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Cover of Immutable: Designing History

Onomatopee

Immutable: Designing History

Chris Lee

€22.00

Immutable: Designing History explores the banal genre of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity). This is framed as a ~5,000 year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing — from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed ledgers, like the blockchain. Immutability figures as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering a variety of techniques (material, technological, administrative, etc.) of securitization against the entropy of a document's movement through space/time, and the political.

This project is driven by a contrast: design educators tend to teach forms like logos, books, websites, etc., but not passports, money, property deeds, etc., in spite of these being, I contend, design's most profoundly consequential forms.

As an alternative historiography, Immutable gestures both towards anthropologist Laura Nader's call to "study up" (on those in power), and the radical educator Paolo Freire's recognition of the "limit situation" as a generative condition for emancipatory praxis. The book's aim is to orient graphic design towards the vocation of imagining, naming, and remembering beyond the horizons of its role as a managerial, administrative, and colonial instrument that imposes a rationality of vision and accountability upon what is knowable, thinkable and sayable.

Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. He is a graduate of OCADU and the Sandberg Instituut. His research/studio practice explores graphic design's entanglement with capitalism and colonialism/ity through the banal genre of the document. He is also currently developing a typographical project that narrates the oscillating status of Asians between the "model minority" and "yellow peril" as a function of the consolidation of Euro-American settler identity. Chris is an Assistant Professor in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at the Pratt Institute.

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Cover of ’Est Pas Une

Onomatopee

’Est Pas Une

Philip Poppek

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?

Cover of The Flesh

Tabloid Publications

The Flesh

Yves B. Golden

Poetry €18.00

The Flesh is a collection of Yves B. Golden's poems, lyric essays and social criticism – and often these generic distinctions become blurred. Published by Ediciones La Escocesa (Barcelona, ES), TABLOID facilitated this book's production as editors and book designers. A selection of Golden's texts are also translated by Leto Ybarra, rendering the author's work into Spanish for the first time.

“Respectfully! The Flesh feels like a conjuring and a force of nature—unyieldingly raw, full of delectable sensitivity that shapes a world Yves B. Golden deliveries with formidable honesty—where her word is the journey, the body and the bond. Yves writes: ‘not one bird is declined entry into heaven’. The Flesh is succulent in the mouth of the mother— Yves is a steward of time machines, celestial bliss and untethered healing. The Flesh unties the tongue, waters the mouth and the garden. Within Yves’ 5th book she offers us a timeline in recognizing that all birds and angels alike can touch the sky. We are always, already, held and drenched in glory and deserving of love and safety. The Flesh is Black like obsidian. May our love bloom like the flesh in every lifetime.”
- keioui keijaun thomas

“Yves B Golden has given us a protection spell against tyranny; a Blue Guide for the conscious and the daydream; raw free jazz that knows the standards as well. Golden’s linguistically liberated fantasies can transmute into a body of politically imperturbable ethoses in the same sentence. This book offers information for an evolutionary sensitivity, for the next level of sense-making and particularity of the human being. Though the poet urges us to de-realize the flesh, to split our own heads open, we must also accommodate the flesh’s intangibles that interlock, conjoin, negate, and negotiate: such ‘outward and inward facing conundrums’ go on and on. Welcome this ‘bearer of turbulent news.’”
- Losarc Raal

Cover of Salvage 8: Comrades, this is madness

Verso Books

Salvage 8: Comrades, this is madness

Salvage Editoral Collective

Periodicals €16.00

The Salvage Editorial Collective on the Covid-19 crisis.

Including: ‘Mothering Against the World' by Sophie Lewis on ‘Momrades’, ‘The Bushes’ a new fiction by China Miéville, ‘Hookers and Other Angels’ photography from Juno Mac, ‘Prepared for the Worst’ by Richard Seymour on Disaster Nationalism, ‘Welfare State Populism and the “Left-Behind Left”’ by Kevin Ochieng Okoth, ‘A Glimmer of a Shell of a Husk’ by Maya Osborne; ‘The Phallic Road to Socialism’ by Sebastian Budgen; A newly translated interview with Daniel Guérin, ‘Nationalism After Coronavirus’ by Sivamohan Valluvan, ‘Striking in Striking Times: Capitalism’s Coronavirus Crisis’ by Gregor Gall, ‘Getting Dressed for a Pandemic’ by Camila Valle, ‘Out of the Iron Lung: A Miasma Theory of Coronavirus’ by Matthew Broomfield.

Poetry by Nisha Ramayya, this issue’s featured poet, and an interview with her conducted by Salvage poetry editor, Caitlín Doherty. Plus the return of the Salvage Editorial Collective perspectives pamphlet, and a postcard.

