Side Magazine #01 – The Professor

The flag bearing twelve yellow stars on a blue background has become Europe’s most recognisable symbol. Since its introduction by the Council of Europe in 1955, it has stood for the unification of Europe’s nation states. It was precisely this yellow circle of stars that prevailed over more than 150 flag ideas sent to the Council of Europe by a host of diverse private individuals. These colourful designs are being now published in Rejected for the first time. They document the continent’s zeitgeist at a decisive period in the development of European unity. Alongside the flag proposals, the trilingual book (English, German, French) features a written contribution by the German-French poet and writer Marie Rotkopf, who tackles the EU’s neoliberal political cynicism and Germany’s expansion of power with biting irony.

We are not where we need to be but, we ain't where we were is the first volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against that reports on active research engaged within the artistic professions and institutions since 2017. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world, by orienting our object of study towards the struggles that impact it. With this publication, our hope is to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the visibilization of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It is the result of militant experiences, at the convergence of our individual experiences and collective questionings.

With texts by Tiphanie Blanc, Antonella Corsani, Fanny Lallart, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ramaya Tegegne and an interview with Outrage Collectif.

Morceaux choisis is the first seminal overview of Saâdane Afif's artistic practices. The publication features 48 exhibitions or performances organized in 28 separate sections, covering a period of 14 years.
Starting with Melancholic Beat at Museum Folkwang, Essen in 2004 and leading up to the recent exhibition Musiques pour tuyauterie, at mor charpentier, Paris in 2018, the monograph considers the format of the exhibition as Saâdane Afif's medium, through which his work takes form and can be read. 

Each one of the figuring exhibitions form an individual booklet: the pages with full color reproductions of the individual works and installation views are inserted within four additional pages providing the exhibition's title, description, details and captions. 
These 28 booklets form the body of the publication. The exhibition texts have been written by Lily Matras and Yasmine d'O. They are accompanied by an interview of Saâdane Afif by Lili Reynaud-Dewar, two critical texts by Zoë Gray and Jörn Schafaff, an index of the exhibited works and an index of Afif 's released books and records.

Saâdane Afif (born 1970 in Vendôme, France) creates installations made up of unexpected encounters between objects. These creations, of uncertain status, oscillate between function and symbol, between art and design, and provoke shifts of meaning that engage a reflection on today's industrial society.

Marlie Mul (b. 1980 in Utrecht, the Netherlands; lives and works in Brussels) is characterized by a strong material awareness, spatial thinking, and an ongoing engagement with conditions of labor, systems of value, and forms of collectivity. Her practice foregrounds a sustained interest in sculptural concerns, direct engagement with materials, and processes of layering, transformation, meaning and re-meaning across multiple levels of articulation. Central to this is a continuous process of familiarizing herself and working with new materials and practices, which are repeatedly extracted from their conventional contexts and expanded into new bodies of work. These are, in turn, accompanied and reframed by other materials as well as by more social formats of production and presentation. 

The first comprehensive monograph on Marlie Mul’s work is published on the occasion of her solo exhibition Das Budget (2025) at Kunsthaus Glarus. It offers a comprehensive chronological overview of key bodies of work from the early 2000s to the present and, through a richly illustrated index, unfolds a complex structure of contexts, collaborations, and modes of production. The publication includes new contributions by Annie Goodner, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Frank Wasser, a dialogue between the artist and the editor, as well as numerous reprints of texts that have accompanied Mul’s work over the years, including writings by the artist herself.

Printed on thick cardboard, this book throws you right back into the child-like explorer mode we know from when we were young. It illustrates the mindful written words of Lisa Gutscher journey through the inner body based on a large archive from found images, screenshots and other image sources to unfold a whole new world in front of your eyes.

The Trial is an extensive publication chronicling the decade-plus-long evolution of one of Rossella Biscotti's seminal works, focusing on the trials of members of the revolutionary left-wing movement Autonomia Operaia in the early 1980s, an emblematic judicial drama of Italy's Years of Lead.

The core of the book is the English transcription of a six-hour audio piece, originally composed from hundreds of hours of the trial's archival recordings broadcast by Radio Radicale. Edited like a theatrical script, The Trial becomes a polyphonic narrative that foregrounds the political voices of defendants in opposition to the structure and language of the legal machine: prosecutors, judges, lawyers. The transcript is accompanied by critical texts by Michael Hardt, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, and Giovanna Zapperi, as well as a conversation between the artist and philosopher Antonio Negri, one of the trial's key defendants. It investigates how political memory is carried, translated, and embodied across time.

Featuring visual documentation and multilingual excerpts from performances staged across various institutions and countries, this publication traces the work's ongoing reactivation through translation, collaboration, and context-specific interventions.

With texts by Phillip Van den Bossche, Filarowska and a conversation between Eva Wittocx and the artist (NL/EN)

Nº 48 / October 2022

sawing a plank is like going for a walk by Kato Six (b. 1986) is published on the occasion of Kato’s solo exhibition at M Leuven this autumn. This book encapsulates 10 years of her quest as an artist.

The work of Kato Six (b. 1986) balances between abstract and figurative art. She works on different themes which she develops into series or ensembles. Architecture, design, domesticity and utensils all act as important references. Starting there, she uses recognisable and everyday materials such as MDF, stone, plastic or textiles.
Kato wants to question certain affinities and let the viewer look at familiar objects or images from a different perspective. As a viewer, you feel connected to the object or image but the actual meaning or function no longer applies.

Some of my works refer to the domestic, especially the most recent ones, such as ‘Carpet Beater Carpet’ and ‘Striped Knitwear’. The invisible work done by “housewives”, but also by workers or maintenance staff, is certainly one of the themes addressed in ‘Carpet Beater Carpet’. The above works are textile works, created with so-called “soft skills”. In the arts, these “soft skills” are often attributed to female artists — women often being assigned a certain medium.
Kato Six in conversation with Eva Wittocx in “sawing a plank is like going for a walk”

Unbidden Tongues #9: Potty Mouth is a collection of what could be described as concrete poetry, written over the past two years by our niece Violet Bartley, now aged five. Typed at a computer and sent exclusively via e-mail, the poems stand as clear evidence of a person in the beginnings of grasping (at) language. Throughout, characters are repeated uninterrupted until margins break them, keys pushed down by a finger not yet strong enough to lift itself up.

Over the years, as her written vocabulary grew and these attempts at communication slowly stacked up into the collection printed here, Violet delivered poem after poem within which different mutations of the word ‘poo’ were uttered in type: poo, poobum, bum poo, ipoo, poop. While simple, often illegible and definitely isolated utterances (she never replies when you send a poem back in turn), they are decipherable examples of someone learning defiance through language.

The straplines of a number of advertisements drawn from magazines of the 1950s are turned into drawings, as though a particularly vain and narcissistic woman speaks (as of course she does), She is ‘en pleine forme’ of her beauty. (2016).