Books

A collective exploration of sound, music and the socio-political dimensions of listening, from researchers and artists with perspectives from the global South.

The publication brings together essays, practices, conversations and artworks from artists, researchers, and activists who are actively engaged in practicing and thinking about sound and listening as an anti-hegemonic gesture. The themes that they dissect and historicize span diverse geographies and contexts, from environmental and military violence to communal agency, indigenous technologies, colonial archives, radio practices, cultural cannibalism, and more-than-human ontologies. Here, borders—both physical and metaphorical—are the sites where the authors position themselves and where knowledge is contested. At the core of these texts are questions of methodology and positionality, but also a concern for action and form—performing, dialoguing and instigating as ways of research.

Contributions by Adrián Sallo Sallo, Alejandra Ríos Ruiz, Bellacomsom, Ekaterina Golovko, Karen Werner, Mariana Carvalho, Mariano Rosales, Nico Daleman, Nicole L'Huillier, Paola Torres Nuñez del Prado, Wilwer Vilca.
Conversations with Caline Matar and Yazan Khalili.
Artworks by Alan Courtis, Laura Mello, Pisitakun Kuantalaeng, Romi Ron Morrison, Yara Mekawei.

Explorations of the audio essay as medium and method.

With contributors including Justin Barton, Angus Carlyle, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, and Iain Sinclair, Sonic Faction presents extended lines of thought prompted by two Urbanomic events which explored the ways in which sound and voice can produce new sensory terrains and provoke speculative thought.

Three recent pieces provide the catalyst for a discussion of the potential of the "audio essay" as medium and method, a machine for intensifying listening and unsettling the boundaries between existing forms: documentary, music, ambient sound, audiobook, field recording, radio play….

Kode9's Astro-Darien (2022) is a sonic fiction about simulation, presenting an alternative history of the Scottish Space Programme, haunted by the ghosts of the British Empire. Justin Barton and Mark Fisher's On Vanishing Land (2006) is a dreamlike account of a coastal walk that expands into questions of modernity, capitalism, fiction, and the micropolitics of escape. Robin Mackay's By the North Sea (2021) is a meditation on time, disappearance, and loss as heard through the fictions of Lovecraft, Ccru, and the spectre of Dunwich, the city that vanished beneath the waves.

Alongside photographic documentation of the events and edited transcripts of the artists' discussions, Sonic Faction brings together contributors with diverse perspectives to address the question of the audio essay and to imagine its future.

Contributors
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Justin Barton, Ben Borthwick, Angus Carlyle, Matt Colquhoun, Jessica Edwards, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Ayesha Hameed, Eleni Ikoniadou, Lawrence Lek, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, Emily Pethick, Iain Sinclair, Shelley Trower

"Elles sont de sortie" is the title of a periodic publication launched in 1977 by Pascal Doury and Bruno Richard. The plural and feminine form of the enigmatic phrase "elles sont de sortie," chosen almost by chance, announces a protean work and often collective experience. From its origins to the most recent iterations, including Doury's more confidential individual trajectory after "Elles sont de sortie," Choquer le Monde à Mort traces five decades of a corpus of nearly three hundred publications. It addresses some of the most emblematic editorial works, as well as others that remain unpublished, alongside ambitious and sometimes scandalous exhibitions, few of which are documented.

This work is the result of several years of research, enriched by numerous firsthand interviews, and unfolds in three parts: a chronology and analysis of a singular and marginal artistic history, works and iconographic documents, and an anthology bibliography. Together, these elements reveal the complexity of an editorial object with porous boundaries, both in its forms and its contents, oscillating between graphzine, artist book, poetry collection, and personal journal. Its ramifications, status, and legacy retrospectively reveal the importance of a discreet yet seminal work.

Thus, "Elles Sont de Sortie" also serves as an opportunity to revisit the paths of two aesthetic and provocative artists, deeply devoted to their art and true free spirits in an art world often too narrow for them. It immerses us in a plethora of works that are intimate and raw, as well as subtle and refined, all in service of a project that, in Doury's words, aims to "shock the world to death."

Edited by Tiphanie Blanc, Jonas Delaborde, Anna Lejemmetel.
Contribution by Anna Lejemmetel.

