Zizanies

In 2018, a group of three visual artists — Agathe Boulanger, Signe Frederiksen and Jules Lagrange— started a year-long conversations with Laurence Rassel, exploring her social and educational background, her ways of working, and examining the tools she applies in her daily practice of running institutions: feminism, the open source and free software movements, and the institutional psychotherapy developed by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury in the psychiatric field around the mid-20^th century.

The work of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) is considered today an invaluable testimony on the deportation and the holocaust of the Romani people during the Second World War. For the very first time, this publication considers equal to her graphic work the notes she wrote on the back of her drawings and paintings. Stojka's particular use of language, phonetically adapted from her knowledge of German, is here transcribed and translated into English, while giving access to both sides of her works.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Malmö Konsthall in 2021.

Ceija Stojka was born in 1933 in Austria to a family of Romani horse traders, the Lovaras. She was still a child when the nazi racial laws drove her into the hell of the concentration camps for 24 months. As a survivor, she covered up this trauma with a heavy silence for almost 40 years. In the 1980s, facing other tragic circumstances in her life, the denial of the Romani holocaust and the resurgence of extreme right-wing racist ideas in Austria, she felt an urgent need to testify. She wrote at first, then started to draw and eventually found her way by blending the two as a self-taught artist. She calls upon us, through her visions of childhood, to never turn a blind eye on what happened, and to remain vigilant as to what may emerge again. Ceija Stojka died in 2013 in Vienna.

Edited by François Piron.
Texts by Ceija Stojka, Noëlig Le Roux, Irka Cederberg.
Graphic design: Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé.

The moral tale is a literary genre that was especially popular in Europe throughout the 18th century. As ways of being and doing were strongly tied to conventions assigned to social roles and genres, the rise of rationality and freethought, characteristic of this era, began re-organizing the so-called “natural order” of established patterns. Through fables and satires, moral tales expressed sharp critical views on the social relationships and hierarchies of the time, often using radical irony and cruelty, as in the tales of Jonathan Swift or of the Marquis de Sade, to decipher the untold rules at play in this early age of capitalism.

The works of the three artists invited to these Three Moral Tales are not that of moralists, but somehow assume a kind of moral dimension, as they present themselves as critical allegories. Joëlle de La Casinière, Ana Jotta and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven make use of fables and sometimes caricatures to observe and criticize the cruelty of human relationships. The “moral tales” narrated by these three artists scrutinize representations of evil, and mock hierarchies, traditions and social order. By doing so, they also follow up on a certain spirit of the iconoclastic avant-gardes of the early 20th century.

French artist Joëlle de la Casinière, Portuguese Ana Jotta and Flemish Anne Mie Van Kerckhoven have in common to pay no fealty to trends of contemporary art. Moreover, they fought unwaveringly throughout their respective careers the need to see their work being given an “official line”. Instead, they stood aside, went underground or remained indifferent to the twists and turns of the art market and institutions. They sometimes created surrogate characters, hid, or playfully modified their names to react to the branding of identity in the artworld, and to the imposed marginalization that they had to cope with as women artists, as did artists living in peripheral geographies. In a way, paradoxically, being marginalized encouraged a calculated versatility of media and styles, and the invention of an idiosyncratic vocabulary, while total freedom remained their one and only rule.

Eleven performance-based projects by Dora García, documented through letters, emails and other elements from the artist's private correspondence with various interpreters of performances, whether they were direct collaborators of simple spectators.

Edited and prefaced by François Piron, Steal This Book, a tribute to Abbie Hoffmann's pamphlet of the same name, is not a definitive attempt at rendering the pieces on which it is based; it calls for a free, active and contradictory reception, that of an open archive. Part epistolary novel, part rough screenplay and part user's manual, Steal This Book proposes a body of discussions, questions without answers and endless ramblings, in place of the critique's or the artist's voice. 

The book has also been presented in exhibitions as a Dora García sculpture meant to be stolen, but it can also be purchased in selected bookstores worldwide.

Contrary to the idea that would have art addressing the greatest possible number of people, Dora García (born in 1965 in Valladolid, lives and works in Barcelona), best known for her performance devices, is interested in what is enacted at the individual scale: in a radically conceptual form, at once accessible and elegant, she elects to transmit oddly coded messages, their ask being to bestir a specific relation with each and every visitor. Dora García is interested in everything that intervenes in the communication between an artist and his/her public: art no longer represents the world, but itself becomes a producer of realities often on the borderline of fiction and make-believe. It urges us to undergo experiences other than ordinary situations, at once simple and hard to grasp. 

Dora García has had solo exhibitions at the MACBA in Barcelona, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the SMAK in Gent. She represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and was a part of the Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, the Sydney Biennial in 2009, the Biennale de Lyon in 2009 and Documenta 13 in 2012.

Translated from the French by Naima Rashid, Natasha Lehrer, Lauren Elkin, Ruth Diver, Jessica Spivey, Jennifer Higgins, Clem Clement and Sophie Lewis.

As she tries to collect them for an essay she is planning to write, other women’s words begin interfering in Clara Schulmann’s life — heard on the radio, in podcasts, songs, and films; words of novelists, feminist intellectuals, friends or strangers overheard in the street. They invade her psyche, reshaping the essay that she once had in mind into a picaresque adventure which investigates the fault lines around women’s voices: and in particular those moments of overflow and excess where wayward words take seed.

