Klima #06

Weaving together the matter of geology, migration, and computation, kathy wu’s debut book She Will Last as Long as Stones mines data from the United States Geological Survey, pairing it with (mis)translations of conversations with the author’s mother, narratives of racialized and gendered labor, and elegies on end-of-life care. Through text, photo-collage, and diagrammatic circuitry, wu mobilizes language toward the edges of things, where glitch and failure meet grief, outpour.

kathy wu's She Will Last as Long as Stones is the 2024 Open Reading Period Book Prize winner, and was selected by guest judge Bhanu Kapil. 

kathy wu is a Chinese–American artist, poet, and designer living in Providence, Rhode Island, on Narragansett land. She works across digital media, fiber, book arts, and language to pull at histories of science and technology. Her work has appeared via The New School, Dialogist, Rain Taxi, NatBrut, and Tilted House, and has been anthologized by Fonograf Editions and Nightboat Books. She has been awarded fine arts residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Black Mountain College Museum, and Pao Arts Center. She currently teaches full-time at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and holds an MFA from Brown University’s Literary Arts program.

She Will Last as Long as Stones has the inter-genre brilliance of asking where materials originate, and following that question until writing becomes a kind of listening with stone, with metal, for magnetic reverberations, for the thinking at the back of the cave.
— Bhanu Kapil

There just might be currents coursing through landscape, language, software, and labor—presences that escape extraction and will not be denied. She Will Last as Long as Stones looks into the multiple temporalities and operations of many things: material place, mining, social and scientific documentation, computation, migrant women's work, and mother-daughter relations, constellating them into a poetics of wondrous design and resonant beauty. 
— Kimberly Alidio

She Will Last as Long as Stones is a subtle circuit that conducts a charge but (paradoxically) remains open. wu's intricate parataxis offers readers fertile resistance, while simultaneously leading us to grounded revelations about the intertwined materialities of technology, language, and memory.
— Allison Parrish

Tendrils threads through grief, joy and solidarity toward futures shaped by collaboration and care. Reaching through ecological crises, these poems seek new ways of living kinship in the more-than-human world.

This anthology gathers international voices that entangle, illuminate and resist: a collective turn to the future with renewal and possibility.

Edited and introduced by fieldnotes collective: Pratyusha, Jessica J. Lee, Alycia Pirmohamed and Nina Mingya Powles.

With contributions by Shasta Hanif Ali, Hala Alyan, Hana Pera Aoake, Polly Atkin, Kara Barlow, Khairani Barokka, Kat Benedict, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Corinna Board, Jody Chan, Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Carlina Duan, Chloe Elliott, Zoë Fay-Stindt, Sophie Hoyle, Petero Kalulé (petals), Bhanu Kapil, Jayant Kashyap, Maija Makela, Lola Olufemi, Carl Phillips, Nat Raha, Shumin Tan, Dženana Vucic and Alice Willitts.

The first publication dedicated to Glissant's art collection and project for a museum of memory-in-transit. 

Titled after Édouard Glissant's (1928–2011) anthology, La Terre, le feu, l'eau et les vents (2010), this publication offers a polyphonic extension of the writer's foundational thinking on art to museology, philosophy and poetry. The Museum of Errantry reflects Glissant's conception of the museum itself as an archipelago—a space open to ruptures, disappearances, and reinventions without forced synthesis. The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds features detailed artist entries, archival fragments and visual documents to illuminate the many relational, diasporic, migratory trajectories that inform Glissant's personal art collection and meditations. The volume also features never-before-published excerpts from L'Abécédaire d'Édouard Glissant (2008), a long-form recorded dialogue between the author and acclaimed Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, as well as a facsimile of Notebook of a Journey on the Nile (1988), a poetic-philosophical travelog composed during a felucca trip through Egypt.

Edited with text by Ana Roman, Paulo Miyada. Foreword by Sylvie Séma Glissant, Mathieu Glissant, Isabelle Vestris, Manuela Moscoso, Anne Louyot. Text by Catalina Bergues, Patrick Chamoiseau, Sabrina Fontenele, Édouard Glissant, Cecília Vilela.

‘I am concerned with the power of sound! and what it can do to the body and the mind,’ wrote composer Pauline Oliveros. In the body, histories and politics come together with sound and listening, memory and feeling. Bodies of Sound offers a resonant exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening in over fifty contributions. In this book of echoes, a variety of forms – from essays to text scores to art, fiction and memoir – speak across gender, ways of knowing, witnessing, sounding and voicing, translation, displacement, violence and peace.

With contributions from: 

Sara Ahmed, Ximena Alarcón, Svetlana Alexievich, Ain Bailey & Frances Morgan, Anna Barham, Xenia Benivolski, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson & Kite, Elena Biserna, Karen Barad & Black Quantum Futurism, Anne Bourne, Daniela Cascella, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maria Chávez, Don Mee Choi, Carson Cole Arthur, Petero Kalulé & AM Kanngieser, Lindsay Cooper, Julia Eckhardt, Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, Ella Finer, Annie Goh, Louise Gray, Christina Hazboun, Johanna Hedva, Sarah Hennies, Tomoko Hojo, IONE, Lee Ingleton, Hannah Catherine Jones, Christine Sun Kim, Nat Lall, Cathy Lane, Jeanne Lee & Lona Foote, Marysia Lewandowska, Annea Lockwood & Jennifer Lucy Allan, Cannach MacBride, Elaine Mitchener & Hannah Kendall, Alison O'Daniel, Naomi Okabe, Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram, Gascia Ouzounian, Holly Pester, Roy Claire Potter, Anna Raimondo, Tara Rodgers, Aura Satz & Barbara London, Shortwave Collective, Sisters of the Order of Celestial Nephology, Sop, Syma Tariq, Marie Thompson, Trinh T. Minh-ha & Stoffel Debuysere, Salomé Voegelin

When Ursula K. Le Guin started writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World presents a selection of these images by the celebrated author, many of which have never been published before, to consider how her imaginary worlds enable us to re-envision our own.  