Artistes typographes (Artists as typographers) is a visual corpus that brings together one hundred and thirty-two artists' books collected and reproduced as part of an artistic residency conducted at the Centre des livres d'artistes (Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche). This compilation of images demonstrate the interest of some figures of the art field for the substances of the book object. They show singular compositions and other typographic details: handwritten letters, character designs, stamps, logotypes.

Featuring Jean-Michel Alberola, John Baldessari, Christian Boltanski, Jean-François Bory, Broutin, Pol Bury, Philippe Cazal, Ulises Carrión, Henri Chopin, Claude Closky, Joëlle de la Casinière, herman de vries, Hamish Fulton, Jochen Gerz, Raoul Hausmann, Simone Forti, Paul-Armand Gette, Dick Higgins, Isidore Isou, Joseph Kosuth, Edmund Kuppel, La Monte Young, Pascal Le Coq, Jean Le Gac, Lefevre Jean Claude, Claude Lévêque, Mario Merz, Annette Messager, Jean-Claude Moineau, Matt Mullican, Maurizio Nannucci, Clemente Padín, Dieter Roth, Claude Rutault, Seth Siegelaub, Roman Signer, Harald Szeemann, Ernest T., Ben Vautier, Bernard Villers, Wolf Vostell, Martha Wilson...

A Hypothesis of Resistance contains five essays on Asynchronicity, Rehearsal, Undetectability, The Present Tense, and Duration. Each attempts to resist the doctrine of "performance," the symptom of a society, stratified by how we perform—economically, socially, digitally. As we become ripe for consumption, caught in an economy of perpetual readiness, basic needs remain unmet and it is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead.

Cally Spooner (born 1983 in Ascot, UK, lives and works in London and Turin) is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media—on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings.

Exhibiting performances that unfold across media—on film, in texts, as objects, though sounds, and as illustrated in drawings—Cally Spooner addresses the manners in which specific technological and financial conditions shape and organize life. With artworks that feature olive oil soap, WhatsApp messages, the voice of a business, the sound of a head cold, eroding support structures, a child development theorist, a poisoning, and an oversize graph, Spooner's work crystallizes an absurd contemporary ecosystem in which entities run the risk of managing themselves and one another to death.

The Forgive Us Our Trespasses Reader explores radical and emancipatory significations and fabulations of trespassing, turning towards practices that transgress and reshape the boundaries of, among other dimensions, currency, governance, religion, spirituality, language, and artificial intelligence.

Complementing the thematic concerns of the exhibition of the same name, this collection of essays, poems, artistic contributions, and a sermon, conceptually maps the distance between the English word "trespasses"—with its double meaning of to sin or to physically tread—and the German word "Schuld"—referring to sin and guilt but with etymological proximities to debt (Schulden). Deviating from the line of prayer that lends the project its name, the contributors do not ask for forgiveness for the various trespasses they elucidate—be they religious, social, class-related, national, sexual, or disciplinary in nature—but rather assert them as modes of transgression, as forms of rebellion, and as possibilities for transcendence.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in 2024.

Contributions by Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Egidija Čiricaitė, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, Toussaint M. Kafarhire, Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, Chao Tayiana Maina, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Tavia Nyong’o, Mary Louise Pratt, Josefine Rauch, Deborah A. Thomas, Senthuran Varatharajah, Yuanwen Zhong.

Dreaming Alcestis is an artist's book by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, conceived as an accompaniment to her holographic film installation of the same name. Dreaming Alcestis was co-directed and co-scripted by Gibson, her partner Nicholas Gordon and critic Maria Nadotti. The publication features a specially commissioned essay by poet and translator Allison Grimaldi Donahue, as well as a reprint of the American poet Alice Notley's 1991 essay What Can Be Learned From Dreams?

