MAKAN #2 / Manufacturing Narratives

Building on the foundations of the first two issues, Synthetic Agencies invites a rethinking [and unthinking] of the assumptions, polarities, and discontents surrounding the notion of agency. Traditionally defined in Western thought as the capacity to act and effect change, agency is inseparable from questions of power and the often invisible structures through which power operates. The various contributions interrogate how agency is produced, constrained, or distributed through the systems of knowledge, design, and governance that shape our built environments, technologies, media, and cultures. They were are invited to right (as much as write on) agency, reflecting on how it operates across different scales and contexts, and imagining alternative worlds or configurations. Ultimately, Synthetic Agencies understands agency not as a fixed attribute but as a contested lens through which we might read, reshape, or resist the conditions of the present.

With contributions by Amine Houari, Driss Ksikes, Fehras Publishing Practices, Hamed Sinno, Helga Tawil-Souri, Lada Hršak, Mayada Madbouly, Myriam Ababsa, Nzinga Biegueng Mboup, Ola Hassanain, Omer Shah, OPPA, Salma Barmani, Samia Henni, Tarek El-Ariss, Zaidoun Hajjar.

Riots are extraordinary events that have been recurring with increasing frequency and occupy a highly controversial space in the political imagination. Despite their often negative portrayals, it is undeniable that riots have played a pivotal role in the confrontation between authority and dissent. Recently, with the deepening crises of capitalism, racial violence, and communal tension, an “age of riots” has powerfully begun. As master fictions of the sovereign nation-state implode, and the hegemonic silencing of the dispossessed reveals the cracks in governability, Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound brings together artistic works, political texts, critical urban analyses, and research projects from across the world in an endeavor to “sense,” chronicle, and think through recent riots and uprisings—evoking a phenomenology of the multitude and surplus population.

With contributions from Asef Bayat, Joshua Clover, Vaginal Davis, Keller Easterling, Zena Edwards, Nadine El-Enany, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Gauri Gill, Natasha Ginwala, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Louis Henderson, Satch Hoyt, Hamid Khan, Gal Kirn, Josh Kun, Léopold Lambert, Margit Mayer, Vivek Narayanan, Ai Ogawa, Oana Pârvan, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, SAHMAT, Thomas Seibert, Niloufar Tajeri, Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Dariouche Tehrani, and Ala Younis.

In How to Mend: On Motherhood and its Ghosts, Kayfa ta’s 4th monograph, Iman Mersal navigates a long and winding road, from the only surviving picture of the author has with her mother, to a deep search through what memory, photography, dreams and writing, a search of what is lost between the mainstream and more personal representations of motherhood and its struggles. How to mend the gap between the representation and the real, the photograph and its subject, the self and the other, the mother and her child. 

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet and associate professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Studies in the University of Alberta, Canada.

Text: Iman Mersal
Editors: Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis
Translated from Arabic by Robin Moger
Co-publishers: Kayfa ta and Sternberg Press
Design: Julie Peeters
Size: 9.6 x 14.8 cm
Pages: 168 pages, Soft cover

Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival honors the forty-year legacy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (1976–2015). Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival celebrates this embodiment of radical feminist separatist collaboration, transformational self-defined autonomous spaces, a commitment to sisterhood and matriarchal culture, and a musical city sprung from the earth for one week in the woods.

A collective of five womyn each with a deep connection to Fest operated by consensus to create this issue. Striving to represent a range of womyn’s voices, values, traditions, and experiences of Fest, the collective highlighted what Fest has meant to generations of womyn, documented its chronology, and bore witness to the power of this community. Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival includes womyn from multiple races, geographies, sexualities, generations, and gender and other social identities. Just as Fest brought together womyn from various backgrounds, our collection includes a range of artistic experience, from seasoned authors and photographers to those womyn new to publishing.
Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival remembers the transformations, possibilities, and hopes for spaces cultivating the ongoing empowerment of womyn.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. “Flurry” is the 15th issue (a best-of, of sorts) edited by Will Holder. “I realized very slowly over a period of time that the activity of framing a performance and the intentions that accumulate around that activity produce a certain anxious kind of mode, and I became bothered by the flurry of activity and how it tends to mask so many things.”

Guest editor: Orla Barry, City Report Brussels: Maxime Fauconnier and Natural Contract Lab, Kasper König, Kendell Geers, Lucy McKenzie, Nástio Mosquito, Lisa Vlaemminck, Paloma Bosquê, Joar Nango, Sandrine Colard, Wu Tsang, Busan Biennale

The eighth issue of Errant Journal questions the ways in which hegemonic culture and discourse tends to prioritize the ideal of openness, access, transparency, and visibility. Delving into topics such as face coverings, ‘coming out’ in queer discourses, the use of opacity in transformative justice, and different strategies of (visual) resistance, ‘Against Visibility’ can be read as a proposition of refusal of the paradigm of visibility and access that permeates all areas of western thinking. At a moment in which representation and uncovering ‘lost’ histories are trending, Errant asks what is being erased in a world where everything must always be visible. When Édouard Glissant proclaimed the right to opacity, he sought not to be reduced or to be measured against an ideal scale in order to be understood and accepted. Expanding from this, Against Visibility looks into the ways in which unlearning imperialism also includes unlearning the ideal of visibility itself.

Contributors: Vivi Alfonsín, Leila Ben Abdallah, Mariam Ben Slama, Michèle Boulogne, Irene de Craen, AmaraChíkà Emele-Ralph, Cosmo M. Esposito, Jamie McGhee, Ludovica Micalizzi, Nadine Monem, Pieter Paul Pothoven, Musa Shadeedi, Federica Stagni