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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.

recommendations

Cover of Majnoon Field Guide

Archive Books

Majnoon Field Guide

Rheim Alkhadi

I went to the field; I became many.

Majnoon is an oil field in the global south. Majnoon is also the violence, and the state of mind that survives the violence. How can this be a field guide in any customary sense? Latitudes have been taken. Words are written in disrupted or troubled syntax. Rather, this book proceeds alongside a search for what many call emancipatory practice; to been acted in the field, where we feel most alive. The volume is divided into five parts, preceded by maps and legends. First in the sequence is a colour-coded soil map,“Majnoon and Hir Environs”, adapted from material originally published in 1960 by the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture. It was the product—relic, really—of a brief era that saw fields and farmlands redistributed among labourers and peasants. Since then, the map has changed with the shifting substance of our earthly constitution; it pivots on the example of Majnoon. Any map is appended by its legends, and I rewrite them from the perspective of dismantling. A longish colour key unfolds with the likeness of a poem pursuing return, inspite of scorch and ruin. It should be mentioned that ‘hir’ recurs multiple times throughout the book as gender-nonconforming pronoun—suggestive, ambiguous, and, in my opinion, sufficiently sound for the moment. It is essential to keep needling the problem of language.

A second, simpler map charts water flow as casualty of upstream accumulation. Dams are borders, after all, and we are lousy with them; downstream is sentenced to the whims of an architecture whose gates are mostly closed. On the map, a symbol resembling a small, numbered page locates Majnoon as point of interest. A subsequent diagram also contains this motif—not for navigation through the field, butt hrough the book itself.

Cover of How to Die – Inopiné

Archive Books

How to Die – Inopiné

Ashkan Sepahvand

Ecology €28.00

A transdisciplinary investigation and a choreographic performance, between Umeå and Oslo, about ecological grief, cultural panic, and a feeling of collapse.

How to Die – Inopiné is a performance and a practice. It thinks through, in an embodied manner, the prevailing contemporary moods of ecological grief, cultural panic, and collapse. As a performance in a theater or outdoors, an audience encounters five dancers who are constantly building, unbuilding, and rebuilding. Afterwards, stories are told around a bonfire. As a practice in the studio, school, or street, a group of dancers, artists, writers, and architects meet for a year of residencies between Oslo and Umeå. They host a working process and encounter external informants. The goal is to displace oneself into the unexpected. This publication, two years in the making, engages with the challenges of translating a choreographic process into the space of a book. It both documents the project's development as well as offering the reader-doer different modes of thinking-doing, from somatic practices to proposals for a curriculum. Experiments in writing, mapping, and moving are played with, all engaging with the question, "what is the future of displaced thinking?"

Published following the series of eponymous events held in Umeå, Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Reykjavik in 2019-2020.

Contributions by Harald Becharie, Mia Habib, Jassem Hindi, Asher Lev, Marie Kraft Selze, Namik Mačkić, Ingeborg Olerud, Anna Pehrsson, Ashkan Sepahvand, Nina Wollny.

Cover of Not Working

Archive Books

Not Working

Maurin Dietrich

Labor €15.00

Not Working brings together the contributions by artists, theorists and writers who in their work examine the interdependence of artistic production and social class.

The complex structures and substantial rise in social inequalities, particularly visible in light of the current pandemic, have given the concept of class a wide range of connotations. Despite the ongoing attempts to view contemporary art in the sense of "class homogeneity"; it remains complicit in the reproduction and masking of existing conditions which it often claims to overcome. The texts in this book form a ground were class can be mediated with respect to artistic practices and other structures in the art world.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Not Working, Artistic production and matters of class at Kunstverein München in 2020.

Contributions by Maurin Dietrich, Melanie Gilligan & Marina Vishmidt, Annette Wehrmann, Stephan Janitzky & Laura Ziegler, Lise Soskolne, Josef Kramhöller, Leander Scholz, Dung Tien Thi Phuong, Steven Warwick, Mahan Moalemi.

Cover of We Have Delivered Ourselves From the Tonal – Of, Towards, On, For Julius Eastman

Archive Books

We Have Delivered Ourselves From the Tonal – Of, Towards, On, For Julius Eastman

Julius Eastman

A collection of essays, librettos, lyrics, memories, photos, personal anecdotes by musicians, visual artists, researchers and archivers that pays homage to the work and life of African-American composer, musician, performer, activist Julius Eastman.

The book investigates his legacy beyond the predominantly Western musicological format of the tonal or harmonic and the framework of what is today understood as minimalist music. By trying to complicate, deny or expatiate on the notions of the harmonic, tonal hierarchy, the triadic, or even the tonal centre, Eastman's compositions explore strategies and technologies of attaining the atonal. One might be tempted to see Eastman in the legacy of Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg and others, but here too, it is worth shifting the geography of minimal tendencies and minimalism in music. It is worth listening and reading Eastman's music within the scope of what Oluwaseyi Kehinde describes as the application of chromatic forms such as polytonality, atonality, dissonance as the fulcrum in analysing some elements of African music such as melody, harmony, instruments and instrumentation. This publication constructs a non-linear genealogy of Eastman's practice and his cultural, political and social relevance, while situating his work within a broader rhizomatic relation of musical epistemologies and practices.

Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was an American composer, pianist, vocalist, and dancer whose work fell under minimalism. He was among the first composers to combine minimalist processes with elements of pop music.

Contributions by Talal Afifi, Elena Agudio, Antonia Alampi, Ana Alenso, Alexander Apóstol, Iván Candeo, Pia Chakraverti-Würthwein, Haris Epaminonda, Eirini Fountedaki, Filippos Koutsaftis, Lal Laleş, Nikola Madzirov, Sarah Maldoror, Olivier Marboeuf, Marco Montiel-Soto, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Erika Ordosgoitti, Rolando Peña, Franziska Pierwoss & Siska, Carlos Rebolledo, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Viola Shafik, Spotters.

Cover of Encounters – Embodied Practices

Archive Books

Encounters – Embodied Practices

Sandhya Daemgen, Raphael Hillebrandt and 2 more

Conversations about embodied strategies of knowledge production and knowledge transmission based on the choreographic and curatorial practices of about fifteen international choreographers, performers, dramaturges and curators.

In the context of the numerous ethical-political challenges of the global present, actors from the dance and choreography scene both in Berlin and internationally talk about forms of knowledge production beyond the prevailing conception found in Western modernity. They counter the mind-body separation and the notion of a universality of knowledge with multiplicities of knowledge production that emerge with and from the reality of differently situated bodies.

What potential do embodied practices offer for emancipatory movements? How can community be created through these practices, and what responsibilities does this entail? What role does the body play in the preservation and transmission of knowledge?

In this publication, edited by the choreographers and curators Martha Hincapié Charry, Sandhya Daemgen, Raphael Moussa Hillebrand and Matthias Mohr; Lukas Avendaño, Wagner Carvalho, Sandhya Daemgen, Ismail Fayed, Alex Hennig, Raphael Moussa Hillebrand, Martha Hincapié Charry, Isabel Lewis, Matthias Mohr, Prince Ofori, Mother "Leo" Saint Laurent, Léna Szirmay-Kalos, Thiago Granato and July Weber conduct conversations about embodied strategies of knowledge production and knowledge transmission based on their respective choreographic and curatorial practices.

Cover of L'entre-corps

CVB

L'entre-corps

Laure Cottin-Stefanelli, Peter Snowdon

Centré sur la mise en jeu du corps filmé et du corps filmant dans leurs pratiques cinématographiques respectives, la Conversation de Laure Cottin Stefanelli et Peter Snowdon a commencé par une présentation croisée de leurs films à Bozar en discussion avec Septembre Tiberghien et s'est cloturée par une exposition intitulée INNER SENSE - Bodies At Work, à la galerie de l'ERG de décembre 2018 à janvier 2019. 

Cover of 1970—2018 – Interviews with Med Hondo

Archive Books

1970—2018 – Interviews with Med Hondo

Med Hondo

Seventeen interviews conducted with Med Hondo over a period of almost half a century, most of the interviews originally published in French were translated into English.

To read Med Hondo opens us up to many perspectives: to his work and its time-historical contexts, to his interests and obsessions, to his standpoint with regard to the intertwining of politics, economics, and culture. Med Hondo describes the school of pronunciation until such point as the slightest accent is erased; he observes the insults immigrants in France have had to tolerate, and fuses their stories and histories with the present; he builds bridges to the Caribbean and to the Western Sahara, to Algeria and Burkina Faso, to Niger and Senegal, to South Africa and the USA. This publication aims to draw attention to Med Hondo's cinema and legacy.

The book originated in the long-term project Cours, cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi—Run, comrade, run, the old world is behind you—The Cinema of Med Hondo.

Franco-Mauritanian director, screenwriter, producer and actor, also known for his work in dubbing, Med Hondo (1936-2019) is one of the great figures of African cinema. His militant work denounces neo-colonialism, racism, the rupture between the peoples of Africa, immigration policies and the resulting social violence.

Cover of Stili Drama XIII-XXI / La Giostra di Lulu XLI-XLIV

Self-Published

Stili Drama XIII-XXI / La Giostra di Lulu XLI-XLIV

STILI DRAMA

The materials collected in the publication have been developed departing from the documentation, transcription and translation of textual, visual, sculptural and audio materials produced between March and November 2021 for STILI DRAMA. 

STILI DRAMA is an open-ended episodic para-cinematographic project, which functions as a spontaneous expression of MRZB research. STILI DRAMA XVIII-XXI and LA GIOSTRA DI LULU XLI-XLIV are the two first fragments of the work.

Language: English, Italian
Edition of 100 copies