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Dora García is interested in everything that intervenes in the communication between an artist and his/her public: art no longer represents the world, but itself becomes a producer of realities often on the borderline of fiction and make-believe.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.

Publication devoted to the only statement the Belgian artist has ever published about his own work.

Those familiar with Guy Mees know that he used the enigmatic title Lost Space to describe two major bodies of work, distinct in origin and form, and separated by a gap of more than twenty years: the geometric objects and panels covered in lace created in the 1960s, and the works he started producing in the 1980s featuring colour paper cutouts pinned to walls. This publication is dedicated to a lesser-known chapter in this story: the writing process of a short text entitled, likewise,The Lost Space. An ambiguous manifesto for Mees' work, the text went through a number of revisions, with Mees contributing suggestions, but never authoring it himself. This book reproduces eight extant versions of the text for the first time, in facsimile and typographic transcription as Richard Hamilton did with the Large Glass notes of Marcel Duchamp.

Published on the occasion of Guy Mees at MU.ZEE, Ostende, in 2019.

Limited edition of 350 copies.
 
Guy Mees (1935-2003) is a Belgian artist whose oeuvre encompasses photographs, videos, sculptures, and fragile works on paper that combine formal rigor with delicacy and a conceptual approach. A leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde, Mees left behind an outstanding body of work that transgresses geometric abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and applied arts.

Edited by Lilou Vidal.
Graphic design: Joris Kritis.

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.

An artist's book disguised as a medical publication written by six fictional women characters from Morocco in free wheeling, Narrative Machines clothes truth with falsehood. With wry irony and Google English it comments on paranoia, fake news, patriarchy, power and media ganging together in the Maghreb (and everywhere else). But it also shows a chosen community of women who confide, support each other and laugh a good load.

Are there weird questions that have been haunting you all your life? Do you wonder why you pass out each mother in law comes to your place? Do you smell fish when you cook meat? Do you know of miraculous medical machines that have been forgotten by official history? What's your take on alternative medicine? Have you ever heard about the Markar, the cardiological device invented by King Hassan II of Morocco? Do you love watching Noujoum Al 3ouloum (Stars of Sciences)? Is your herbalist your best friend? Do you ever wonder if you should wax your arms? In your daily life, do you struggle sometimes with your feminist ethic? Do you put snail cream on your face? Write to us! Join our community! Be part of the Narrative Machines family!

Ghita Skali (born 1992 in Casablanca) is an artist based in Amsterdam. She studied in France, first at Villa Arson, Nice then at the post-graduate program of the Fine Arts School in Lyon. She was a De Ateliers (Amsterdam) resident between 2018 and 2020. She notably exhibited recently at Kunsthal extra City (Antwerp), Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and at the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam).

Texts by Kaoutar Chaqchaq, Ayla Mrabet, Ghita Skali
Graphic design: Roxane Maillet

A book of interviews with Sylvère Lotringer.

French philosopher Sylvère Lotringer (1938-2021) was the general editor of Semiotext(e). A younger contemporary of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault, he was one of the main introducers and interpreters of French Theory in the United States. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions (Semiotext(e), 2007).

François Aubart is an art critic, independent curator and publisher (co-founder of <o> future <o> and Même pas l'hiver).

A documentary and speculative publication on a genealogy of political, social, ecological and identity-based struggles in the Brittany region and the West of France, from the 1960s to the Zone to Defend of today, based on numerous documents and films made by filmmakers and collectives.

Published following the eponymous exhibition at Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire, in 2019.

Texts by Isabelle Cambourakis, Jade Lindgaard, Élise Roullaud; interviews with Jean-Louis Le Tacon, Patrick Prado, Joseph Potiron, Olivier Tric. 
Graphic design: Laure Giletti & Grégory Dapra.
 
published in September 2021

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.
 
Published in February 2021
English edition
21 x 29,7 cm (softcover)
168 pages (105 ill.)

Émilie Notéris focuses her analysis on artworks created by women in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in a book that is at once literary, aesthetic and political.

On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, Paraguay creates a collection of essays and book-length interviews, published in, or translated into French. The books in this series are commissioned ones, books developed independently and freely, without a deadline. They articulate thoughts on art and political positions in the present through situated and experimental literary writing.

Émilie Notéris (born 1978) is an essayist, science fiction author, and translator.

As she tries to collect them for an essay that she is wanting to write, voices begin interfering in Clara’s Schulmann life. Voices of women, heard on the radio, in podcasts, songs, and films; voices of novelists or feminist theorists; voices of friends or of strangers overheard in the street. Like weeds, like bad seeds (what « zizanies » stands for in French), these wayward words invade her thoughts and her life, and the essay that she once had in mind unfolds in a picaresque tale full of twists and turns. Zizanies is a timely and elegant narrative that reveals Clara Schulmann as a new author whose own voice is going to matter in the years to come. (The texts in this book are French only.)

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.

