Film & Video

First critical edition of Kathy Acker’s unpublished early writings from (1969-1976). Comprises almost all the typescripts from that period present in the Kathy Acker’s archives. Features also the transcription and presentation of Acker’s two 1974 experimental videos.

Editor: Justin Gajoux. Critical notes: Justin Gajoux & Claire Finch. Also with texts of: Alan Sondheim, Emily Cheng, Jill Kroesen, Peter Gordon, Claire Finch, Anna Maria Pinaka, Matias Viegener, Justin Gajoux.

I Want reviews the eponymous duo's double-projection film installation examining issues of gender, sexuality and performativity—and inspired by the words of punk poetess Kathy Acker and convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which was presented at their 2015 solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary.

The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors.

Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration. Alongside generous color documentation, written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse unpack and reflect upon both the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work.

Including essays about Barbara Hammer, Agnès Varda, Camille Billops, Jane Arden, Penny Slinger, Ana Mendieta, Hito Steyerl, Mati Diop, Catherine Breillat, Carol Morley, Ulrike Ottinger, Charlotte Prodger, Charlotte Pryce, Rosalind Nashashibi & Lucy Skaer, Gloria Camiruaga, Margarethe von Trotta, Astra Taylor, Lina Wertmüller, and more.

Including essays about Lucrecia Martel, Alice Rohrwacher, Cecilia Mangini, Chantal Akerman, Mika Rottenberg, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Agnès Varda, Barbara Hammer, Laida Lertxundi.

The first issue contains interviews with women including Carolee Schneemann, Mania Akbari, Laura Mulvey, Alice Diop, Bette Gordon, and Lis Rhodes. It contains pieces on the films of women including Kathleen Collins, Sally Potter, Chantal Akerman, Moyra Davey, Camille Henrot, Naomi Kawase, Germaine Dulac, Alice Guy-Blaché.

The book includes Mendieta's first published comprehensive filmography resulting from three years of collaborative research conducted by the Estate of Ana Mendieta and the University of Minnesota as well as original essays by John Perreault, Michael Rush, Rachel Weiss, Lynn Lukkas, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, and Laura Wertheim Joseph.

The first book-length treatment of Mendieta's moving-image practice, Covered in Time and History aims to locate her films centrally within her larger oeuvre and at the forefront of the multidisciplinary shifts that characterized visual arts practice during the 1970s.

Bringing together both known and previously unseen works of film and video, installations, works on paper, and material from her archive, this volume addresses critical themes that appear throughout Hammer's work, including sensation and intimacy, lesbian representation, and the maintenance of illness, in addition to exploring the artist's relationship to experimental queer cinema, feminist history, and environmental activism. Featuring a wide range of responses, from personal anecdotes to academic analysis and poetic interpretation, this volume highlights the resonating impact of Hammer's artistic narrative across cinema studies, art history, queer theory, and feminist thought.

This delectable book collects the rococo prose of Lisa Robertson. There are essays - many originally published as catalogue texts by art galleries - on the syntax of the suburban home, Vancouver fountains, Value Village, the joy of synthetics, scaffolding and the persistence of the Himalayan blackberry. It makes for one of the most intriguing books you'll ever read.

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.

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.

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.

Presented as the blueprints for three public lectures, We are behind proposes alternative routes through Emily Wardill’s work and represents three different attempts at embodying and dissembling knowledge. Using different formal textual devices, from which they also deviate – a standard lecture, the subject of which becomes something felt, not taught; an a-chronological conversation; and the transcript of a play rendered as a formal essay – each section describes the different facets of an ongoing dialogue between the authors. Fragmented not only by dialogic turns, appropriated texts, images, a score and quotations, and containing extensive reproductions of Wardill’s work, the book’s content and design reflects the labyrinthine, and sometimes hallucinogenic quality of her films and their radical combination of form, content and idea.

Each section focuses on specific works. Section One, The Object, uses The Diamond (Descartes Daughter), SEA OAK, and Gamekeepers without Game, to explore ideas of the rational, public art, the public, linguistic framing and the irrational, via Gladys Knight and the Pips, a hand-drawn hallucinogenic section, Seth Price’s essay Dispersion, Norman Mailer, The Rockridge Institute and Peter Gidal. Section Two, The Window follows a conversations between the authors, that opens onto desire, politics, mirrors, and the films Basking in what feels like ‘An Ocean of Grace’ I soon realise that I am not looking at it but rather, I AM it, recognising myself, Split the View in Two (Part Two), and Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck. In the final part, The Theatre, an apparently formal essay on the implications of framing live action, the proscenium arch as a link between theatre and cinema, Dan Graham, perspective, power and its collapse, transforms into a collection of dialogues around Ben, Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck, authenticity, reality and fiction.

Mettant au travail un concept esquissé par la théoricienne Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (qui opère la distinction entre lecture paranoïaque et lecture réparatrice, cette dernière refusant de séparer le blanc des faits du jaune de l’imagination), ce livre se soutient d’une conviction : lorsqu’elle entend partir de la non-effectivité sexe-genre pour libérer, non seulement notre manière d’envisager les identités sexuelles, mais bien la façon de penser le monde, la théorie queer communique avec de multiples avancées parallèles qui, dans les sciences sociales et la philosophie contemporaines, entendent de même se frayer un chemin à travers les clivages et les dualismes entre nature et culture, corps et esprit, monde imaginaire et monde réel, individu et communauté.