Drawing on the protagonist of Euripides's ancient myth as its ancestral guide, Dreaming Alcestis offers a poetic reflection on living and dying at a time of acute social, political and economic turmoil, documenting—via dream life—Gibson and Gordon's relocation from Northern to Southern Europe. In the film, two characters, dreaming of a long-dead queen, are filmed in long takes, refracted holographically and interrupted only by the sounds of the city and the sea. In Gibson's words, "2,500 years after her birth, Alcestis—in the film, a mysterious, Lynchian figure—returns from the underworld, dreaming of, or possibly dreamed by, a man and woman who have traversed Europe in search of her, from North to South, with family in tow. Meanwhile, the ice caps melt, 43 wars rage around the globe and another city burns on TV." In a feminist key, Gibson, Gordon and Nadotti reclaim a minor heroine from Greek mythology, using her as a therapeutic device to reflect on what it is to be human in the contemporary context.

Premiering at the British Art show in 2022, Dreaming Alcestis was exhibited on the occasion of the artist's first solo show in Italy, Dream Gossip, at Ordet in Milan, and was subsequently taken on tour, first to the Museo Civico di Castelbuono and then to Macro, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. The book and the film Dreaming Alcestis are part of Alkestis, a project orchestrated by the Museo Civico di Castelbuono in partnership with the British Art Show 9 (Hayward Gallery Touring, Southbank Centre, London).

Edited by Laura Barreca, Edoardo Bonaspetti, Beatrice Gibson.
Texts by Laura Barreca, Edoardo Bonaspetti, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Alice Notley.

When he was prevented from guiding a writing workshop, Quim Pujol resorted to collecting exercises for the participants to work with by themselves, either alone or in small groups. These exercises, suggestions and scores draw on a wide variety of sources, such as poetry, experimental literature, dance, popular performance practices, visual art and all kinds of text populating everyday life. Now expanded into a book, they are invitations to read, write and daydream, to ‘complicate our relationship to language’ and imagine texts in multiple guises. Potential literatures that give pause, redirect the attention or, at times, simply ‘produce a comforting doodle in the volatile palimpsest of human flesh’.

Quim Pujol is an experimental artist and curator working at the crossroads of language and live arts.

In its very first issue, Bebe Magazine offers a broad constellation of possibilities for queer understandings, beyond identity-based reduction. Using the prefix trans- (across, beyond, through), each of our eight co-curators chose a term and formed mini collectives to destabilise its accompanying pre-established, societally accepted, conceptions—from transversal lines to transactions.

Exutoire: Paul-Antoine Lucas, Bùi Quý Sơn, ba-bau: Đinh Thảo Linh, Kiều-Anh Nguyễn, Cao Việt Nga / Evgeniia Skvortsova, Zip Group + Borya Pospelov, Slaystans Collective / Ina Schürmann, La Bouche Cabaret, represented by Leo, 90mil radio, Queer Analog Darkroom / Bích Đào, Myrto Vogiatzi, Laia Ros, Queers on the Move / Teodora Roșu, Stol Collective: Ioana, Marco, Anio, Mara / Martina Lattuca, Vittoria Torsello, Chiron Floris / Bernadetta Budzik, Rachel Rouzaud, Tomasz Burek / Henellis Notton, Anita Kodanik, Bohdana Korohod, Greta Štiormer / Silvia Bicelli / Elizabeth Patiño / Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdous / Ákos Boros / Lucile Claudia Eerie, Babbyccino / Madonna Lenaert, Joppe De Campeneere / Mayim Frieden

Bebe Magazine is a publication born out of the Ghent-based collective Bebe Books, focusing on collaborative and experimental approaches to cultural production. It provides a space for contributors to work together in exploring fresh perspectives and questioning established norms.

With a strong emphasis on collective creation, Bebe Magazine brings together curators, artists, and thinkers to navigate complex ideas and reflect on the shifting boundaries of contemporary culture. Each issue is shaped by the diverse voices and shared efforts of its contributors, making it a dynamic and evolving platform.

A bootleg of the first edition of Country Lesbians, published by WomanShare Books in 1976. It was printed in the context of a 2024 exhibition at Shmorévaz, a Paris-based independent art space, dedicated to the WomanShare collective, taking the book as its starting point, and borrowing its title.

WomanShare Collective is Sue Deevy, Billie Miracle, Nelly Kaufer, Carol Newhouse and Dian Wagner.

