Sisters of the Wind

A visual anthology compiling the contributions of the filmmakers who are part of the Light Cone collection, a key institution for the distribution, promotion and preservation of experimental cinema in France and around the world, on the occasion of its 40th anniversary.

2022 marks an important moment for Light Cone: its 40th anniversary. Such an event should be celebrated in the best possible way. Light Cone has come together thanks to the filmmakers whose films entered the collection over the years. We've decided to invite them to participate in an editorial project, a book in which we would publish their contributions: letters, postcards, photographs, drawings, film stills, collages, etc., which they have sent us for the occasion of the anniversary. A collective scrapbook in which the materiality of the objects—paper, photos, colors, handwritten notes—evokes that of analog cinema, which we have always defended. A book of images is born, and through the creation of this micro-collection, so is a portable museum of about one hundred pieces, which are ready to be exhibited and which will remain in the care of Light Cone's archive.

With Michel Amarger, Martin Arnold, Caroline Avery, Peter-Conrad Beyer, Giuseppe Boccassini, Patrick Bokanowski, Louise Bourque, Robert Breer, Dietmar Brehm, Claudio Caldini, Stefano Canapa, Abigail Child, Pip Chodorov, Martha Colburn, Philippe Cote, Sandra Davis, Frédérique Devaux, Karel Doing, Anja Dornieden, Flatform, Cécile Fontaine, Olivier Fouchard, Su Friedrich, Siegfried Alexander Fruhauf, Peter Gidal, Milena Gierke, Christoph Girardet, Juan David, Gonzalez Monroy, Christophe Guérin, Nicky Hamlyn, Barbara Hammer, Teo Hernandez, Tony Hill, Mike Hoolboom, Jakobois, Larry Jordan, Patrice Kirchhofer, Maria Kourkouta, Alexandre Larose, Christian Lebrat, Emmanuel Lefrant, Maurice Lemaître, Jeanne Liotta, Rose Lowder, Johann Lurf, Pablo Marín, Mara Mattuschka, Bruce Mcclure, Miles Mckane, Luc Meichler, Barbara Meter, Peter Miller, Matthias Müller, Michel Nedjar, Dominique Noguez, Vivian Ostrovsky, Simon Payne, Emmanuel Piton, Charlotte Pryce, Gisèle Rapp-Meichler, Abraham Ravett, Emily Richardson, D.N. Rodowick, Gaëlle Rouard, Martine Rousset, Pierre Rovere, Ben Russell, Daïchi Saïto, Maki Satake, Sylvia Schedelbauer, Jeff Scher, Stanley Schtinter, Guy Sherwin, José Antonio Sistiaga, John Smith, Vicky Smith, Michael Snow, Malena Szlam, Mika Taanila, Marcelle Thirache, Trinh T. Minh-ha, David Wharry, Telemach Wiesinger, Antoinette Zwirchmayr.

Natural Enemies of Books is a response to the groundbreaking 1937 publication 'Bookmaking on the Distaff Side', which brought together contributions by women printers, illustrators, authors, typographers, and typesetters, highlighting the print industry’s inequalities and proposing a takeover of the history of the book. Edited by feminist graphic design collective MMS, the publication includes newly commissioned essays and poems, conversations with former typesetters Inger Humlesjö, Ingegärd Waaranperä, Gail Cartmail, and Megan Downey, and reprints of the original book and other publications.

Audio journals that document Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like, I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue, or through my lips, or through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous, or alarming.... It just seems like sounds that have been uttered back and forth maybe now over centuries. And it always boils down to the same meaning within those sounds, unless you're more intense uttering them, or you precede them or accompany them with certain forms of violence.
—from The Weight of the Earth

Artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was an important figure in the downtown New York art scene. His art was preoccupied with sex, death, violence, and the limitations of language. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Wojnarowicz began keeping audio journals, returning to a practice he'd begun in his youth.The Weight of the Earth presents transcripts of these tapes, documenting Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.

In these taped diaries, Wojnarowicz talks about his frustrations with the art world, recounts his dreams, and describes his rage, fear, and confusion about his HIV diagnosis. Primarily spanning the years 1987 and 1989, recorded as Wojnarowicz took solitary road trips around the United States or ruminated in his New York loft, the audio journals are an intimate and affecting record of an artist facing death. By turns despairing, funny, exalted, and angry, this volume covers a period largely missing from Wojnarowicz's written journals, providing us with an essential new record of a singular American voice.

Published 2018

In a reality in which the boundaries between cinema, art, installation and multimedia experimentation seem to be increasingly blurred, History of a Tree by Flatform is a project that sets out to radically alter the idea of the portrait in western art. 

A non-human living organism – the Oak of the Hundred Knights of Tricase, the oldest Vallonea oak in Europe at the age of 900 years – and the territory in which it has stood for centuries become the subject: through a film and a robotized video installation, statements become a portrait, and are transformed into a work of art. 

The book retraces the genesis, development and implementation of this original idea, providing a visual score, the film in 80 images, dialogues in ten languages, the contributions of a tree searcher, an art historian and two philosophers, as well as a series of in-depth essays drawing on the fields of science, history, anthropology, music and linguistics. 

In the fourth title of the acclaimed DecadentEditions series, Dennis Lim explores the oeuvre of South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo via his 2005 film. Forty minutes in, we realise we’ve been watching a film within the film. The ‘real’ characters leave the cinema and find themselves reenacting what they just saw, as a chance encounter invites a suicide pact. Is it life imitating art, or the other way around? Dennis Lim is a film curator, teacher, and writer. He is currently the Artistic Director of the New York Film Festival.