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Cover of Trading Zones – Camera Work in Artistic and Ethnographic Research

Archive Books

Trading Zones – Camera Work in Artistic and Ethnographic Research

Jürgen Krusche ed., Laura von Niederhäusern ed., Barbara Preisig ed.

€20.00

This book introduces camera-based practices at the intersections of artistic and ethnographic research that critically examine the means of their own production and social embeddedness.

In shared practices such as recording in the field, editing in post-production and modes of presentation, the camera is involved as an agent rather than an innocent device. How does the camera grapple with the invisible and how does it reveal what the camerawoman is unable to see? How do films, videos and photographs provide access to vulnerable knowledges and what presentation formats can extend the linearity of narration?

Taking account of their own situatedness and the limits of representation, many of this book's contributors attempt to speak with—rather than about—the other. These negotiations appearing in the featured projects open up a shared field of artistic and ethnographic inquiry, whose potential—for experiments and reflections—is far from exhausted.

Contributions by Sepideh Abtahi, Shirin Barghnavard, Laura Coppens, Louis Henderson, Heidrun Holzfeind, Mina Keshavarz, Daniel Kötter, Jürgen Krusche, Bärbel Küster, Bina Elisabeth Mohn, Laura von Niederhäusern, Uriel Orlow, Barbara Preisig, Rani al Raji, Nahid Rezaei, Anette Rose, Sahar Salahshoori, Christoph Schenker, Amira Solh, Lena Maria Thüring, Zheng Mahler.

Published in 2022 ┊ 160 pages ┊ Language: English

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Cover of I Speak Radio

Archive Books

I Speak Radio

Anna Bromley, Achim Lengerer and 1 more

Publishing a selection of her radiophonic essays here for the first time, I Speak Radio reflects Anne Bromley's collaborative radio practice.

Since 2010, Anna Bromley has been inviting artists, activists and cultural researchers into the radio studio to explore language and voice together, in the context of sound, politics and everyday life. What began as an artists' radio research format has developed over the years into a series of exhibition pieces focusing on radio and its visible and invisible transmission bodies.
Publishing a selection of her radiophonic essays here for the first time, I Speak Radio reflects Bromley's collaborative radio practice. The publication also provides insight into the corresponding exhibition formats of these projects, including cooperations with a large number of artists, activists, radio makers and theorists. An index of images and texts on Bromley's other artistic works is inserted into the book.
I Speak Radio opens with Bromley's eponymous multimedia essay on the feminist appropriation of early radio technology in the 1920s. A Voice Exists in Voicing, the series of radio essays and sonic portraits with which Bromley opened the Manifesta Radio in Prishtina in the summer of 2022, comprises the core of the book. The accompanying visual element to this section is a series of drawings by Michael Fesca. Contextualizing texts by Catherine Nichols and Hedwig Fijen provide an introduction to A Voice Exists in Voicing. Finally, Bromley talks to media activist Diana McCarty about the politics of persistent radio voices and considers critical perspectives on radio as a medium within art exhibitions.

The reader series Scriptings: Political Scenarios publishes carefully selected scripts and texts by artists that refer neither to academic forms nor to purely literary forms of writing, but rather embed "text" as a fully integral part of contemporary political and visual art practice.

Contributions by Anna Bromley, Diana McCarty, Hedwig Fijen, Catherine Nichols, Tetsuo Kogawa, Alla Mitrofanova, JD Zazie.

Cover of Entangled – Texts On Textiles

Archive Books

Entangled – Texts On Textiles

Anne Szefer Karlsen

Design €20.00

What does it mean to be a curator who writes, and, more specifically, how can curators write about textiles? This publication steps outside the framework of the typical exhibition catalogue to occupy "the space between literature and criticism".

The Community of writers was set up to create time and space to retreat from these outside opinions and demands and to let curiosity and the joy of writing be the driving forces of the writing process. This book has been realised under the auspice of Interweaving Structures: Fabric as Material, Method, and Message, and specifically through collaboration between the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at the University of Bergen and the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź. The two partners have strong positions of specialisation—the museum acts as a caretaker of material textile traditions and art in Poland, and the faculty has a strong textile art tradition and offers the only education programme for curators in Norway.

Edited by Anne Szefer Karlsen.
Contributions by Andreas Hoffmann, Heather Jones, Martina Petrelli, Anne Szefer Karlsen, Lea Vene, Johanna Zanon.

Cover of Mud … and the Earth System

Archive Books

Mud … and the Earth System

Rikke Luther

Ecology €22.00

Mud … and the Earth System explores groundbreaking research in Earth system sciences and highlights the challenges of communicating these findings to the public.

As once-stable “mudscapes” transform, they become both symptoms and symbols of a rapidly warming planet. This book delves into humanity’s connection to these changes through the study of ancient organic and inorganic compounds that have come alive after millennia. It poses essential questions about what these evolving ‘mud’ compounds reveal about Earth’s deep past and our imminent future.

Born from collaborative research led by artist Rikke Luther at the Interdisciplinary Research of Ocean, Climate and Society (ROCS) at the University of Copenhagen in collaboration with Earth scientist, Professor Katherine Richardson, this publication showcases how artistic practices – such as image-making, conceptual mapping, and filmmaking – enhance scientific representation.

Mud… and the Earth System features commissioned essays from experts in Earth Science, Political Aesthetics, and Molecular Geobiology. The book pairs their insights with compelling artwork, including large-scale maps of emerging ‘mudscapes’ in Svalbard, Iceland, Greenland, and Gotland.