Co-published by Ness Books and Shmooks

Graphic design: Espace Ness

Darryl Cook is a cuckold, and that’s exactly how he likes it. He has an inheritance that spares him from work, a manageable and seemingly consequence-free drug habit, and a lovely wife called Mindy who’s generally game for anything—and for as much of it as she can get. But after an accidental overdose and some serious oversharing, Darryl’s world begins to crack up. Tormented by what seems to be the secret truth in sex, and less assured of that secret’s form, Darryl steps into what used to be called real life . . . Darryl is a disarmingly funny and unabashedly intelligent look at a community of people parsing masculinity, marriage, sex (and love) on their own terms.

Underneath the sharp satire and hilarious sexual irreverence this is a deadly serious book: a brilliant novel of a seeker, like The Pilgrim’s Progress refracted by queer internet culture. —Torrey Peters

Ess is what I might call a burgeoning cult literary figure, armed with an unmistakable lyric deadpan and a taste for provocative subject matter. — Stephen Ira, Poetry Project

What Darryl is looking for is a crisis of sufficient severity that it will cause him to feel real to himself. — Dominic Fox, Review 31

What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own life―a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son―to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncle’s suicide to the settlement of the American West, museum period rooms to the origins of her last name to the Assyrian genocide, and the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem to the development of modern obstetrics. Here Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility.

A lost feminist masterwork by a speculative fiction icon about a lesbian’s coming-to-consciousness during the social upheaval of the 1970s.

Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God is remarkable for its deft intertwining of many themes: not only the overt one of coming out, but many intricately (and inevitably) interlaced stories of alienation, a search for community and rebellion against how our society defines women.

Guest Editor: Collectif Picha, Lumbumbashi Biennale, City Report Athens, Andrei Molodkin, Maryam Najd, Andrien Lucca, Valérie Mannaerts, Kendell Geers, Gabi Ngcobo, Maja Daniels, Zhang Yunyao, Wim Delvoye, Larissa Sansour, Dome Wood

In Bab Al-Saha, a quarter of Nablus, Palestine, sits a house of ill repute. In it lives Nuzha, a young woman ostracized from and shamed by her community. When the Intifada breaks out, Nuzha’s abode unexpectedly becomes a sanctuary for those in the quarter: Hussam, an injured resistance fighter; Samar, a university researcher exploring the impact of the Intifada on women’s lives; and Sitt Zakia, the pious midwife.

In the furnace of conflict at the heart of the 1987 Intifada, notions of freedom, love, respectability, nationhood, the rights of women, and Palestinian identity—both among the reluctant residents of the house and the inhabitants of the quarter at large—will be melted and re-forged. Vividly recounted through the eyes of its female protagonists, Passage to the Plaza is a groundbreaking story that shatters the myth of a uniform gendered experience of conflict.

À travers ses trajets quotidiens dans les transports parisiens, Maxime décrit ses aventures homosexuelles réelles et fantasmées. On découvre dans ses poèmes ses désirs de vengeance contre la bourgeoisie, la famille, ses explorations diurnes en manif et nocturnes dans les clubs. Maxime écrit un journal en poèmes de ses déambulations urbaines dans lesquelles il explore les recoins de ses désirs. Ses projections romantiques et ses rêves politiques à la périphérie des villes, des normes nous font imaginer une révolution jouissive. L’ouvrage couple deux recueils de Maxime Vignaud, placés tête-bêche dans le livre, comme deux revers d’une même pièce, ou comme deux corps qui dorment en cuillère.

'Femme' describes a constellation of queer, gendered expressions that uproot expectations of what it means to be feminine. Building upon experiences of transformation, belonging and harm, this book is a transfeminist call for collective liberation.

Trans Femme Futures envisions the future through everyday actions that revolutionise our lives. Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift discuss struggles around trans healthcare, the need for collectives over institutions, the importance of mutual care, and transfeminism as abolition.

The authors show how social change can be achieved through transformative practices that allow queer life to thrive in a time of climate, health, political and economic crises.

'A brilliant, useful, and immensely moving book that deals a critical blow to the epistemic austerity of our times' - Jordy Rosenberg

The Western museum is a battleground - a terrain of ideological, political and economic contestation. Almost everyone today wants to rethink the museum, but how many have the audacity to question the idea of the universal museum itself?

