Assaf Gruber’s films examine how art affects individuals who are not necessarily drawn to it. What may seem to be the unladen weight of culture, sometimes turns out to be its own rendering.

The films’ plots emerge from their characters’ personal environments, addressing the manner by which personal stories become intertwined with political ideologies, and the way in which social relations between private and public spheres are shaped. Gruber’s protagonists include: a sixty-year-old man, who due to his religious background was rejected multiple times from East German art academies during the 1970s; a retired security guard from the Old Masters Gallery in Dresden who now wants to spend the rest of her life as a volunteer in an Avant-garde museum, and the Chinese owners of a manufacturing company for contemporary sculpture, based in Poland. 

The publication is composed of eight chapters, each focusing on a discussion that turned out to be a significant factor in the films’ production. The tran- scription of each conversation is placed next to film stills with subtitles superimposed. This conceptual design allows Gruber to present the films as the third party in each chapter, as if they too are commenting, questioning, and completing the dialogue. 

Contributors: Paolo Caffoni (Ed.)

This book brings together contributions from participants and guests of Film in the Present Tense – International Symposium on Current Developments in Analog Film Culture, held in Berlin. It reflects a contemporary discussion around the use, value and purpose of analogue film from a multiplicity of perspectives: artists, filmmakers, scholars, archivists, curators, technicians and manufacturers. Film in the Present Tense intends to provide a documentation of the collective momentum that characterized the symposium and it responds to the persistent desire to keep talking about analogue film.

Organized by LaborBerlin in collaboration with Filminstitut Udk Berlin.

Author(s): (ed.) L.Greenfield, D. S. Phillips, K.Schroedinger

Contributors: Nicola Baldini, Erika Balsom, Petra Belc, Christa Blümlinger, Britt Al-Busultan, Anja Dornieden, Juan David Gonzáles Monroy, Guy Edmonds, Scott Fitzpatrick, Tiago Ganhão, Sally Golding, Luisa Greenfield, Philip Hoffman, Emmanuel Lefrant, Olga Moskatova Aurélie Percevault, Deborah S. Phillips, Martin Reinhart, Nicolas Rey, Julian Ross, Katia Rossini, Kerstin Schroedinger, Guy Sherwin, Björn Speidel, Peter Taylor, Esther Urlus, Stefanie Weberhofer, Philip Widmann, Zero Pixel, Ulrich Ziemons

This book marks the ten-year anniversary of the project A Collective Memory by Azin Feizabadi. The project encompasses five narrative-driven films, alongside other artworks. Each film has its own urgency, approach, and point of departure. The films naturally vary in their subjects, they touch upon stories of migration, uprising, transformation, revolution, renewal, collapse, defeat, depression, and desire that connect the life of the artist with those around him. The research materials that have come up over the course of this project consist, on the one hand, of concrete historical events and, on the other hand, all the innumerable, fragmented personal memories spread between pats, presents, and futures that narrate every-changing stories of how things were, are, and may be.

Contributors: Jens Maier-Rothe & Ashkan Sepahvand (co-editors) Shahab Fotouhi, Nanna Heidenreich, Sarah Rifky, Rasha Salti, Ashkan Sepahvand, Jan Verwoert, Chiara Figone

A conference, hosted by the International Center for the Arts José de Guimarães, borrowed its title from an unfinished film stored in an archive in Bissau. Luta ca caba inda (The struggle is not over yet) was conceived as a documentary film on post-independence Guinea-Bissau, but was abandoned in the editing process in 1980.

The archive testifies to a decade of collective and internationally connected cinema praxis in the country, as part of the people’s struggle for independence from Portuguese colonialism. Fifteen contributors brought their expertise to the task of re-visiting a period of revolutions whose reverberations can still be felt today. A rare coming together of artistic, juridical, cinematographic, curatorial and academic practices, the conference was not only a timely and important occasion to address issues of the post-colony in Portugal, but it also yielded new and experimental ways of convening around an archive, convoking conflicts and probing its topicality in the present.

It took place in a room in which, echoing Édouard Glissant’s notion of the ‘Creole garden’, plants, archival objects, technical props, furniture and people were arranged on equal terms.

Republications is the first volume of Archive Journal’s hors-séries. Each issue of the series is commissioned to authors whose research is close to the editorial line of the journal. For the inaugural issue Archive’s editors have invited French curators and art critics Virginie Bobin and Mathilde Villeneuve. Taking as a starting point the notion of ‘republication’, the contents of this publication have been compiled through a collective process over the course of multiple editorial meetings in Berlin, Aubervilliers and Paris between 2011 and 2012. The texts assembled in this volume have been written in English or in French.

Contributions by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Lene Berg, Pauline Boudry, Renate Lorenz, Christophe Bruno, Foundland, Jeff Guess, Alexis Guillier, Rémy Héritier, Franck Leibovici, Sohrab Mohebbi, Julien Prévieux, Sally Price, Anna Théodoridès, Vassilis Salpistis, Marie Voignier.

In dictionary entries, after its first appearance the discussed word is represented by its initial: class, class struggle, class contradiction as well as crisis, catastrophe, or colonialism become C. Our C (K in German) stands for Class Languages, and thus for the question of the verbalization, translation, and inscription of those political and social conflicts that determine our contemporary moment. Instead of passing off art as a model for a better politics, we wish to test it for the signatures, the markers and forms of these deeply antagonistic relations of which art itself is a material part: we are concerned with art as a class language, as well as with class languages in art; with art’s room for maneuver as well as with its limits and restrictions, curatorially, in writing and debate.

To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice offers a narrative of artist Alex Martinis Roe’s research into a genealogy of feminist political practices in Europe and Australia from the seventies until today.

These practices include those of the Milan Women’s Bookstore co-operative; Psychanalyse et Politique, Paris; Gender Studies (formerly Women’s Studies) at Utrecht University; a network in Sydney including people involved in the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, Feminist Film Workers, Working Papers Collective, and the Department of General Philosophy at Sydney University; and Duoda – Women’s Research Centre and Ca la Dona, a women’s documentation centre and encounter space in Barcelona.

Drawing from their practices and experiences, Martinis Roe’s research forms a proposal for a transgenerational approach to feminist politics. This is further developed as a practical handbook of twenty new propositions for feminist collective practice, which were formed in collaboration with a network of contributors through experiments with these historical practices.

Being Together Precedes Being offers a text book for the project “The Kids Want Communism,” which was initiated towards the 99th anniversary of the Soviet Revolution of October 1917 as a series of exhibitions, symposiums and conferences, screening programs, publications and a summer camp. In this textbook, communism does not merely describe an “us versus them” relation, but also offers that we are becoming the future. This trajectory of communism runs parallel to us at every single moment and its guiding principle is that being together precedes being.

Sowing Somankidi Coura. A Generative Archive is a long-term research endeavor by Raphaël Grisey in collaboration with Bouba Touré around the permacultures and archives of Somankidi Coura, a self-organized cooperative along the Senegal river founded by a group of former African migrant workers and activists in France in 1977 after the Sahel drought of 1973.

The book assembles texts, voices, images, takes, retakes and research around the Pan-African history of the cooperative of Somankidi Coura, the liberation struggles of migrant workers and farmers in France and West Africa. It enables thinking a politics of decolonisation for agriculture, migration, care, soil and the archive.