Salvage is a bi-annual journal of revolutionary arts and letters. Salvage is written by and for the desolated Left, by and for those sick of capitalism and its planetary death-drive, implacably opposed to the fascist reflux and all ‘national’ solutions to our crisis, committed to radical change, guarded against the encroachments of ‘woke’ capitalism and its sadistic dramaphagy, and impatient with the Left’s bad faith and bullshit.

Published June 2020

Cover of Tale of cinema

Fireflies Press

Tale of cinema

Dennis Lim

Essays €14.50

In the fourth title of the acclaimed DecadentEditions series, Dennis Lim explores the oeuvre of South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo via his 2005 film. Forty minutes in, we realise we’ve been watching a film within the film. The ‘real’ characters leave the cinema and find themselves reenacting what they just saw, as a chance encounter invites a suicide pact. Is it life imitating art, or the other way around? Dennis Lim is a film curator, teacher, and writer. He is currently the Artistic Director of the New York Film Festival.

Cover of Métaphoriques Cannibales

non-a

Métaphoriques Cannibales

non-a

Métaphoriques Cannibales est un recueil transdisciplinaire, où le cannibalisme est pris comme métaphore, comme un concept ouvert aux analogies, comme anthropopoiésis et boîte noire, et comme fait social total.

Peuplent cet endroit des individus qui s’abreuvent de symboles, d’imaginaires, d’occulte, d’intime et ne craignent pas d’en recracher des images et idées d’une extrême violence, tout en constituant paradoxalement l’univers de leur production comme “safe space”.

Le cannibale est une spécialité belge, composée d’un toast recouvert de filet américain (une variante belge du steak tartare).

Transgressif et provocant, c’est ici un paroxysme de l’altérité et fantasme de l’Autre, qui permet par reflet de nous contempler nous-même.
La vie n’a de saveur que pour devenir viande.

La transgression, c’est aussi aller plus loin. Oser aller plus loin. Plus loin que les normes communément admises qui sont toutes relatives et violentes.
SUBSTANCE MOLLE ET SANGUINE

Nous cherchons des outils spéculatifs pour pænser notre monde.STIMULI VISUELS HOMOGÉNÉISÉS PAR LE ROUGE

C’est d’un brouillard polysémique empli de chimères, d’un tabou lardé de malaise et d’angoisse, bien au chaud dans un ventre plein de plasma, que ɴon-ᴀ émet ce recueil transdisciplinaire.

Dans la large brèche que nous propose l’ouverture de notre thématique, s’engouffre une multitude d’approches : de la chansonnette, au récit spéculatif, de la définition critique, à la BD vorarephile, du reportage photo, à la poésie expérimentale, de la théorie d’écologie spéculatif, à la performance eroticocculte.

Explorons les obscures profondeurs de nos éthiques pour y trouver les fondations de nos ontologies... se mordre d’une balle dans le pied.

Contributeur·rice·x·s
aariel136, Maurane-Amel Arbouz, Nina Bigot,Mathilde Block, Juliano Caldeira, Rémi Calmont, Rouge Cendre, Chloé Clemen, Sam Ectoplasm, Robin Faymonville, Gabriel René Franjou, Tristan Gac, Léo Gillet, Charlotte Guerlus, Théophile Gürtin, KarenDK, Olga Mathey, Louise Mervelet, Jean-Baptiste Molina, Hélène Alix Mourrier, Carole Mousset, Lucy Ozon, Angel Raymond, Andres Komatsu & Camila Roriz, Paradoc sale, Manon Schaefle, Yan Tomaszewski, Tom Valckenaere, Chloé Viton, xX-Sukuba-Xx, Zelig, Janna Zhiri

Cover of Viscose 05: Retail

JEUG

Viscose 05: Retail

Camila Palomino

Non-fiction €27.00

Viscose is a journal for fashion criticism. The fifth issue of Viscose explores fashion’s multifaceted retail spaces and cultures. With the evolution of shopping in the 20th and 21st centuries as its focus, the issue looks at the shop as a central nexus where communities and identities are continuously produced and re-imagined through commerce. With a special attention to the role of fashion retail within urban spatial politics, we seek out histories of projects—often developed with or by artists—that have embraced the shop as a medium of both possibility and contestation. 

With contributions by:
Dennis Brzek, Anastasia Howe Bukowski, Michael Bullock, Felix Burrichter, Canal Street Research Association, Noah Dillon, Harun Farocki, Anna Franceschini, Ignacio Gatica, Christian Hincapié, Juje Hsiung, Jessica Kwok, Rhonda Lieberman, Matthew Linde, Marge Monko, Cheuk Ng, Luis Ortega, Camila Palomino, Andreas Petrossiants, Leah Pires, International Library For Fashion Research, Vésma Kontere Mcquillan (International Library For Fashion Research), Rose Salane, Alice Sarmiento, Museum Of Modern Shopping, Jeppe Ugelvig, Sean Vegezzi, Post Vsop, Evie Ward, Leah Weirer