In A Programme of Absolute Disorder, Françoise Vergès puts the museum in its place. Exploring the Louvre's history, she uncovers the context in which the universal museum emerged: as a product of colonialism, and of Europe's self-appointed claim to be the guardian of global heritage.

Vergès outlines a radical horizon: to truly decolonize the museum is to implement a 'programme of absolute disorder', inventing other ways of apprehending the human and non-human world that nourish collective creativity and bring justice and dignity to the dispossessed.

Foreword by Paul Gilroy

Translated by Melissa Thackway

'A vibrant and compelling framework for feminism in our times' - Judith Butler

For too long feminism has been co-opted by the forces they seek to dismantle. In this powerful manifesto, Francoise Verges argues that feminists should no longer be accomplices of capitalism, racism, colonialism and imperialism: it is time to fight the system that created the boss, built the prisons and polices women’s bodies.

A Decolonial Feminism grapples with the central issues in feminist debates today: from Eurocentrism and whiteness, to power, inclusion and exclusion. Delving into feminist and anti-racist histories, Verges also assesses contemporary activism, movements and struggles, including #MeToo and the Women's Strike.

Centring anticolonialism and anti-racism within an intersectional Marxist feminism, the book puts forward an urgent demand to free ourselves from the capitalist, imperialist forces that oppress us.

An impassioned discussion about the alternative ways to form relationships and resist capitalism.

Capitalist ideology wants us to believe that there is an optimal way to live. 'Making connections' means networking for work. Our emotional needs are to be fulfilled by a single romantic partner, and self-care equates to taking personal responsibility for our suffering. We must be productive and heterosexual, we must have babies and buy a house. But the kicker is most people cannot and do not want to achieve all, or any of these life goals. Instead we are left feeling atomised, exhausted and disempowered.

Radical Intimacy shows that it doesn't need to be this way. A punchy and impassioned account of inspiring ideas about alternative ways to live, Sophie K Rosa demands we use our radical imagination to discover a new form of intimacy and to transform our personal lives and in turn society as a whole.

Including critiques of the 'wellness' industry that ignores rising poverty rates, the mental health crisis and racist and misogynist state violence; transcending love and sex under capitalism to move towards feminist, decolonial and queer thinking; asking whether we should abolish the family; interrogating the framing of ageing and death and much more, Radical Intimacy is the compassionate antidote to a callous society.

Ghassan Kanafani (1936 - 1972) is perhaps the greatest Palestinian novelist, whose books including Men in the Sun and Returning to Haifa documented the horrors of war and occupation. He was also a leading political thinker, strategist and revolutionary. Here, his writings on politics, history, national liberation and the media are collected in English for the first time.

Featuring new commentary from leading writers, this collection is a testament to Kanafani's continuing relevance. His work remains a vital touchstone for revolutionary Palestinian struggle and anti-colonial thought.

Edited by Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi

First-generation Palestinian refugees recall life before and after the Nakba.

During the 1948 war more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. The legacy of the Nakba - which translates to 'disaster' or 'catastrophe' - lays bare the violence of the ongoing Palestinian plight.

Voices of the Nakba collects the stories of first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, documenting a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East through the voices of the people who lived through it.

The interviews, with commentary from leading scholars of Palestine and the Middle East, offer a vivid journey into the history, politics and culture of Palestine, defining Palestinian popular memory on its own terms in all its plurality and complexity.

Afterword by Rosemary Sayigh. Winner of an English PEN Award 2021.

Comprehensive documentation on 43 outstanding socially committed artistic projects over the past twenty years.

The book Visible: Art as Policies for Care. Socially Engaged Art (2010–Ongoing) was born from the editors' enduring curatorial research into long-term situated art projects that exist within the social sphere, beyond the logic of the traditional art system, confronting unjust systems, and prefiguring novel visions for living together.

The socially engaged art projects collected here hold a significant place in the constantly evolving trans-local art scene of the past two decades, and form a lens through which to observe changing realities and their urgencies; they redefine the concept of art in light of current climatic, political, and social changes and foster the dematerialization of the artwork in processes that become policies of culture and care.

