Unsorcery (2nd Edition)

This book traces the legacy of Zona, Eastern Europe performance art festival that took place in Timișoara, Romania, between 1993 and 2002, years which were marked by a transition from communism to a new society built on different principles.

Bringing together artists from the former "Eastern Bloc," Zona became a space of encounters, a platform for theoretical discussions and postmodern art experiments, which displayed a remarkable diversity of artistic languages. The fall of the Berlin Wall, as Nicolas Bourriaud noted in his book "The Radicant", was the first decisive step towards globalization and the generalization of postmodern thought.

In the early 1990s, adopting subversive strategies helped artists overcome critical moments in totalitarian societies, which had been consolidated for decades in Eastern Europe. They combined techniques of expression such as pastiche, quotes, historical images, popular culture, or subcultures with personal mythologies. What resulted was often a critical mixture with an explosive effect. Body art became an appropriate language for critically analyzing stereotypes about the nation, religion, gender, or social prejudices and taboos. Body art facilitated the transfer of ideas and a dialogue with the audience, or it helped launch questions about identity politics. The concerns and intentions of the festival's protagonists were built around political, social, and artistic topics that were debated between the East and the West.

Essays by Ileana Pintilie, László Beke, Vladimir Bulat, Robert Fleck, Alexandra Titu, Berislav Valušek; artists' texts by Alexandru Antik, Matei Bejenaru, Ștefan Bertalan, Geta Brătescu, Oskar Dawicki, Ion Grigorescu, H.arta Group, Karen Kipphoff, Liliana Mericioiu, Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, Sorin Vreme.

KILOBASE BUCHAREST A-Z is a publication which is describing Bucharest through a sort of experimental alphabet book: for each letter of the English alphabet, artists, writers, architects and researchers were invited to choose a key term and develop a contribution representing a sliver of the Romanian capital city, capturing a polyphonic set of perspectives on the infinite facets of a city whose identity is notoriously difficult to define.

Contributions by: Irina Bujor, Serioja Bocsok, studioBASAR, Iuliana Dumitru, Ștefan Ghenciulescu, Kilobase Bucharest, Apparatus 22, Mihnea Mihalache-Fiastru, Ștefan Constantinescu, Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Gruia Bădescu, Ioana Ulmeanu, Decebal Scriba, Sillyconductor, Prosper Center, Geir Haraldseth, Jimmy Robert, Karol Radziszewski, Lea Rasovszky, Ștefan Botez, Simina Neagu, Bogdan Iancu, Andrei Mihail, Mihai Lukács, Mihai Mihalcea, Cosima Opârtan, Juergen Teller, Hans Leonard Krupp.

The publication also includes a republished insert by late artist Ioana Nemeș, and three reprinted contributions previously published in Kilobase Bucharest A-H (Mousse Publishing, 2011) produced on the occasion of "Image to be projected until it vanishes" exhibition at Museion Bolzano.

Echoing Jean Dubuffet's idea that thought must arise from material in artistic practice, Giuliana Prucca, through this essay, reinterprets a moment in the history of 20th-century art using materials such as stone, sand, earth, and dust. She employs the mineral to illustrate that the creative act would be a trace of the body's disappearance. The loss of humanity and the deconstruction of the subject objectify themselves in the image. In other words, art resides in the tension between representation and its loss, ultimately leaving nothing but an image.

Drawing from the influential figure of Antonin Artaud, she weaves critical and poetic connections between the texts and works of various artists, writers, and thinkers, ranging from Jean Dubuffet to Jan Fabre and Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein and Gutaï, Joë Bousquet to Camille Bryen and Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard to Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille to Aby Warburg.

The material is not merely a thematic pretext; it is an active and explosive catapult that questions the arbitrary linearity of a conventionally assimilated art history. Following Ponge's example, Prucca applies the principles of poetry to criticism, starting from Artaud's material, the most undisciplined of poet-artist-thinkers of the modern era. This results in a critically inventive approach dangerously suited to its object, celebrating an anti-critique. The chosen writing materials, stonepaper for the cover and recycled paper for the pages, is consistent, intending to give the impression of being covered in dust.

