Oral History of Exhibitions

Contributions by: Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Georgia Sagri, John Kelsey, Matthew Pang, Cathy Wilkes, Sarah Rapson, Nick Irvin, Gene Beery, Anne Dressen, Anne Pontégnie, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Sara Deraedt, Anne Rorimer, Kari Rittenbach, Olga Balema, Maria Nordman, Louise Lawler, Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Adrian Morris, Matt Browning, John Miller, Envers Hadzijaj, Enzo Shalom, Bedros Yeretzian, Morag Keil, Helmut Draxler, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Steve Cannon, Rae Armentrout, Zoe Hitzig, Pierre Guyotat, Lola Sinreich, Fanny Howe, Hélène Fauquet, Marie Angeletti, Richard Hawkins, Andy Robert, Alexander García Düttmann, Daniel Horn, El Hadji Sy, Henrik Olesen, Aurélien Potier, Richard John Jones, Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Nora Schultz, Peter Fend, Megan Francis Sullivan, Jill Johnston, Sturtevant, Tonio Kröner, Bernard Bazile, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Jérome Pantalacci, Gérard Traquandi, Gladys Clover, Maria Wutz, Jimmie Durham, Richard Sides, Camilla Wills, Michael Callies, Steven Warwick, Matthew Langan-Peck, Dan Graham, Nina Könnemann, Hans Christian Dany, Valérie Knoll, Win McCarthy, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Anna Rubin, Heji Shin, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Inka Meißner, Simone Forti, Morgan O’Hara, Angharad Williams, Ye Xe, Lily Van Der Stokker, Yuki Kimura, Peter Wächtler, Eva Steinmetz, Michael Van den Abeele, Marc Kokopeli, Bradley Kronz, Robert Grosvenor, Samuel Jeffery, Charlotte Houette, Adam Martin, Wade Guyton, Chloe Truong-Jones.

Edited by Marie Angeletti with Gianmaria Andreetta and Camilla Wills.

Printed in December 2022.
416 pages, Edition of 840.
© 2022 Claude Balls Int. / the author(s).

This collection of essays by Martin Herbert considers various artists who have withdrawn from the art world or adopted an antagonistic position toward its mechanisms (essays on Lutz Bacher, Stanley Brouwn, Christopher D'Arcangelo, Trisha Donnelly, David Hammons, Agnes Martin, Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Charlotte Posenenske, and Albert York).

A large part of the artist's role in today's professionalized art system is being present. Providing a counterargument to this concept of self-marketing, Herbert examines the nature of retreat, whether in protest, as a deliberate conceptual act, or out of necessity. By illuminating these motives, Tell Them I Said No offers a unique perspective on where and how the needs of the artist and the needs of the art world diverge.

2nd edition (2025).

In this edited collection of work spanning more than 20 years, Silvia Federici provides a detailed history and critique of the politics of the commons from a feminist perspective. In her clear and combative voice, Federici provides readers with an analysis of some of the key issues in contemporary thinking on this subject. Drawing on rich historical research, she maps the connections between the previous forms of enclosure that occurred with the birth of capitalism and the destruction of the commons and the "new enclosures" at the heart of the present phase of global capitalist accumulation.

Considering the commons from a feminist perspective, this collection argues that women and reproductive work are crucial to both our economic survival and the construction of a world free from the capitalist hierarchies. Federici is clear that the commons should not be understood as happy islands in a sea of exploitative relations—but rather autonomous spaces from which to challenge the existing organization of life and labor.

The Conspiracy of Equals (1796) is often hailed as the first revolution against a revolutionary state. Even if the conspirators were soon found out and put on trial, their ideas of radical equality and liberty shaped future generations of revolutionaries worldwide. An Anarchist Playbook—the first publication in Tenement’s new imprint, No University Press—gathers together many of the key documents from their trial across a myriad forms, with a number of these texts appearing herein in their first English-language translation.

Assembled in the Playbook are the last words of Gracchus Babeuf, the leader of the conspiracy and a radical proponent of the abolition of private property, and of his fellow conspirator Augustin Darthé, as they faced the guillotine. We’ve a letter, written in the popular idiom of the sans-culottes, that urges the common soldier to rebel; the score and lyrics of a street song that names the new class enemy: the wealthy bourgeoisie who have profited from the revolution; a first-time English translation of ‘The Last Judgement of All Kings’—an extraordinary one-act play by Sylvain Maréchal, the unofficial poet of the Conspiracy, that was performed to considerable acclaim in Year II of the Revolution (and that the Workshop is in the process of adapting for contemporary audiences). 

Many of these texts were never published in their own time, and form a part of the testament left behind by Philippe Buonarroti, a leading conspirator who inspired new generations of revolutionaries across Europe over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the best known works included is the Manifesto of Equals, long considered a founding text of social, communist and anarchist revolutions. The Playbook presents a translation of the Manifesto alongside other key texts by the conspirators, reconstructing the richness and variety of revolutionary communication that informs the editorship, shape, and scope of this volume.

