Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity

From the Palestinian struggle against Israeli Apartheid, to First Nations' mass campaigns against pipeline construction in North America, Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of some of the crucial struggles of our age. Rich with their unique histories, characteristics, and social relations, they are connected by the shared enemy they face: settler colonialism.

In this introduction, Sai Englert highlights the ways in which it has, and continues to shape our global economic and political order. From the rapacious accumulation of resources, land, and labour, through Indigenous dispossession and genocide, to the development of racism as a form of social control, settler colonialism is deeply connected to many of the social ills we continue to face today.

To understand settler colonialism as an ongoing process, is therefore also to start engaging with contemporary social movements and solidarity campaigns differently. It is to start seeing how distinct struggles for justice and liberation are intertwined.

'Femme' describes a constellation of queer, gendered expressions that uproot expectations of what it means to be feminine. Building upon experiences of transformation, belonging and harm, this book is a transfeminist call for collective liberation.

Trans Femme Futures envisions the future through everyday actions that revolutionise our lives. Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift discuss struggles around trans healthcare, the need for collectives over institutions, the importance of mutual care, and transfeminism as abolition.

The authors show how social change can be achieved through transformative practices that allow queer life to thrive in a time of climate, health, political and economic crises.

'A brilliant, useful, and immensely moving book that deals a critical blow to the epistemic austerity of our times' - Jordy Rosenberg

The Western museum is a battleground - a terrain of ideological, political and economic contestation. Almost everyone today wants to rethink the museum, but how many have the audacity to question the idea of the universal museum itself?

In A Programme of Absolute Disorder, Françoise Vergès puts the museum in its place. Exploring the Louvre's history, she uncovers the context in which the universal museum emerged: as a product of colonialism, and of Europe's self-appointed claim to be the guardian of global heritage.

Vergès outlines a radical horizon: to truly decolonize the museum is to implement a 'programme of absolute disorder', inventing other ways of apprehending the human and non-human world that nourish collective creativity and bring justice and dignity to the dispossessed.

Foreword by Paul Gilroy

Translated by Melissa Thackway

Epidemics and pandemics undermine societies and highlight the vulnerability of relations people have created to the land, other species, and each other. This book presents fragments of disease management in the Mediterranean from the 15th-century onwards and in the Aegean Archipelago in the last two centuries. From religious to medical approaches to the Bubonic Plague, through the creation of lazarettos, to the famine in occupied Syros, to ghost ships drifting on the Mediterranean: citizens are forced to avoid citizens. Public health in crisis: confinement versus mobility, awakening memories of totalitarian regimes.

CONTENTS

Impending Arrivals by Dimitra Kondylatou
Cruises to Nowhere
Covid-19 stricken Ships
Ghost Ships drifting on the Mediterranean

Suspended Arrivals by Dimitra Kondylatou
Le Corbusier Confined
Venice, Lazaretto and Black Death

Confined Spaces by Dimitra Kondylatou
Religious versus Medical Approaches to the Plague
Public Health and Public Order
Architectures of Control
The Lazaretto at Syros

Confinement and Totalitarianism, Famine in Occupied Syros
by Nicolas Lakiotakis

Panic Room. Waiting Room. Island.
by Hulya Ertas

Schismatics consists of 10 short stories, in a fictitious way dealing with forgotten historical personas. Among them, artist Goda Palekaitė includes Mary Anning –– an amateur discoverer of dinosaurs, Emanuel Swedenborg –– a mystic who empirically explored the architecture of heaven, and Essad Bey –– a Jewish-Muslim writer and orientalist. Here their lives are revived and balance between the lines of history and story.

The book fuses elements of fiction, academic writing, and artistic research, and intertwines with rumors, forgeries, and inventions. Previously, its characters and narratives have already appeared in Palekaitė’s performances and installations, which are presented in the middle of this bilingual edition. In the introductory essay, Valerio Del Baglivo analyses the author’s exploration of facts and fiction, the mechanisms of knowledge production, and the trans-chronological perception of time. At the end of the book, Monika Lipšic ‘Riddle’ reflects on a ‘schismatic poetics’. 

Goda Palekaitė is a contemporary artist and researcher whose work combines visual, literary, performative, and anthropological practices. Exploring the politics of historical narratives, the agency of dreams and collective imagination, and social conditions of creativity, her work evolves around long-term projects that manifest as performances, scenographies, installations, and texts. Her performances, solo and group shows are being presented internationally. In 2019 Goda Palekaitė received The Golden Stage Cross and the Young Artist’s Prize for her artistic contributions across disciplines.

Published September 2020

‘Five Devours’ is a short essay in five parts about need and food as a part of speech, about speech’s relationship to nourishment and hunger; the currency between eating and speaking, expending and consuming.

12 pages
150 x 200mm
risograph printed 
edition of 150

A manifesto against the current moralizing trend in the arts.

Should art be determined by political ideals? In recent decades art institutions have sought to embody liberal values of universal equality and social justice. This move toward greater inclusivity has borne witness to a countervailing trend: artworks are increasingly scrutinized for their political implications, and artists must take care not to transgress particular moral fault lines.

Examining contemporary exhibitions as well as works of art and film, and the broader cultural reactions to them, Rosanna McLaughlin investigates the consequences of this moralizing approach to creative work. She invites us to rethink the connection between political values and art—and to ask whether a relationship between them should exist at all. In arguing against morality in the arts, McLaughlin lays the groundwork for a more expansive concept of difference in twenty-first-century art making.

"What if ambivalences were seen as productive, and not a danger to erase? Would we not begin to know ourselves better? What is it that we are so afraid of finding out? Art is a testing ground for ideas, a means of reaching. What a shame, if we use the space it offers to destroy it entirely."

Rosanna McLaughlin is a writer based in East Sussex and the author of Double-Tracking: Studies in Duplicity (2019) and Sinkhole (2023). Her writing on art and culture has featured in ArtReview, Frieze, Granta, The Guardian, and The White Review, among other publications. Between 2021 and 2023 she was co-editor of The White Review.

“You run a WHAT?” A small press. Yes, this is the dream of those who don’t give a damn about mainstream literature, major presses and millionfold print runs. It is the nirvana to everyone interested in a mindful and loving acquaintance with books.

“Start out small. Continue smaller if needed. Never end. Dream big. Continue dreaming bigger if needed. Make sure to keep being considered small.”

This is not a basic guide, it is a fun and inspiring glance at the inner depth of a small press. With enthusiasm and distinctness the publisher gives advice on everything from networking to handling the scripts to creating and selling a book.

Kristian Carlsson (b.1978) is published in a number of select small presses following his literary debut in 1996. For a decade he had been engaged as an occasional guest editor and project based publisher, when he in 2009 founded Smockadoll Förlag [Smockadoll Press] and decided to publish contemporary poetry. In 2012 Smockadoll was featured by the news agency TT/ Spektra as one of a handful of today’s unsurpassed Swedish small presses for translated literature. During the years Kristian Carlsson most certainly has had time to break each and every one of the small press guidelines issued in this volume.