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Cover of Minnan Exit

te editions

Minnan Exit

Wen-You Cai

€45.00

Since 2015, Wen-You Cai has returned on multiple occasions to her parents' hometown of Quanzhou, Fujian, to attend the funerals of her deceased relatives. The ceremonies in the Minnan region unfold like grand dramas in which she is both an observer and a participant. Throughout the ceremony, Wen-You is enveloped in the unknown; everything seems meticulously arranged. Amidst the overwhelming grief of losing loved ones, there exists a feeling of confusion, and taking photographs was one of the ways for her to engage in the funeral process.

For this photo series, Wen-You was initially confronted by her own fear of death, intertwined with her bewilderment and curiosity about the complex funeral rituals and its uniqueness inherent to Minnan culture. To demystify these subjects, Wen-You, joined by te editions, interviewed a funeral director who provides comprehensive “one-stop services,” a monk who hosts Buddhist ceremonies, and a folklorist of Minnan rituals. Minnan Exit can be interpreted as many things–a family album, a curated collection of photographs, an unfinished journey of discovery, as well as the process of  Wen-You's reconciliation with her mortality.

Minnan Exit was designed by an independent graphic design studio, RELATED DEPARTMENT. Through the artist's lens, the design team sought inspiration from funeral objects and rituals, to create a visual concept for the publication's structure and layout with the regional characteristics of Minnan.

Special Interviewees: Chen Huaxian, Master Puyuan, You Gongchu (A-Bue)

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Cover of N°3 Mirroring

te editions

N°3 Mirroring

te magazine

Much in our life at this moment is often marked by an absence of clarity. Many have experienced a malaise and come to know its persistence. We seem to have become used to stasis and theoretical discussions, lingering in silence and hoping from time to time for something extraordinary to happen. Yet it might also have been a blessing; an opportunity to free ourselves from overarching narratives, to direct our attention to the individual, the local, and to subjects that have long been part of our own lives—a more agile, intuitive mindset.

The third issue of te magazine took shape in this context, and chose to confront experiences of “plight”—plight of the persecuted, of the artists, of the forgotten, and of those living with colonial legacies. How might we, as individuals, transmute plights in order to learn to live in this world? If each piece in this issue can be said to propose a mode of healing, the aim is not only about specific pathologies, but rather to recommend adjustments and defenses in moments of crisis. While writing on the plights of others, the authors also look inward for the roots of questions that they have long harbored about their own experiences. As introduced by Jacques Lacan, the theory of “the mirror stage” refers to children's initial awareness of their own existence. As adults, we continue to grapple with the process of self-discovery and understanding, at times feeling trapped deeply in the “mirror.”

This issue’s theme, Mirroring represents a continuous exploration of the self. On the one hand, these pieces document the processes of setbacks, negating, questioning and reconciling; on the other, delineate the self through the other, a process discernible in several jointly-authored pieces in this issue, where a special connection and sense of fellowship formed through dialogue, correspondence, and collaborative research. In Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse described how the protagonist's worldview was shaped through seeking and struggle, and we hear in it an echo of the inspiration behind this issue of te: “But now, his liberated eyes stayed on this side, he saw and became aware of the visible, sought to be at home in this world, did not search for the true essence, did not aim at a world beyond.” (Siddhartha by H. Hesse, translated by Hilda Rosner, Bantam Books,1971)

Contributors:  Guadalupe Maravilla, Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, Kader Attia, Gantala Press, Peng Jen-Yu, An Mengzhu, Chang Yuchen, Chris Zhongtian Yuan, Chu Yun, Chen Zhe, Lieko Shiga

Cover of Three moments of a script that never was written but might have happened

te editions

Three moments of a script that never was written but might have happened

Hu Wei

This publication departs from three video works by the artist Hu Wei, exploring the possibilities of devising new scripts within the manifold connections between materials for creative works, images, and texts.

The first part of the publication transcribes and recompiles the narrations in his videos into three sets of juxtaposed scripts. Each of these textual fragments showcases an “anatomical section of an era” from disparate geopolitical contexts: a family letter from Sabah, a set of Rashomonian testimony, and an anecdote about the anonymous.

The second part is a notebook-like atlas that unfolds following the clues of three keywords: “Fabrication,” “Anonymity,” and “Boundary.” Within this section, different types of images and texts, including factual materials, embodied research and survey records, as well as fabricated documents, interlace with each other. They serve as an interrogation, extension, reconstruction, and reassemblage of three muted histories or events.

Cover of Time Suspended

Netwerk Aalst

Time Suspended

Herman Asselberghs, Els Opsomer and 1 more

Photography €25.00

The first thing a traveller has to learn in Palestine is to wait: the Palestinians have been doing it for more than 50 years. In the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and on the West Bank, they have been waiting for permission to return ever since the Nabka, the catastrophe of 1948, when they were driven out of their houses and away from their land.