The Flesh is a collection of Yves B. Golden's poems, lyric essays and social criticism – and often these generic distinctions become blurred. Published by Ediciones La Escocesa (Barcelona, ES), TABLOID facilitated this book's production as editors and book designers. A selection of Golden's texts are also translated by Leto Ybarra, rendering the author's work into Spanish for the first time.

“Respectfully! The Flesh feels like a conjuring and a force of nature—unyieldingly raw, full of delectable sensitivity that shapes a world Yves B. Golden deliveries with formidable honesty—where her word is the journey, the body and the bond. Yves writes: ‘not one bird is declined entry into heaven’. The Flesh is succulent in the mouth of the mother— Yves is a steward of time machines, celestial bliss and untethered healing. The Flesh unties the tongue, waters the mouth and the garden. Within Yves’ 5th book she offers us a timeline in recognizing that all birds and angels alike can touch the sky. We are always, already, held and drenched in glory and deserving of love and safety. The Flesh is Black like obsidian. May our love bloom like the flesh in every lifetime.”
- keioui keijaun thomas

“Yves B Golden has given us a protection spell against tyranny; a Blue Guide for the conscious and the daydream; raw free jazz that knows the standards as well. Golden’s linguistically liberated fantasies can transmute into a body of politically imperturbable ethoses in the same sentence. This book offers information for an evolutionary sensitivity, for the next level of sense-making and particularity of the human being. Though the poet urges us to de-realize the flesh, to split our own heads open, we must also accommodate the flesh’s intangibles that interlock, conjoin, negate, and negotiate: such ‘outward and inward facing conundrums’ go on and on. Welcome this ‘bearer of turbulent news.’”
- Losarc Raal

This eighth instalment of BFTK is on letters and letters. It takes the double meaning of this word as its point of dispatch, inviting recipients to think through and respond to — directly and indirectly — ideas around correspondence, addressing and alphabets. What it means to be in correspondence with somebody, the initiation and continuation of this communicative exchange and what happens when it is severed or lost. How to write directly towards a you, to you; to a particular reader, object, locale. The volume is littered with letters. There are letters about letters, letters to letters, letters that crease, fold, tear and rip, letters that are sent and lost, found and read. There are letters that pile up, their combinations arranged and rearranged to form comprehensive linguistic logics, and there are letters that are simply letters. Contributions sit in eight-page signatures, of which there are twenty-six in total. Of the eight hundred bound copies, twenty-six are left unbound, returned to discrete correspondence, loose abécédaire units for exchange — letters to be leafed through and addressed once more.

PLEASE TAKE A LOOK AT YOUR
SHADOW IN THAT MIRROR
Chang Yuchen
(pp.1–8, A)

BESTIARY FOR A NON-GENETIC DESCENDANT
Bhanu Kapil
(pp.9–16, B)

THROW STUFF AWAY
Hannah Regel
(pp.17–24, C)

THE MOON HATH XXX DAYS:
LETTERS FOR LETTERS
Helen Marten
(pp.25–32, D)

WHAT DOES THE LOSS FEEL LIKE?
Meg Miller
(pp.33–48, E, F)

LIGHT UP THE A
Kate Briggs
(pp.49–56, G)

THE POSTCODE CONNECTION
Rebecca Ross
(pp.57–72, H, I)

(LETTER) TO S… LABYRINTH-CORTEX
Michèle Métail, trans. Thea Petrou
(pp.73–80, J)

RACKETY CORRESPONDENCES /
A CORRESPONDING RACKET
Nisha Ramayya
(pp.81–96, K, L)

THE COIN OF THE REALM
Lucie Elven
(pp.97–104, M)

UNFOLDING FOLDED FANTASIES:
A CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE SEATED SCRIBE
Fatema Abdoolcarim
(pp.105–112, N)

DEAR DEAREST DEAR MOTHER
Alice Butler
(pp.113–120, O)

/ DON’T BOTHER THE CREASE
Tice Cin
(pp.121–128, P)

FEELING LETTERS, SEEING BLUE
Gemma Blackshaw
(pp.129–144, Q, R)

LINES OF GRACE AND DISGRACE
Francis Haselden
(pp.145–152, S)

AN ABC OF MIMICRY
Jeffrey Stuker & Jan Tumlir
(pp.153–176, T, U, V)

ADDRESS
Céline Mathieu
(pp.177–184, W)

MY VOICE FOLDS YOU
Thea Petrou
(pp.185–192, X)

A LONG DISTANCE LULLABY
Vibeke Mascini
(pp.193–200, Y)

DEBT OF GOLD CAN BE PAID OFF,
DEBT OF KINDNESS IS CARRIED OVER DEATH
Chang Yuchen
(pp.201–208, Z)

LETTERS ON LETTERS
FROM LETTERS ON LETTERS
Matthew Stuart
(covers)