In this book, the 1923 manifesto “Active Art” by Latvian philosopher Andrejs Kurcijs triggers a series of responses by writers, artists and curators on the notion of activism, past and present: art for political purposes, art for its own purpose or art with no purpose. 

All the texts collected in this volume aim at considering the active part of writing according to the definition given by Kurcijs. It is true of the book design by Laure Giletti and Gregory Dapra too. Contributors include curator Rebeka Põldsam, artists Evita Vasiļjeva and Eva Barto, writers Bella Marrin and Robert Glück, and poet Laura Boullic. It also includes the reprint of an essay from 1987 by James Baldwin, commissioned by the African Center in New York, and an in-depth conversation between the editors of the books and philosopher Ainārs Kamoliņš.

Stemming from a series of works by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, this monographic catalogue offers a range of perspectives on urgent issues around gender, sexuality and labour in the digital age.

This book orbits “Second Sex War”, a series of works by Sidsel Meineche Hansen addressing political and ethical questions arising from the use of digital bodies in contemporary visual culture and the means of production and distribution for these commodities. Realising that the same avatars are used across the pornographic, gaming and cultural industries, she investigates the working conditions and relationships that structure these fields. Through numerous essays and conversations, Second Sex War, the book, emphasises her collaborations with various practitioners (animators, musicians, writers) and the way they have inflected her practice. Media theorist Helen Hester (author of the Xenofeminist manifesto) reflects on the limitations of the porn industry and the use of female avatars. Artists collective Radclyffe Hall talks to photographer Phyllis Christopher about early lesbian erotica magazine in the 1980s. Linda Stupart compiles quotes by Sara Ahmed, Kathy Acker and Ursula K. Le Guin to consider what is radical sex today.  Artist Hannah Black's contribution, which opens the publication, reads like a manifesto for artists being crushed under the weight of current political circumstances. 

Edited by Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Robert Leckie.

Texts by Robert Leckie, Hannah Black, Helen Hester, Phyllis Christopher & Radclyffe Hall, Linda Stupart, Josefine Wikström. Entretiens with Helena Vilalta, James B Stringer, Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi) by Sidsel Meineche Hansen.

Revolution: A Reader collects texts from across many cultures and times and organises them roughly along a chronology of living, from 'beginning' to 'childhood', 'education', 'adulthood' and 'death'. The book brings the embodied fact of revolution into the lived present by engaging readers with language that takes us there, no matter where we are to begin with. We are all in revolution, now. Reading can make this fact primary and conscious and shared.

Heavily annotated throughout, the book is, quite literally, a conversation. The annotations, by Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler "composed simultaneously and in response to one another“ stitch a web of arguments that link the book into a single thing, a reader. The book also features a narrative bibliography of revolution by David Brazil.

This installment written by LA-based artist and writer Avigail Moss, develops as a thorough analysis of one particular book: Marianne Wex’s outstanding photo-essay Let’s Take Back Our Space: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, from 1979. Moss proposes a contextual approach of the book, in relation to politics and feminism in post-war West Germany, as well as a minute study of its design and page structure, revealing the complexity and force of the volume.

“Die Toilette” is an assemblage of text fragments taken from different books by LA-based writer Chris Kraus, conceived and annotated by artists and writers Jon Bywater, Louise Menzies and Marnie Slater. By reading through Kraus’s texts looking for traces of New Zealand, where she grew up, the three Kiwis question the representation of the distant; how it is embodied by characters, situations, language, and in the writing/reading dynamics Kraus creates. The beach, affection and loving relationships, the role of the city, intense relationships with wildlife – all this and more is at stake in this amazing montage.

The 6th installment of The Social Life of the Book series is a section of the catalogue of publications from English conceptual artist Helen Chadwick’s personal library, reproduced by Will Holder for single mothers. The library was acquired in 2006 and is held by the Henry Moore Institute archive, Leeds, UK.

Moyra Davey’s practice of photography is closely connected to the history and the experience of reading. In “The Wet and the Dry”, autobiography and considerations on the medium mixes with the lives of Goethe, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Shelleys. This text was also the basis for Davey’s acclaimed video work The Goddesses.

An important inspiration for this The Social Life of the Book series, Matthew Stadler is relentlessly challenging preconceived ideas of publishing and the book, in his own writing, lectures and publishing activities. In this new essay, he’s examining the political dimensions of the book, through an unexpected, yet fertile, comparison between today and the invention of the space of the page in the Middle Ages. His praise for the dynamics of the “marginal” introduces a compelling discussion on authorship, the market, and the reader’s agency – putting the emphasis on the democratic openness of the book.

An artist, a musician, and a publisher based in Brooklyn, NY, James Hoff tells here how books got him into art. He considers the complex and stimulating fabric of anecdotes, gossip, secrets, that are shared around artists’ publications, and, further, the role of printed matter in the building of an artist’s community. The essay pays homage to Edit DeAk through its title, and also comprises some pictures of book covers and LP sleeves from Hoff’s collection.