Le Guin’s maps offer journeys of consciousness beyond conventional cartography, from the Rorschach-like archipelagos of Earthsea to the talismanic maps of Always Coming Home. Rather than remaining within known terrain, they open up paradigms of knowledge, exemplified by the map’s edges and how a map is read, made and re-made, together. The Word for World brings her maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays by contributors from a variety of perspectives to enquire into the relationship between worlds and how they are represented and imagined. 

Contributors: Federico Campagna, Theo Downes-Le Guin, Daniel Heath Justice, Bhanu Kapil, Canisia Lubrin, Una McCormack, David Naimon, Nisha Ramayya, Shoshone Collective, Standard Deviation, Marilyn Strathern. 

Co-published by Spiral House and AA Publications to coincide with an exhibition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s maps at the Architectural Association, London, opening on 10 October 2025.

”One of the literary greats of the 20th century.” Margaret Atwood

For Fall 2025, Spike is getting to the bottom of the vintage aura around contemporary culture: Nostalgia. 

Are we doomed to ever-shorter cycles of cash-cow retromania, until AI memory-wipes us with pure simulation? Or is the root problem of our endless déjà vu actually the expectation that art "make it new," itself just so much nostalgia for a long-gone modernism? We're working out what the present owes to the past, if our goal is to conjure a better culture for tomorrow.

Featuring Jeppe Ugelvig's essay on the art world's uses and misuses of nostalgia; Simon Reynolds and Adina Glickstein talk exhausting the past; e-girl/theorist Alex Quicho critiques the end of newness; filmmaker Johan Grimonprez identifies with the hijacker in his dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997); a portrait of kitsch-savant painter Friedrich Kunath; cultural critic Rosanna McLaughlin on missing the white cube; Artist's Favorites by Diego Marcon; ex-dealers Margaret Lee and Jeff Poe escape the art game; Whitney Mallett on rebranding celebrity through book culture; making analog-ish art "under" the internet with Marc Kokopeli, Bedros Yeretzian, Flora Hauser, and Nicole-Antonia Spagnola; Sean Monahan forecasts our old-fashioned future; art historian Lynn Zelevansky on "New York/New Wave" at P.S.1 Contemporary (1981); artist Maja Bajevic's Yugostalgic report from Sarajevo; and Tea Hačić-Vlahović getting dewy-eyed catching up to her mother's age; plus, reviews of exhibitions by Mark Leckey, Wolfgang Tillmans, Women's History Museum, and more.

Founded by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, Spike (Spike Art Quarterly) is a quarterly magazine on contemporary art published in English which aims at sustaining a vigorous, independent, and meaningful art criticism. At the heart of each issue are feature essays by leading critics and curators on artists making work that plays a significant role in current debates. Situated between art theory and practice and ranging far beyond its editorial base in Vienna and Berlin, Spike is both rigorously academic and stylishly essayistic. Spike's renowned pool of contributing writers, artists, collectors and gallerists observe and reflect on contemporary art and analyse international developments in contemporary culture, offering its readers both intimacy and immediacy through an unusually open editorial approach that is not afraid of controversy and provocation.

The new publication triangulates between geopoetics, geopolitics, and cultural geography; a 464 page issue with some 50 contributors as well as a large section on Swedish philosophical geographer Gunnar Olsson.

Like Freud’s prototypical baby, we struggle over whether to keep our body together or to give it away. We all live these scenes of bodily loss. Freud and Marx both sing harmoniously: what we give up, we give under duress. We are not easy with what we’ve been tasked with, but the task has been the same since birth, doubled in the name of emancipation: first, there’s nothing less than to survive alienation and exploitation, then there’s staying alive for one another’s sake. Perhaps the storied antagonism between Freud and Marx turns on the difficulty of holding these tasks together, balanced on the knife’s edge that separates self-interest from collective liberation.

Capitalism does not produce itself all alone, no matter its disciplines and political-economic constraints on the reproduction of society. If Marx taught us anything, it’s that capitalism produces its own gravediggers, the proletariat—“the unreason of reason,” he quipped, where the dominant social order encounters its unconscious element. Through the bad exchange of capitalism comes a gothic reversal, from preconscious life to premature death, where workers end up burying themselves instead of the system that provides the grave plot. That exchange is felt internally, in a rift that cleaves open the self. Freud, for his part, helps us describe how political economy hammers our lives into unreasonable and reasonable shapes, imaginary and real, as countless and heterogeneous as the individual faces in a collective mass. For each and for all, we bring psychoanalysis to bear on the political-economic problems we suffer in common.

King Ketamine. Beyond the vibecession. Austere Mothers. Sick at Work. Money, Feces, Babies, Gifts. Essays by Juliana Spahr, Peter Coviello, Nicolás Medina Mora, Jyoti Rao, and Hannah Proctor. Images of Red Vienna from Wilhelm Reich’s camera, dispatches from Lebanon, and more.