The essay disrupts traditional reading habits and shatters the conservatism of art criticism by inhabiting writing space differently, presenting a physically engaging interaction. This is an essay in the literal sense, an experience where form never contradicts content, urging readers to take the risk of thinking deeply and embracing a new rhythm. A complex and challenging design invites them to choose different reading options, ultimately treating criticism as one would poetry.

Giuliana Prucca [Paris | Berlin] is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She is the founder and art director of the publishing house AVARIE, specialising in contemporary art books that explore the relationships between text and image, body and space.

Graphic design, art direction by Vito Raimondi

Tense is a never-realised publication, written and composed by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in 1984, that only now has been released in a very limited run on our imprint. The book accompanied the exhibition Top Stories, which took a closer look at the 29 issues of the prose periodical with the same title, founded in the late 1970s by Anne Turyn.

Top Stories was dedicated to fiction by emerging women artists and writers from that time. Tense was originally intended to become part of the series as well, but never made it to print. It was only recently – during the making of the exhibition at Amsterdam’s Kunstverein – that the original mock-up was retrieved from the editor’s archives and finally sent off to the printer.

FROM THE PROP TO THE INSIDE gathers texts on the concept of the prop—as object, requisite and support—on stage and in the exhibition space. The starting points of this book are objects and installations of the artist Michaela Schweighofer, which deal with the stage as a platform and the sculpture as a prop.

The authors are friends: artists, critics and curators whom she has invited to write a text at the interface of their and her practice. The contributions within take on multiple forms; letters, essays and interviews—they are intended to create a theoretical-subjective anthology that makes visible the phenomena of the private as symptoms of the structural, as well as to provide a direct insight into contemporary artistic creation.

Text: Juliane Bischoff, Veronika Eberhart, Cornelia Lein, Cathrin Mayer, Gianna Virgina Prein, Agnieszka Roguski, Juliane Saupe, Michaela Schweighofer & Chloe Stead

A collection of brief descriptions of Toine's movement performances- and installations since 1979. The book, that started four years ago as a possible form in which Toine's ephemeral works could live on, gradually developed into a writing project about movement and the imaginative power of language.

Each of the 120 selected works has been translated in the most concise way into words and sentences.

Because of the possible role that the book could play in the discussion about conserving and documenting volatile works of art, Toine included related texts by other writers who directly or indirectly responded  to my writing: Marcus Bergner  Hannes Böhringer  Florian Cramer  Jan Van Den  Dobbelsteen  Nell Donkers  Tim Etchells  Ger Groot  Geert Koevoets Thomas Körtvelyessy  Dom H. van der Laan  Dick Raaijmakers  Jan Laurens Siesling  Sandra Smets  Hans Stevens  ieke Trinks  Samuel Vriezen  Ciel Werts - Emilie Gallier
Editing and text advice   Kathrin Wolkowicz  Dick van Teylingen

translations:  Simon Benson  Maaike Trimbach  Samuel Vriezen  Helen Adkins  Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

English version

graphic design: Koos Siep
Edition: 2 x 250 copies

Founded in 2023, A4 is a poetry review which showcases and explores contemporary writings practices. Run by Littérature Supersport collective, the object is seen as the extension of their events. The review takes the form of 4 postcards which, when placed side-by-side, form an A4-sheet. A light (even precarious) format for literature that slips into the back pocket of pants and hangs on fridge doors. Each issue features unpublished texts by 4 authors. Wrapped in colors, A4 is distributed by post and available in good bookshops, in Brussels, Liège, Paris and Marseille. 

This second issue presents texts by : Chloé Delchini, Justine Gensse, Simon Johannin and Jérôme Poloczek.