More-than-Human

Clipping 2: Sum, Parts brings together transcripts, commissioned texts, studies, and personal reflections that explore how transformation is central to building archives that remain alive through time. Clipping, in sonic terms, signals distortion—moments when excess pushes beyond clarity and opens new spaces of possibility.

The issue features contributions by Monique Todd, Andrea Zarza Canova, Cleo Tsw, Zahra Malkani, meLê yamomo, Melisa Cenik, Golnoosh Heshmati, Voice as Landscape (Alec Mateo and Lorenzo García-Andrade Llamas), Atiyyah Khan, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti, Femke Dekker, and Alice Twemlow. It is edited by Federica Notari and Cleo Tsw, designed by Catherine Hu and Cleo Tsw, and printed and bound by No Kiss.

Having fled to France in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles joined the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital, where he carried out a transformative clinical practice for over twenty years, in part under the Vichy regime. 

Saint-Alban was an extraordinary event, a commune, an informal refuge in a time of extreme danger, a sort of upwelling spread through word of mouth. Those entering the asylum were welcomed, and that welcome never stopped. Care happened through a broad range of communal activities for staff and patients: theater, cinema, collective writing, horticulture, the sorting of colored pearls, gymnastics, singing, a monthly newspaper. The dignity of every patient was of foremost importance. 

Now, as then, warmongers are willing to poison and slaughter without blinking, making all of life difficult if not impossible: the pull of such asylums is obvious. Tosquelles is a ground-breaking record of the life and work of the founder of institutional psychotherapy. Assembled by Joana Masó, with many texts translated to English for the first time, it is a direct encounter with Tosquelles’s clinical, intellectual, and political writings. 

“Tosquelles’s work serves as a model for dismantling capitalist institutions, a revolutionary venture whose essence Joana Masó captures.”
Paul B. Preciado 

“This remarkable collection allows us to experience the genius of Tosquelles in all its dimensions for the first time. We accompany him through his early work in Reus and Barcelona, the development of his therapeutic ideas and inventive practices in war-torn Catalonia and in exile at the Septfonds Camp, his legendary years at Saint Alban and his lesser-known later years in Melun, Nouvelle Forge and La Candélie. Joana Masó guides us to the creative heart of a man whose counter-cultural, counter-intuitive thinking excited generations of intellectuals in France and now inspires the world.”
Rosie Stockton 

“Resistance hero, anti-Stalinist Marxist, Surrealist, revolutionary practitioner of social therapy, mentor to Frantz Fanon: Francesc Tosquelles was one of the most innovative thinkers in modern psychiatry, a visionary whose moment may finally have arrived.”
Adam Shatz

With texts by Francesc Tosquelles, trans. Robert Hurley and Mara Faye Lethem

A collection of Pauline Julier’s art that expands from the terrestrial to the cosmos to comment on our place in the universe. 

At the interface of documentary and fiction, the multimedia works collected in Pauline Julier take us on a dizzying journey through space and time. Julier’s art travels through the geological ages of planet Earth, through different histories, natural disasters, and the Anthropocene’s paradigm shifts and into outer space. Her background in political science and photography is reflected in her work: looking into the past and the future, she investigates topical questions about our unlimited use of natural resources, escapism, and the colonization of space. 

Conceived and designed as a work of art in its own right, this volume offers a comprehensive insight into Julier’s art and thought through a conversation with eminent scholar of science and technology studies Donna Haraway alongside contributions by curator Céline Eidenbenz, anthropologist, and writer Nastassja Martin, and art historian, curator, and author Chus Martínez. 

Edited by Céline Eidenbenz and Sarah Mühlebach.

With Contributions by Donna Haraway, Pauline Julier, Nastassja Martin, and Chus Martínez.

A political and aesthetic critique of racial capitalism and modes of social experimentation in the form of resistance to the colonial commons.

Stefano Harney (born 1962) is Honorary Professor at The Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia and a Visiting Critic at Yale School of Art. He has held teaching positions in New York, Leicester, London, and Singapore. He now teaches at the Dutch Art Institute. An interdisciplinary scholar, his research spans (the intersections of) social sciences, arts and humanities, as well as the fields of business and management.

