Self-Institution A Terminology Audit

What does ‘user-friendly’ website mean if, on it, online behaviors like stalking, teasing, and ghosting — once considered peripheral — are now central to survival, care, and belonging? How to thrive without becoming an “Interdisciplinary Unicorn”: the state’s most beloved user-citizen fluent in multiple registers of production, optimization, and self-branding? How in this beautiful world is one supposed to log off, when surveillance and privacy erosion have been normalized? And how, oh how, could users possibly think of building the alternatives, when cool and cringe online acts, all activate the platform’s reward system: the unleashing of emoji-filled praise? How to resist the platform’s toxic seduction? 

Haunted by screenshots of early cyberfeminist websites and in dialogue with digital sages, web scripts, and business interests, media artist, web developer, and author Maisa Imamović embarks on a philosophical and practice-based crusade through the internet’s surface and its shadows. To expose the various ways of thriving online without surrendering to optimization, the book explores imperfect uses of perfect software, preservation of precarious web infrastructures, tactical content strategies, and experiments with autonomous financial systems — all wrapped in educational efforts to sustain criticality amid automation. Through these traversals beneath the scroll, Maisa finds her Webland: speculative, broken, and oftentimes, poetic infrastructure where logic destabilizes, binaries dissolve, and meaning evades monetization. But can a non-extractive internet exist beyond metaphor? Can poetry rewire protocol? Or will her sanctuary be absorbed into the very architectures it resists?

"In Maisa in Webland, Maisa Imamovic evokes the multidimensional, spontaneous human elements of the early web, using interviews, case studies, critical theory and fiction as her organic materials. She peeks behind the screen and through time to trace the subtle erosion of the web’s early utopian ideals to its cold and extractive present. Imamovic bravely wades through the swampy digital muck that mediates our everyday reality, examining its invisible psychic scaffolding with academic rigor, and a big dose of humor and heart. Was it an inevitable entropy, or an aberration? How and when did we get so off-course? Can we return? Do we want to? In Maisa’s Webland, we might very well be doomed, and maybe that’s a good thing. When the center of this tangled web no longer holds, something new can take shape.” - Nada Alic, author of Bad Thoughts

Often dissident, sometimes adherent, Nothing About is, in essence, indefinable because it is adaptive and fluid. Speculative or hands-on, this discipline – if we can call it that – displays all the ambivalences of our contemporary lifestyles: superficial and profound, profane and divine, present everywhere and nowhere, and often regarded as futile, even though it could nonetheless destroy the most beautiful of insides. This book brings together a variety of intellectual tools and insights – polysemic and ambiguous, bespoke and improvised, ornamental and criminal, spanning media, technology, the arts and other, often undefined fields – that analyze the impact of the discipline on contemporary design. In the end, what makes Nothing About charming is that this inside – insofar as it is still defined as such – has only the humble ambition of accompanying beings, both animate and inanimate, within their environment, like a friend who is never far away. 

Introduction by Javier Fernández Contreras. Text contributions by Daniel Zamarbide, Line Fontana & David Fagart, Valentin Dubois & Bertrand Van Dorp, Camille Bagnoud & Ahmed Belkhodja, Javier F. Contreras & Roberto Zancan, Paule Perron, Philippe Rahm, Youri Kravtchenko, Leonid Slonimskiy, Simon Husslein, Vera Sacchetti, Jan Dominik Geipel, Valentina De Luigi, Jean-Pierre Greff.

Exhibitions by Edgar Calel and Forensic Architecture, conversations with Lisette Lagnado and between Eyal Weizman, Agata Nguyen Chuong, Zoé Samudzi and Irmgard Emmelhainz, and short stories by Portia Subran and Rémy Ngamije.

Forensic Architecture presents ‘A Counter-Archive of the Ovaherero and Nama Genocide’, a powerful investigation into the early 20th-century genocide committed by German colonial powers in today’s Namibia. Drawing on years of archival research and spatial analysis, the exhibition traces the lasting impact of colonial violence in three parts: from the ideological roots of racialised imperialism, to the design of the concentration camp, to the ongoing environmental degradation and dispossession affecting Indigenous communities today.

Edgar Calel’s ‘Dreams and memories dazzle through the flickering of fireflies’ is an exploration of dreams, memory and everyday life within his multi-generational family home in Comalapa, Guatemala. Each morning, dreams are shared among family members, as a practical and poetical way to sense the energy of the day ahead. Concrete business plans and reminders to cook certain dishes emerge from these retellings: a ritual so entwined in the architecture of their every day, that, even when apart, they recount their visions through shared voice notes.

Pina is a printed, portable exhibition space. We function as a commissioning platform, collaborating with artists to create exhibitions existing solely within the pages of a magazine.

