Ventoline #4 – mai 2022

Dean Blunt is one of the most important British artist of the current century because he fundamentally does not care about Britain. His importance makes it shocking that such little critical attention has been paid to his work. His indifference explains it.

Dhanveer Singh Brar’s ‘Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit)’ looks to initiate a conversation that needs to be had about Dean Blunt, about Britain (through Blunt’s indifference to it), and about Blackness in Britain (through the depth and complexity of Blunt’s feeling for it). Using the 2016 album ‘BBF Hosted By DJ Escrow’ as a means of navigation, Brar hears Blunt in order to access the long contested dream of Britain’s disappearance that was conducted under the name of Black British Arts. Partial (in the sense of his relation to Blunt) and partial (in the sense of unfinished), ‘Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit)’ see’s Dhanveer Singh Brar give the dream a grammar, if not a name.

Dhanveer Singh Brar is a theorist and scholar who teaches in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His is a member of Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective and Lovers Discourse. Brar’s second book ‘Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early Twenty-First Century’ will be published by Goldsmiths Press/MIT Press in Spring 2021

"To encounter BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow through Dhanveer Brar’s ears is to see Babylon through his eyes, and to sense Britain—to uncover with 'accuracy, brutality and beauty' the complexities of its meaning—through the social music, social vision and social feel of those who refuse the Britishness that is withheld from them. Brar discerns Dean Blunt’s rightful place in a cultural field where critical discourse and sonic dream are fundaments of a dub university curriculum whose various approaches show the absolute necessity and generativity of stealth, flaw and the resistance to category. Blunt’s “love letter to the blackness of Hackney” deserves the most rigorous, gentle, erudite attention. Happily, Dhanveer Brar is here to provide it." – Fred Moten.

"Like the Elizabeth Bishop painting “Interior with Extension Cord,” Kelly Clare’s helical, light-filled Universal Product Code delicately traces a bewildering infrastructure. This incantatory song, “busy in green,” points its reader to the disturbing beauty in stripey checksum barcodes, to arrays of imported figs at the grocer, to words like cloud or lime that now mean too much. Humorous, musical, perspicacious, this chapbook rocks."

- Katherine Gibbel, April 2026

Includes 3 poems by Dre Roelandt.
Published as part of Paraphernalia and Addenda 2.2 of Tabloid Publications.

Dans l’imaginaire collectif, l’œuf évoque la fragilité et la promesse de vie, tandis que la pierre renvoie à la permanence et à la disparition. Cette édition tente de déplacer cette opposition à travers une forme fragmentaire. Il rassemble des notes écrites au fil du temps. Sa production suit cette logique : imprimé en offset, le projet prend en compte les formats de papier afin d’en optimiser l’usage. Les chutes sont utilisées dans un cahier complémentaire, rassemblant textes et images laissés en marge. La reliure, cousue à la main au fil de coton, reste simple et légère. L’objet se conçoit comme quelque chose à manipuler et découvrir, entre publication et transmission plus intime. 

« J’ai donc cherché une forme simple, en évitant tout formalisme superflu. Le projet repose sur une question : est-il nécessaire de produire ce type d’objet, et pourquoi ? » 

In the collective imagination, the egg suggests fragility and the promise of life, while stone evokes permanence and disappearance. This edition seeks to move beyond this opposition through a fragmentary form. It gathers notes written over time. Its production follows the same logic: printed in offset, the project takes paper formats into account in order to optimize their use. Offcuts are used in a supplementary section, gathering texts and images left aside. The binding is hand-sewn with cotton thread, remaining simple and lightweight. The object is conceived as something to handle and discover, between publication and a more intimate form of transmission. 

“So I sought a simple form, avoiding unnecessary formalism. The project rests on a question: is it necessary to produce this type of object, and why?”

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.

Mark Fisher taught a generation to hear the future's disappearance in contemporary music, as if the rhythm of the world was synchronised to the periodic flowering of new creative forms. His diagnosis was devastating: stagnation in music was akin to a venous insufficiency, or worse, some kind of nuclear winter that would ward off the spring for endless generations to come. 

Drawing on musicians like SOPHIE, Arca and Iglooghost, Matt Bluemink declares that the future is not lost; it still speaks to us through music. If Fisher’s Hauntology — dwelling on ghosts of the past — is the logic of depression, then Bluemink’s Anti-Hauntology posits a logic of hope where voices from the future continue to guide the development of the present. 

Island-hopping through Stiegler's philosophy of technics, Simondon's theory of individuation, and the spatial imaginaries of cyberpunk and solarpunk, Bluemink builds a theoretical framework equal to the times — one that takes seriously our capacity to, not only diagnose the world, but remake it. In order to create a new future we must re-imagine our relationship with music, with technology, and with culture. The world of tomorrow is a blank canvas; an open book. New beginnings are always possible. 

Matt Bluemink is the founder and editor-in-chief of Blue Labyrinths online magazine. His research is focused on the relationship between the philosophy of technology, media theory and urbanism. He also writes on contemporary music, literature, and digital culture.