Preface by Jack Halberstam.
Collective translation (original title: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Minor Compositions, 2013).

Graphic design: Sophie Demay & Maël Fournier-Comte (In the Shade of a Tree).
 
published in February 2022
 
French edition
12,5 x 19,5 cm (softcover)
208 pages

Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.

In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

Moulded from clay, between 2021 and 2023, The subtle rules the dense is a series of ceramic chest plates, by the artist Phoebe Collings-James. Inspired by Makonde and Yoruba body masks and Roman muscle cuirasses, the sculptures explore the interplay between ritualistic objects’ violent histories and their contemporary presentation as fetishistic ornaments. This publication brings together responses to the series from artists SERAFINE1369 and Rehana Zaman and geographer Professor Kathryn Yusoff; exploring layered references to tarot, Shakespeare and post-colonial theory; probing the materiality and extractive politics of geology; and reflecting the plural multifaceted nature of Collings-James’ practice.

A series by Phoebe Collings-James

With Texts by Serafine1369, Rehana Zaman, Kathryn Yussof.

Justin Allen’s Language Arts takes up writing as an integral part of an interdisciplinary art practice. Across poems, essays, lyrics, screenwriting, and drawings, works touch on themes of music and subculture, African diasporic language, visual art, and more, bringing together Allen's numerous influences into one collection.

Justin Allen's Language Arts is the 2022 Open Reading Period Editors' Pick.

About the author
Justin Allen is a writer and performer from Northern Virginia. With a background in tap dancing and creative writing, his work often combines a variety of art forms. He has been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater and The Shed and has held residencies at ISSUE Project Room and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies. He has received support from Franklin Furnace, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Jerome Foundation, and shared his work both stateside and abroad.

"In Hatnaha, Justin Allen has reinvented the myth of Atlantis for our postlapsarian age. His art of language cannibalizes the American grammar book, spawning gorgeous new idiolects. Through the buzz and rumble of Afro-diasporic sound clash, Allen hears the frequency of bodies becoming ungovernable. Set to a soundtrack of punk phonotactics, Language Arts is just the book to toss over the barbed wire fences that cordon us off from our post-Reparations future." —Tavia Nyong’o

"Language Arts shares a name with an elementary school class I always wished was more “art” and less rote memorization, and it fully delivers on that desire with its spellbinding assortment of prose poetry, screamo lyricism, screenplay, conlang, and Black political fiction as vibrant as any comp on physical media or stream. nunats nen-tuk nutaks dipa. Justin Allen creates an executable file, one that's bound to spread like Soulja Boy's "Crank That" renamed “britney_spears-hitmebabyonemoretimeremix.mp3," but without the need for tricknology." —Devin Kenny

Originally published in 1987, Saving Seeds: Metaphors of Lesbian Growth, a special issue of Maize: A Lesbian Country Magazine, was created by artist and writer Jenna Weston as a tribute to "magical female-oriented gardens."

From her Introduction: "I have found that, generally speaking, lesbian gardens are works of art. We make intricate designs with twine between sapling posts. Later, these weavings support tomato vines. Bright colored ribbons flutter from the tops of tall bean poles. Raised vegetable beds are sculpted into various graceful shapes. The winding paths are edged in pieces of broken pottery and stones we've found. We build altars in the centers of our gardens, and hold rituals between the onions and the lettuce."

"I asked wimmin to send me drawings and photos and descriptions of their magical female-oriented gardens. The replies came from near and far, and make up a part of this book. The rest of the book contains poems and prose that came directly from my experiences as a gardener and a lesbian."

This reissue reimagines the black and white stapled original in a bounty of earth tones: different colored French Papers are risograph printed in green, brown, and orange ink. The book is handsewn with gradient thread. Also included is a recent interview with Jenna Weston printed as an 11x17 leaflet, reversed with a poster of one of the garden diagrams in the book.