The essays give perspectives on the DNA that is collected and stored in mud, which connects life across timescales as an evolutionary resource framing the interactions of human societies with the extreme complexities of the Earth system. Esther Leslie’s “Mud Crystal and Polar Thinking” sets the scene, followed by Karina K. Sand’s “Death and Life:  in Mud: Two Million Years in a Split Second,” and Earth scientist Katherine Richardson’s contribution “A Muddy Diary.”

As Richardson sums up, “Mud is an important medium for storing the archives that describe the history of both life and climate on Earth, and we are only just beginning to understand the fantastic stories that mud can tell.”

Contributions by Esther Leslie, Rikke Luther, Katherine Richardson, Karina Sand

Cover of Two years Vacation

Archive Books

Two years Vacation

Céline Condorelli

Labor €24.00

This book, Deux Ans de Vacances, Dos Años de Vacaciones, Dwa Lata Wakacji, Two years Vacation, Due Anni di Vacanza, documents the production of Céline Condorelli's process-based, cumulative artwork titled 'Tools for Imagination'. The title of the book raises the question of labour and working time, starting from a non-equivalence with its inverse: free time. We can read the various iterations of the title which appear on the cover as an expression of the impossibility of thinking about time outside of work in a univocal dimension.

Cover of Metropolitan Voids Agency

Archive Books

Metropolitan Voids Agency

Margherita Moscardini, Zasha Colah and 1 more

Metropolitan Voids Agency is the first monographic publication dedicated to the collected works of artist Margherita Moscardini. The book recounts the work carried out by Moscardini spanning seventeen years, between 2008 and 2024, inviting a reading of her practice in its entirety as an investigation into ‘urban voids’: those which Moscardini has recognized and designated as voids, or those she has herself invented in the urban fabric.

Cover of A conversation, Nick Zedd & Marie Canet

Goswell Road

A conversation, Nick Zedd & Marie Canet

Marie Canet, Nick Zedd

“What happened to my book?”

This was the last email we received from Nick, in December 2021. A short, concise demand, which we responded to, telling him that the transcription was coming soon and that Marie was finalising the introduction. Little did we know, what Nick surely already knew: he was dying. The urgency should have given it away, but Nick was always blunt in our email exchanges.

Nick passed away on February 27th, 2022. We regret not getting the transcription to him while he could still edit it, so this book in your hands remains an unabridged testament.

The only thing he did edit were his final words, in an unsolicited email in September 2021:

“I was thinking about when you asked me if I had any final words, that it would be better to have me say: Freedom or death. At the crossroads. With a key.”

So we leave you with this; a homage to the legendary founder of the Cinema Of Transgression - a brilliant artist, a sharp mind, a loving father, a kind revolutionary, a boot stamping on the face of modernity forever, an underground phenomenon.
Nick Zedd, rest in peace.

[Note by the publisher.]

With a foreword by Goswell Road. Includes a conversation with Nick Zedd, and the manifesto 'Cinema of Transgression'.

Softcover (11 cm x 18 cm)
84 Pages
75 copies
Language : English

Cover of Au fort les âmes sont

Mucem

Au fort les âmes sont

Laure Prouvost

Exclusive works designed by Laure Prouvost for her carte blanche at the Mucem in Marseille, a series of immersive and poetic installations in the heart of Fort Saint-Jean, photographed by Raphaël Massart for this cut-out book, between an artist's book and an exhibition catalogue, accompanied by drawings and critical texts.

For the Mucem, Laure Prouvost has created a series of immersive installations in the heart of Fort Saint-Jean. Repurposed everyday objects, glass sculptures, sound mirages, and underwater videos shot in the depths of the calanques and around Frioul compose a sensitive and poetic universe. Between fiction and reality, the artist invites visitors on a sensory journey where everything is transformed: forms, narratives, and life itself.
The book was conceived as a visual journey leading from the Old Port of Marseille to Fort Saint-Jean and into the very heart of each work. To recreate this encounter between artist Laure Prouvost and the Mucem, there is a constant dialogue between the exterior—the sea, the stone of the fort—and the interior—the intimacy of the installations that unfold in the air, in the bowels of the earth, and underwater... Designed in close collaboration with the artist, the book captures this moment through photographic work carried out especially by Raphaël Massart and an evocative form designed by the artist: like a book that also floats in the Mediterranean. To accompany this visual unfolding, a booklet embedded in the heart of the book contains texts by Hélia Paukner, curator of the exhibition, and Mathilde Roman, art historian.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Mucem, Marseille, in 2025.

Cover of Screen Writings

University of California Press

Screen Writings

Scott MacDonald

"Ask audience to cut the part of the image on the screen that they don't like. Supply scissors."—Yoko Ono, Tokyo, June 1964

A dazzling range of unconventional film scripts and texts, many published for the first time, make up Scott MacDonald's newest collection. Illustrated with nearly 100 film stills, this fascinating book is at once a reference work of film history and an unparalleled sampling of experimental "language art." It contributes to the very dissipation of boundaries between cinematic, literary, and artistic expression thematized in the films themselves. Each text and script is introduced and contextualized by MacDonald; a filmography and a bibliography round out the volume.

This is a readable—often quite funny—literature that investigates differences between seeing and reading. Represented are avant-garde classics such as Hollis Frampton's Poetic Justice and Zorns Lemma and Morgan Fisher's Standard Gauge, and William Greaves's recently rediscovered Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. Michael Snow turns film loose on language in So Is This; Peter Rose turns language loose on theory in Pressures of the Text.

Some of the most influential feminist filmscripts of recent decades—Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx, Su Friedrich's Gently Down the Stream, Trinh T. Minh-ha's Reassemblage, Yvonne Rainer's Privilege—confirm this book's importance for readers in gender and cultural studies as well as for filmmakers and admirers of experimental writing, independent cinema, and the visual arts in general.