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Cover of Spatial Folders #1

MIARD

Spatial Folders #1

Kris Dittel ed., Golnar Abbasi ed.

€18.00

This publication is the first issue of ‘Spatial Folders’, a thematic periodical that is produced by the faculty of Master Interior Architecture: Research and Design (MIARD) program at Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. It is composed of a selection of graduation theses alongside contributions by guest authors that focus on urgent socio-cultural, socio-political, and ecological issues that affect the (built) environment and its representation regimes.

This first issue focuses on extraction and extractivism that characterises the power structures that make our worlds and their historicities. Across time extraction processes have been making and changing the spaces of the world through displacement of bodies and matter, from within and across the earth. At the same time, these processes establish epistemologies and forms of representation that articulate extraction as natural or inevitable within the frameworks of anthropocentrism, capitalism, colonialism, racism, or hetero-reproductivism.

This collection of texts approaches the question of extraction from a variety of spatial perspectives. The contributions zoom in to specific sites, cases, and areas of interest while providing a critical analysis of various networks of power and influence across time and space. These works do not turn away from the material aspect of extraction but rather closely trace the spatial and material conditions and consequences of extraction in the case of oil, hormones, milk, wood, and water, among others.

With Kris Dittel, Golnar Abbasi, Eva Garibaldi, Shiila Infriccioli, Natasha Marie Llorens, Jane Rendell, Shonali Shetty, Alex Augusto, Suárez Agnes Tatzber, Elien Vermoortel, Dominique Willis, Clementine Edwards, Zoraïma Hupkes

Design by Dongyoung Lee

Published in 2023 272 pages

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Cover of Fly-Fishing

Duke University Press

Fly-Fishing

Christopher Schaberg

Ecology €16.00

In Fly-Fishing, Christopher Schaberg ponders his lifetime pursuit of the widely mythologized art of fly-fishing. From the Michigan lakeshore where he learned to fish to casting flies in a New Orleans bayou, Schaberg sketches landscapes and fish habitats and shows how fly-fishing allows him to think about coexisting with other species. It offers Schaberg a much-needed source of humility, social isolation, connection with nature, and a reminder of environmental degradation. Rather than centering fishing on trophies, conquest, and travel, he advocates for a “small-fishing” that values catching the diminutive fish near one’s home. Introspective and personal, Fly-Fishing demonstrates how Schaberg’s obsession indelibly shapes how he understands and lives in the wider world.

Cover of Beauty Kit

a.pass

Beauty Kit

Isabel Burr Raty

Ecology €12.00

BEAUTY KIT – AN ECO-EROGENOUS ART PROJECT by Isabel Burr Raty with contributions by Kristin Rogghe, Elke Van Campenhout, Gosie Vervloessem, Pablo Diartinez and Tim Vets, is an experimental catalog summarizing Isabel Burr Raty’s research on conceptualizing and manufacturing eco-erogenous para-pharmaceutical products. It tells the story of the BKFF, a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their orgasmic juices to produce beauty bio-products, used for treatments in the BK Spa, critically discussed in the BK Focus Group and moving forward into becoming a village, where every-body harvests each other. The catalog comes with contributing text, “Harvesting bodies – The Farm as Paradox” by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout, and other reflections on the project.

Isabel Burr Raty is a Belgian-Chilean artist, filmmaker, and Media Art History teacher in ERG (École de Recherche Graphique), living between Brussels and Amsterdam. She is currently developing her second feature film, about the colonial impact on Easter Island, and creating live art and new media installations that queer production understandings, such as the Beauty Kit Project. Her works have been shown internationally.

Cover of Ever Gaia

Isollari

Ever Gaia

James Lovelock, Hans Ulrich Obrist

Ecology €20.00

The most accessible introduction to the life and work of James Lovelock, and a guide to address today's "polycrisis."

There is no creation of the future if we do not sustain, at root, an intuition for invention. No one understood this better than James Lovelock, the most significant scientific thinker since Charles Darwin.

Over the course of his career, Lovelock set the terms by which we've come to understand life—biologically, societally, poetically—in the twenty-first century. He helped NASA complete missions to Mars and the moon; he invented devices that revealed the presence of harmful chemicals in the Earth's atmosphere, inspiring Rachel Carson to write Silent Spring; and he formulated the Gaia hypothesis, the deceptively simple idea that our planet could be viewed as a single self-regulating organism—everything entangled, everything acting upon everything else.

In September 2015, Hans Ulrich Obrist traveled to Dorset to visit Lovelock at his seaside cottage, where they spent nine hours discussing garden cities, frozen hamsters, rising temperatures, tiny widgets, the Space Age, the birth of modern science, the agonies of institutions, and the future of humanity. Ever Gaia presents this conversation as a celebration of Lovelock, who died in 2022 at 103, alongside contributions from two future pioneers of Gaia: Daisy Hildyard and Precious Okoyomon. As another of Lovelock's heirs, Tim Lenton, writes in his afterword, this encounter was pivotal in Lovelock's late intellectual life and, at the start of 2023, provides a guide—by way of Lovelock's Gaian approach—to address today's "polycrisis."

Ever Gaia opens the second season of isolarii as a tribute not just to Lovelock but to the late Bruno Latour, who introduced the series when we launched it two years ago. The second volume of a trilogy that started with the release of The Archipelago Conversations in 2021, Ever Gaia is the most accessible introduction to the life and work of Lovelock, whose way of seeing—"perhaps his greatest legacy," Obrist writes—will continue to shape our world and our place within it for decades to come.

Cover of Protoplasmic Flow

Samara Editions

Protoplasmic Flow

Jenna Sutela

Ecology €27.00

One of artist Jenna Sutela's regular collaborators, Physarum polycephalum, is often referred to as a natural computer. This yellow, ‘many-headed’ slime mold is an ancient, decentralized, autonomous organism that processes data without a nervous system, operating via communities of coordinated nuclei that demonstrate advanced spatial intelligence. If the slime mold cannot find the resources it needs, it hibernates until better conditions arise; theoretically, it is immortal. Over the years, Sutela has, for example, ingested the slime mold in her performances as a form of artificial intelligence, letting its hive-like behavior program her own.

Sutela's work for Samara reactivates this line of work, delivering co-existence with the slime mold to people's homes in the form of a dried sample of Physarum polycephalum as well as related performative instructions. Inside the box, the audience receives everything necessary to grow slime mold at home, and witness the behaviour of this fascinating organism. With the set of performative instructions, Jenna Sutela proposes the ways of co-existing and engaging with Physarum polycephalum.

Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living media, such as Bacillus subtilis nattō bacteria and the “many-headed” slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela's work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Moderna Museet, and Serpentine Galleries. She is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-21.

Protoplasmic Flow contains everything required to activate the slime mold in a location of your choosing.

Duration: take all the time that you need
Language: Instructions are in English and Italian.

Cover of OEI #94-95 Geografier [Geographies]

OEI editör

OEI #94-95 Geografier [Geographies]

Jonas J. Magnusson, Cecilia Grönberg and 1 more

The new publication triangulates between geopoetics, geopolitics, and cultural geography; a 464 page issue with some 50 contributors as well as a large section on Swedish philosophical geographer Gunnar Olsson.