Echoing Jean Dubuffet's idea that thought must arise from material in artistic practice, Giuliana Prucca, through this essay, reinterprets a moment in the history of 20th-century art using materials such as stone, sand, earth, and dust. She employs the mineral to illustrate that the creative act would be a trace of the body's disappearance. The loss of humanity and the deconstruction of the subject objectify themselves in the image. In other words, art resides in the tension between representation and its loss, ultimately leaving nothing but an image.

Drawing from the influential figure of Antonin Artaud, she weaves critical and poetic connections between the texts and works of various artists, writers, and thinkers, ranging from Jean Dubuffet to Jan Fabre and Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein and Gutaï, Joë Bousquet to Camille Bryen and Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard to Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille to Aby Warburg.

The material is not merely a thematic pretext; it is an active and explosive catapult that questions the arbitrary linearity of a conventionally assimilated art history. Following Ponge's example, Prucca applies the principles of poetry to criticism, starting from Artaud's material, the most undisciplined of poet-artist-thinkers of the modern era. This results in a critically inventive approach dangerously suited to its object, celebrating an anti-critique. The chosen writing materials, stonepaper for the cover and recycled paper for the pages, is consistent, intending to give the impression of being covered in dust.

The essay disrupts traditional reading habits and shatters the conservatism of art criticism by inhabiting writing space differently, presenting a physically engaging interaction. This is an essay in the literal sense, an experience where form never contradicts content, urging readers to take the risk of thinking deeply and embracing a new rhythm. A complex and challenging design invites them to choose different reading options, ultimately treating criticism as one would poetry.

Giuliana Prucca [Paris | Berlin] is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She is the founder and art director of the publishing house AVARIE, specialising in contemporary art books that explore the relationships between text and image, body and space.

Graphic design, art direction by Vito Raimondi

This publication presents research conducted by visual artist and choreographer Clarissa Bauman over two years, in the frame of the exerce MA in choreography and performance (National Choreographic Center of Montpellier / Occitanie). Here, writing becomes movement, a weaving of words, gestures, images, and drawings that rub against each other in a dialogue articulated from page to page.

"The choreography of small, overlooked gestures from moments of boredom, letting loose, detours. The finger sliding along the table, the arm coinciding with the back of this wooden chair. The coincidence of a gesture with an image, and the instantaneous disparition of this image in the body, as it transforms into the sketch of another movement. Contours, strokes, perspective lines, everything sinuous, asking at what moment does the image appear, emerge, and then become undone? The impossibility, within the body, of an image being fixed, still, one. (…) At this point in the writing, I perceive text less as a desire to organise, sediment, or give form to something, whatever it might be, but rather as a desire to find the outlines of connections between materials left hanging in the room I share with them, the tight space around the table, the images pinned to the walls in front of and behind me, the markings layered, scratched, or sketched in notebooks, the pages from books insistently revisited these last months, the memories that wane, escape, or insinuate themselves between these spaces. Developing a strategy for distracted observation."

Contributions by Anne Kerzerho, Christian Rizzo, Rostan Chentouf, Alix de Morant, Laurent Pichaud, Myrto Katsiki, Jocelyn Cottencin.

In Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, the group’s founder, provides, for the first time, an in-depth introduction to the history, practice, assumptions, potentials, and double binds of this practice. The book includes an extensive array of images, maps, and detailed documentation that records the intricate work the group has performed.

Included in this volume are case studies that traverse multiple scales and durations, ranging from the analysis of the shrapnel fragments in a room struck by drones in Pakistan, the reconstruction of a contested shooting in the West Bank, the architectural recreation of a secret Syrian detention center from the memory of its survivors, a blow-by-blow account of a day-long battle in Gaza, and an investigation of environmental violence and climate change in the Guatemalan highlands and elsewhere.

Weizman’s Forensic Architecture, stunning and shocking in its critical narrative, powerful images, and daring investigations, presents a new form of public truth, technologically, architecturally, and aesthetically produced. Their practice calls for a transformative politics in which architecture as a field of knowledge and a mode of interpretation exposes and confronts ever-new forms of state violence and secrecy.

17 Mouvements collects traces of a project that Decoratelier - the workspace and arts platform of Jozef Wouters - did in the fall of 2022 around the ‘5 blocs’ area in Brussels (Rempart Des Moines/Papenvest).

When Nuit Blanche invited them to build a gym, Camille Thiry and other Decoratelier associates did not want to design another generic muscle cage. Together with the neighbourhoods inhabitants, they built 17 distinct movement spaces, each tailor-made to an individual’s size, needs, dreams and aches. The gym equipment has meanwhile been removed from public space, but this eponymous book (ed. by Jozef Wouters) combines notes and reflections (language: French) by Camille with beautiful photography by Enzo Smits, documenting the ingenious and unique negotiations that were a part of this collaboration.