of recuperation leads towards a polyvocal Herball of contraceptive plants, the collaborative Fieldguides, and a part-fictionalized Return from Cape Town to the interior of Angola.
     
The Fieldguides are conceived as generators of collaborations, which is to say that they are a means to invite guides to beam light onto the investigation from multiple angles—historical, anthropological, experiential, ethnobotanical, literary, and more. The guides are influential researchers and writers whose insights, experiences, and reflections shaped the investigation. The guides were invited to write towards the project in a word-of-mouth form; each contribution will, in turn, occasion a set of gatherings during which the text will be read aloud.

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Cover of Inserts in Real Time: Performance Work 2000–2023

K. Verlag

Inserts in Real Time: Performance Work 2000–2023

Dora Garcia

Performance €35.00

'Inserts in Real Time' is the first monograph on the performance work developed by artist Dora García over the past twenty years. The book contains a conversation between the artist and curator Joanna Zielińska; a selection of her performance scripts; her performances to date, listed, illustrated, described, and contextualized; and three newly commissioned texts – by art historian Sven Lütticken, performance theorist Bojana Cvejić, and Dora García. The publication is co-published with M HKA, Antwerp, and accompanies Dora García’s exhibition 'She Has Many Names'.

Cover of Of Planters; an Herbarium

Birthday, Felony & Fuss

Of Planters; an Herbarium

COUR

Ecology €28.00

Published in tumult of “Planters, a garden show” by COUR: with Noëmi Orgaer, Orson Van Beek, Charlotte Bombel, Moreno Schweikle, Shun Yoon, Yen Proesmans, Benny Van den Meulengracht-Vrancx, HansWuyts, Malte van der Meyden, Fritz Adamski, Hannah Kuhlmann, Delphine Lejeune, Grażyna Mielech and Giseok Kim. 

Cover of Hole Studies

Fonograf Editions

Hole Studies

Hillary Plum

Essays €18.00

Hole Studies is a book about care and the forms it may take. An essay collection on writing and labor, art and activism, attention as a transformative practice, difference and collaboration, adjuncting and the margins of the academy, whiteness and its weapons, professionalization and its discontents, the radical importance of surprise, friendship at work, the self and its public and private modes: Hole Studies keeps listening.

What is it we need from each other? What could we still make happen? This book looks for forms of responsiveness and moments that matter. It honors everyday acts of thinking and trying. Essays explore the music of the Swet Shop Boys, the literature of the US’s brutal war in Iraq, the career of Sinéad O’Connor, the aesthetics of the Dirtbag Left, the legacies of the “war on terror,” feminism on the job, and illness in America. Hole Studies is an intimate document and a critical guide. Hole Studies would like to work for you.

If Montaigne returned today as a feminist and Sontag a poet, they might have together crafted an essay collection as astonishing as Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies. Plum rigorously examines her many subjects (from a history journal’s MLA citations to Sinéad O’Connor’s infamous televised protest) and then rigorously interrogates her examinations. Each page holds more brilliance and artistry than should be possible. Hole Studies is an exciting read and a conceptual achievement, and Plum is one of the best American essayists around. — Jeannie Vanasco

Cover of this simulation sux

Domain

this simulation sux

Jr Ting Ding, DeForrest Brown Jr.

Essays €20.00

this simulation sux is a collection of speculative essays and personal observations commissioned by global cultural institutions and local counterculture zines between February 2020 and April 2021.

"During the moment of pause brought on by the initial lockdown, we chose to write as a form of self care and mediated therapy; writing, for us, is a way to process, orient, and grasp for a moment of clarity in the ever changing media and cultural landscape. In this informational era, in which our attention is in very high demand, the amount of content we are expected to consume is endless. Beset with political unrest, economic uncertainty, and waning emotional bandwidth, we have become datapoints in the vast and saturated marketplace presented to us as “society.”

[...]

Flânerie, the French term describing the act of walking and observing, became a part of our daily ritual; we lapped the outer edges of the island of Manhattan and exploring various neighborhoods during the peak of the pandemic. The images presented on this book’s jacket were captured on these walks, documenting the absurdities of everyday life in this fraying simulation. Personal, anecdotal narratives of an imagined reality are represented through the images, which are placed alongside our speculative observations derived from historical data.

We hope that these writings can provide others with prose and information that can be applied like an antidotal balm to treat our communal ailment of future shock."

—Ting Ding 丁汀 & DeForrest Brown, Jr. 

Cover of addictive no an adjective

Vibrational Semantics

addictive no an adjective

Anna Barham

Essays €12.00

A text on speaking, listening and being understood made in conversation with iOS speech-to-text software.

Cover of Wave of Blood

Divided Publishing

Wave of Blood

Ariana Reines

Poetry €16.00

Is it the computerization of the planet
Or a loosening of my fidelity to suffering
I don’t understand the intensity
I’ve hidden here but I know I despaired
Of finding a physical place to keep
My tears. Now what. Seas that go turquoise
When you stop looking at them . . .
 
Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.

Praise for Ariana Reines:

Ariana Reines is a go-for-broke artist who honors her traditions by being like no one else. Some of us have made a fetish of our stupidity, pretending to forget history, and some of us have made a fetish of despair, congratulating ourselves on melancholia, but Ariana is too brilliant and too alive for either of those sad luxuries... I am convinced of the authenticity of the summonses she receives and the summonses she issues and when I read her I am reminded that all of this is a calling before it's an identity or career. Her voice-which is always more than hers alone is a dialectic between the very ancient and the bleeding edge. - Ben Lerner

Reines's books are works of intellectual commitment and structural sophistication; at the same time, they allow the raw stuff of being, in all its messiness, to enter the page. -The White Review

Mind-blowing. - Kim Gordon

Her writing is queer and raunchy, raw and occult, seemingly never pulling away from her deepest vulnerabilities. Yet Reines simultaneously maintains a feeling of epic poetry, of ancient intention. She moves between worlds in search of the divine and the self. - The New York Times

These are the kinds of poems that reorient you in the world, make you understand how little you know, but how much is inside you. - NYLON