Forms of Public Privacy

Chilli is one of the most popular food ingredients in contemporary China, and symbolic of modernisation. More Than Chilli goes beyond its trendy façade to explore Chongqing, known for its tradition of spicy food. From the perspective as a local, Rossy Liu reflects on her own personal memories associated with chilli. A combination of fragmented scenes, objects, dialogues, movements and sounds are drawn on to unravel the locality of culinary identity. While chilli has become a ubiquitous flavour in today's global society, the book emphasises the hidden intimacy that still exists between Chongqing locals and their unfiltered connection to chilli.

In 2019 SOTA finished the first Fair Arts Almanac. The content of the book was generated during a week long summer camp in 2018 with about 70 contributors. The result was a bundling of tips & tricks, statements & demands, visions & ideas, dates & data, testimonies & voices, addresses & announcements on fairness within the complex relationships between the artistic, political and economic sphere. The compilation of various contributions in this first edition was deliberately associative and open for debate, full of contradictions, loose ends and inconsistencies.

A poetic script, an apocalyptic newspaper, and a syntax of intersected historical narratives. An investigation of an archive of writings previously published in The Lowell Offering, a periodical issued between 1840-1845 by women factory workers in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Design by Daria Kiseleva

DUCTUS is the latest solo project by Paul Abbott, featuring 51 minutes of audio, across 12 tracks, and a 42 page booklet featuring new writing. DUCTUS was written and recorded in Edinburgh and Porto in 2019. 

DUCTUS presents a playful weave of collapsing time through a number of speculative elements and fictional characters. Abbott feels his way through learning drums, rhythm and writing as fleshy research technologies. DUCTUS is the latest stage in a process considering sound, the body, imagination, and language through music. This features as part of ongoing investigations using real and imaginary drums, synthetic sounds, performance and writing.

Piecing Pages is a (visual) reader which collects the work of fifteen artists, writers and designers across twelve contributions. Each contribution offers insights into a practice or research project that in some way embodies the notion of working in fragments. Together, these contributions unravel how a traditional women’s craft technique continues to influence and inform the fragmented working methods of designers, artists and writers today.

With contributions by Asefeh Tayebani, Hanka van der Voet, Jess Bailey and Sharbreon Plummer, Joke Robaard, Linda van Deursen, Lucy R. Lippard, Melissa Meyer and Miriam Schapiro, Rietlanden Women’s Office, Ronja Andersen, Rosita Kær, Susu Lee and Youngeun Sohn

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

Taking the shape of an accordion-folded A3 poster, “Under The Sea” investigates the political economy of global internet infrastructures, whose material reality has temporarily become visible during fibre optic network expansion works in The Hague and other Dutch cities.

As internet users, we spend a lot of time underwater. Contrary to popular belief, satellites play a negligible role in beaming our intimate messages, cat footage and work emails across the globe.

99% of all intercontinental internet traffic travels through one of over 550 fibre optic cables criss-crossing our oceans. Despite its scale, complexity and many interlinkages with global systems of power, this network of cables and landing points commonly remains invisible.

Printing: Risograph, Stencilwerck Den Haag; English text and Photography: Livio Liechti; Dutch translation: Minke Havelaar; Design: Apsara Flury. 
Edition of 250. Co-funded by Oxfam Novib.