Métaphoriques Cannibales

Goswell Road presents Fous Moi La Paix a book of drawings by multidisciplinary artist Vava Dudu. Vava made 37 exclusive drawings for the publication, which launched at Paris Ass Book Fair 2024 at Palais de Tokyo. The drawings are offset with her texts, poems and several images of her iconic clothing and accessories.

"The multidisciplinary artist Vava Dudu refuses to follow convention: she draws and writes poetry, makes clothes and accessories, and builds furniture and guitars. She asserts her position as an outsider in contemporary art by stating that she “prefers extremes to the middle ground.” Her work as an independent stylist goes hand in hand with her activity as a singer in La Chatte, an electro-zouk punk new wave band founded in 2013 with Stéphane Argillet and Nicolas Jorio, aka “Nikolu.” Her underground artistic world, which joyously combines text and image, is expressed through various media.

Vava Dudu was born in 1970 in Paris, where she lives and works."

Text from Lafayette Anticipations website

With the series '24 European Ethnographic Museums' Van der Heide questions the construction and identity of the ethnographic museum today. Here, the project becomes a collection of artefacts in and upon itself and by recording the names of these institutions Van der Heide places the viewer in front of the dilemma: who is authorized to decide what is an artefact, and what should be collected and for what reason? In the 19th century, with the birth of the current European nations, museums openly referred to their colonial past. Today the museums bare more euphemistic names like: ‘Museum der Kulturen’ or ‘World Museum’ but still place the West as the self-acclaimed center of the world.  The existence of the ethnographic museum, which is intertwined with the complicated and loaded colonial past, has been subject to contemporary criticism. While some of the European ethnographic institutions have attempted to come to terms with the past of their collections and their heritage, Van der Heide focuses upon how language continues to reflect the political present of the institutions.

This book stems from the author’s discontents with Lacanian Psychoanalysis, by drawing from psychoanalysts like Félix Guattari and Sándor Ferenczi, as well as authors like Viveiro DeCastro, and Thomas Lamarre, to whom the book is dedicated. 

As Lucas Ferraço Nassif elaborates on the possibility of a multiplicitous Unconscious, or rather, a mass of many Unconscious(es), he attempts here to fold the book itself into the text, to make the organisation of the physical book itself a part of the elaboration. 

This 2nd Edition comes with a few editorial changes, and a slightly different design approach. It is being presented now with a suite of endorsements from a group of exciting writers and researchers, including Persis Bekkering, Thomas Lamarre, and Yuchen Li. Much of the first edition is preserved, and an extra text has been added, written by the editor as a part of the lecture at Ifilnova. There has been a focus on making this book more accessible, so we have reworked the design of this edition in Black & White. 

The Unconscious is Semiotic, not Linguistic, and it only jumps out when you read between the lines. Do you remember, back in 1997, when 600 kids had epileptic shocks whilst watching Television—the Pokémon Shock? This might sound strange at first, but Lucas Ferraço Nassif theorises that, contrary to the claim that this was caused by oscillations of blue and red light alone, it could have been caused by microperceptions and intensities within narrative. As Porygon takes Ash and friends into the digital world, the immanence of unconscious assemblages drags viewers in, too. 

Such is the haptic and imagetic nature of this book. Using several design and editorial strategies, and a particular mode of writing, the author attempts to elaborate on their work on the Unconscious by recreating a similar possibility—where book, language and reader collapse into a composition, an assemblage or a haecceity. Unconsciousness operates as the multiplanar compositions of Japanese Anime do, so this book has been organized accordingly—different texts, different temporalities, different voices—and like the Japanese concept of Ma (negative space), or even like CoreCore, something jumps out of the breaks, the gaps in between the layers, and therein lies, for this book, a departure point for elaborating on not just one, but many, Unconscious(es). 

Le titre du livre « Index of operational and code names » reprend l'intitulé d'un document trouvé sur Internet constitué d'une liste de 437 mots anglais classés par ordre alphabétique et accompagnés de brèves indications concernant les opérations militaires pour lesquelles ces mots ont servi de noms de code.

Ce document a inspiré à Diane Guyot la série « Index War » réalisée selon un protocole simple consistant à produire un dessin pour chaque mot de la liste.

Composé de 86 dessins issus de cette série, certains reproduits pour le support du livre, d'autres présentés au sein d'un cahier photographique tels qu'ils sont aujourd'hui accrochés dans les intérieurs de leurs propriétaires, et d'une partie textuelle placée en fin de volume qui restitue l'intégralité du document source, le livre, comme le suggère la mention volume 1 qui accompagne son titre, ne marque pas le point d'achèvement de l'œuvre mais témoigne au contraire d'un processus en cours.

L'articulation des composantes de l'œuvre dans l'espace du livre en constitue en mème temps une nouvelle version, à la fois spécifique et autonome. L'activation du dispositif codex/index invite le lecteur à une méditation sur la notion de code, où s'entrecroisent sémiotique de l'image, technique de propagande et technologie de l'information.

In 2018, a group of three visual artists — Agathe Boulanger, Signe Frederiksen and Jules Lagrange— started a year-long conversations with Laurence Rassel, exploring her social and educational background, her ways of working, and examining the tools she applies in her daily practice of running institutions: feminism, the open source and free software movements, and the institutional psychotherapy developed by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury in the psychiatric field around the mid-20^th century.