The publication is composed of four main sections with overarching photo documentation—interviews, essays, forums, and short literary texts—collecting contributions by artists, anthropologists, novelists, activists, and sociologists, such as Anna Tsing, Wissal Houbabi, Maria Thereza Alves, Tania Bruguera, Jonas Staal, DAAR - Decolonizing Architecture Art Research, Giuseppe Campuzano and Nan Goldin.

Edited by Martina Angelotti, Matteo Lucchetti, Judith Wielander.

Contributions by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Maria Thereza Alves, Martina Angelotti, Art Labor, Kader Attia, Gianfranco Baruchello, Richard Bell, Black Quantum Futurism, Brave New Alps, Tania Bruguera, Zoe Butt, Giuseppe Campuzano & Miguel López, Beatrice Catanzaro & Fatima Kadumy, CATPC, Marco Cavallo, Chimurenga, Luke Ching, Chto Delat, Emanuele Coccia, Cooking Sections, Luigi Coppola, Radha D'Souza & Jonas Staal, DAAR / Sandi Hilal & Alessandro Petti, Nico Dockx & Seppe Nobels, Maddalena Fingerle, Forensic Architecture, Futurefarmers, María Galindo, Néstor García Canclini, Daniel Godínez Nivón, Morten Goll, Adam Greenfield, Raphaël Grisey & Bouba Touré, Helon Habila, Helena Producciones, Sandi Hilal, Kim Hou, Wissal Houbabi, Adelita Husni Bey, Emily Jacir, Karrabing Film Collective, Selom Kudjie & Ibrahim Mahama, Zacharias Kunuk, Maria Lai, Le Nemesiache, Carolina Lio, Matteo Lucchetti, Wu Mali, Colum McCann, Marisa Morán Jahn, Zanele Muholi, Myvillages, Paolo Naldini, Jesús "Bubú" Negrón, Tone Olaf Nielsen, Otobong Nkanga, Rachel O'Reilly, Ahmet Öğüt, P.A.I.N., Jasmeen Patheja, Narawan Kyo Pathomvat, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Ai-jen Poo, Pussy Riot (Nadya Tolokonnikova), Sahar Qawasmi & Nida Sinnokrot, Tabita Rezaire, Robida, Rojava Film Commune, ruangrupa (Farid Rakun), Jon Rubin & Dawn Weleski, Beatrice Salvioni, Alejandra Sarria, Igiaba Scego, Dread Scott, Superflex, Pelin Tan, Bert Theis, Anna Tsing, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Nadeesha Uyangoda, Éric Van Hove, Judith Wielander, Andrea Zegna, Anna Zegna.

The cultural and political legacies of the the 1933 and 1934 Arab Exhibitions in Jerusalem.

Resurgent Nahda examines the 1933 and 1934 Arab Exhibitions in Mandate Jerusalem, highlighting the city's role in asserting a regional Arab Nahda and fostering economic, cultural, and artistic exchange amid post-WWI geopolitical fragmentation.

The book emerges from Nadi Abusaada's seven years of research, including an award-winning 2019 essay in the Jerusalem Quarterly and two exhibitions he curated at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah (2022–2023) and Darat al-Funun in Amman (2024). Featuring six essays, an interview, and primary materials—archival documents, crafts, and artworks—the book explores Jerusalem's connections with Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut, tracing the journeys of artists, craftspeople, architects, and journalists who shaped this pivotal chapter in modern Arab history.

Nadi Abusaada is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut. His work focuses on the material histories and visual cultures of the modern Arab world. He holds a PhD in architecture from the University of Cambridge. He has also held various academic fellowships including the ETH Zürich Postdoctoral Fellowship at ETH Zürich and the Aga Khan Postdoctoral Fellowship in Islamic Architecture at MIT. Besides his writings, Nadi Abusaada has also been involved in research-based curatorial work. He has curated and participated in a number of exhibitions around the world including in Ramallah, Amman, Zurich, Venice, Dubai, and Montreal.

Edited by Nadi Abusaada.
Texts by Nadi Abusaada, Nisa Ari, Wesam Al Asali, Samira Badran, Nadine Nour el Din, Kirsten Scheid, Sary Zananiri.