Chicanes heralds a new French feminism through a meticulously orchestrated chorus of the wildest female voices, from figures in the history of feminist writing to the stranger on the street, blurring the boundaries between body and art; personal and political. A poly-translation, by eight female translators, from established to emerging, Chicanes brings the individual voice of each translator into subtle relief.

Le numéro 1 de la revue de cinéma Fidback éditée par le FIDMarseille, avec un retour sur la 35e édition du festival, un regard rétrospectif sur des films qui ont fait l'actualité mondiale du cinéma en 2024, une carte blanche à Clara Schulmann, et un portrait de l'artiste et cinéaste Declan Clarke par Alice Leroy.

Retour sur six films issus de la sélection officielle du FID, par des auteurs, critiques et écrivains de langues française et étrangères. Les textes critiques sont accompagnés d'entretiens, de documents ou de matériaux inédits. De Amsevrid, premier film magistral du cinéaste algérien Tahar Kessi, jusqu'au Tríptico de Mondongo du maestro argentin Mariano Llinás, ce bouquet de films est un condensé de l'édition 2024 du festival – une poignée de films parmi tous ceux qui auraient mérité le retour.

Le choix des huit films sur lesquels nous avons invité des auteurs et autrices à poser leur regard est en soi un geste critique. Il nous a semblé que les derniers films d'Albert Serra, Miguel Gomes, Alain Guiraudie, Jia Zhangke et Victor Iriarte méritaient plus que d'autres l'inscription dans le temps long de la revue. Films restaurés, écrits édités, rétrospective et exposition au Jeu de Paume : Chantal Akerman fut pour beaucoup, cette année, une révélation. Naked Acts, le film ressuscité de Bridgett Davis, aura marqué ceux qui ont eu la chance de le voir.

Pour sa carte blanche, Clara Schulmann a choisi le film Lucciole (2021), de Pauline Curnier Jardin. Mais son texte porte au-delà de l'œuvre, il déplace le geste critique en un récit spéculatif sur la manière dont une vie et un travail se tissent sur une trame faite de lieux, d'histoires, de personnes.

Alice Leroy est la première à faire le portrait de l'artiste et cinéaste irlandais et berlinois Declan Clarke : à prendre la mesure, à tracer les perspectives d'une œuvre majeure, bien qu'encore méconnue, du cinéma d'aujourd'hui.

Fidback est une revue de cinéma éditée par le FIDMarseille. Chaque année, elle dessine une image-constellation du cinéma aimé et défendu par le festival.

Following an open call, this is—the very last issue—a collectively-compiled "Erratum", or addendum [if you will] to the twenty-three issues from 2007 until now.

Edited with Paul Abbott, After 8, Alma Sarif, Phil Baber, Daniel Blumberg, Thomas Boutoux, Kristien Van den Brande, Chloe Chignell, Martina Copley, Anthony Elms, Chris Evans, Carolina Festa, Kasper Feyrer, Richard Finlay Fletcher, Ben Green, Mariëtte Groot, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Léa Guillon, Sarah Handley, Gloria Hasnay, Loes Jacobs, Michel Khleifi, Willis Kingery, gerlach en koop, James Goggin, Keira Greene, Léa Guillon, Jacob Lindgren, Kobe Matthijs, Martino Morandi, Zen Nguyen, Alice Notley, Robert M. Ochshorn, Oscar the dog, Willem Oorebeek, David Reinfurt, Scott Rogers, Andrés de Santiago Areizaga, Rosa Sarholz, Clara Schulmann, Andrea di Serego Alighieri, Sabrina Tarasoff, Kristy Trinier, Seymour Wright and Unknown.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organization of reading and writing in contemporary art practices. It was published by de Appel in Amsterdam (2007–2016) and is currently co-published by KW with uh books.

A foundational work of queer theory. 

First published anonymously in the notorious "Three Billion Perverts" issue of Félix Guattari's journal Recherches—banned by French authorities upon its release in 1973—The Screwball Asses was erroneously attributed to Guy Hocquenghem when it was first published in English in 2009. This second edition of that translation, with a new preface by Hocquenghem biographer Antoine Idier that clarifies the different theoretical positions within France's Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionaire, returns the text to its true author: writer, journalist, and activist Christian Maurel.

In this dramatic treatise on erotic desire, Maurel takes on the militant delusions and internal contradictions of the gay-liberation movement. He vivisects not only the stifled mores of bourgeois capitalism, but also the phallocratic concessions of so-called homophiles and, ultimately, the very act of speaking desire. Rejecting any “pure theory” of homosexuality that would figure its “otherness” as revolutionary, Maurel contends that the ruling classes have invented homosexuality as a sexual ghetto, splitting and mutilating desire in the process. It is only when nondesire and the desire of desire are enacted simultaneously through speech and body that homosexuality can finally be sublimated under the true act of “making love.” There are thousands of sexes on earth, according to Maurel, but only one sexual desire. The Screwball Asses is a revelatory disquisition.

Introduction by Antoine Idier
Translated by Noura Wedell