In November 2002, the Brussels-based authors of Time Suspended went on a ten-day visit to Palestine. Like most, everything they knew of the country came from media. They discovered a complex and intricate society that could not be summed up in a soundbite. The many full-bleed images of Palestine presented here (many of them depict a somewhat deserted, laid-back, sleepy, place) challenge years of media-tainted observation and truly give insight into the daily lives of its inhabitants.

Cover of Tee A. Corinne: A forest fire between us

MACK

Tee A. Corinne: A forest fire between us

Tee A. Corinne, Charlotte Flint

LGBTQI+ €52.00

A forest fire between us is an ambitious publication that uncovers Tee A. Corinne’s radical and expansive photographic practice, offering a new perspective on the intersections of her work as photographer, lesbian sex activist, educator, and author. Edited by curator Charlotte Flint, this book charts a route through Corinne’s practice with never-before-seen photographs, slides, contact sheets, and ephemera uncovered from her archive. Showcasing the pioneering work that established Corinne as one of the foremost lesbian photographers of her time, this publication places Corinne alongside friends, fellow artists, writers, and activists who helped define radical counterculture, from Audre Lorde to Joan E. Biren (JEB), Ruth Mountaingrove to Honey Lee Cottrell, among others.

At the book’s heart are the Feminist Photography Ovulars, gatherings of women in the Oregon countryside which were the setting for DIY photographic workshops exploring image-making against the natural landscape, which Corinne co-organized in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The photographs made during these annual gatherings speak to the incredible community that Corinne fostered, and an understanding of the ways in which play and pleasure can come together to create something radical.

Delving into an extensive array of archival material, A forest fire between us is a call to action that shows us the ways in which photography, activism, and community can come together to create a powerful new visual language around desire.

With an extensive chronology and texts by Ruth Mountaingrove, JEB, and Charlotte Flint.

Cover of Hortus

Self-Published

Hortus

Lilia Luganskaia

Photography €35.00

The Hortus  project is an open investigation into the nature of seemingly common objects through 'Floriography', urban gardens, and the history of female rights. Hortus was inspired by urban gardens in West Amsterdam and created with its plants by Lilia Luganskaia. 

Joanna Cresswell about the 'Hortus':

History teaches us that a language of flowers can communicate endless things about the culture in which it emerged, and herein lies Lilia Luganskaia's interest. Taking inspiration from the world of 19th Century sentimental flower books, Hortus presents itself as a set of notes towards a modern handbook for contemporary floriography, considering what the discipline might look like today. By collecting common flora across one year in the urban gardens around her home in Amsterdam and cross-referencing their meanings with publications from the past, Luganskaia reflects on their natures, their roles, and the symbolic familiarity they might hold for the communities living with them. A female artist and reader of the twenty-first century, she seeks out the essence of modern life through her lens, and through flowers, just like the women who came before her. 

Lilia Luganskaia (1990) Russian - Dutch multidisciplinary artist and author, based in Amsterdam. In her artistic practice, Lilia uses her background in documentary techniques to focus on what she calls ‘investigating reality’.  Her practice is research-based, Lilia decodes abstract notions such as love, tourism, bureaucracy, politics, and feminism through the use of constructed images, sculptures, videos, and installations. One of the key elements of her work is to understand multiple aspects of the photographic image.

Cover of I will pay to make it bigger

Prototype Publishing

I will pay to make it bigger

Ahren Warner

Fiction €25.00

You wake up in the footwell of a mid-sized hatchback somewhere on a highway in outer Bangkok. You compile neurotic spreadsheets of the best ‘party destinations’ in Europe, whilst your work emails pile up without ever being read. You quit your job. You launch a banal start-up. You grieve for a past relationship. You stare endlessly at the waves coming in from a beach in Koh Pha Ngan. You vape intensely. You spend money on feelings, on the performance of your own persona, whilst you observe yourself with a detached sense of horror.

i will pay to make it bigger is a novella, by poet and artist Ahren Warner, in which ‘you’ are the main character. Through text and image – autofiction, docufiction, and just plain fiction – you work your way through a tangle of preoccupations: from what it means to buy enjoyment, to the fragile construction of your own self as a cultural product.

i will pay to make it bigger is also a photobook, a collection of images produced whilst living in Thai ‘party hostels’. Although these photographs might seem to exist as the documentation of intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.


With a Coda by Hana K. Ohnewehr, commissioned by Yu’an Huang

Cover of échos

Self-Published

échos

Hugo Boutry

Photography €32.00

ÉCHOS is an intuitive investigation, redacted by using a compact digital camera. Those photos date from 2014 to 2018 and were shot in and around Brussels (up to 1350 km away), at any time of day or night, following a simple desire to look at things intensely and interpret signs playfully.

200 numbered copies
212 pages color photography printed in BE
With an introducing text by Constantin Carsoux