Books

Including essays about Madeline Anderson, Lorenza Mazzetti, Laure Prouvost, Ben Rivers & Anocha Suwichakornpong, Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor, Susan Sontag’s filmmaking career, Storm De Hirsch, Zia Anger, Ashley Connor, Bruce LaBruce, Pina Bausch/Chantal Akerman, Magdalena Montezuma, Rebecca Horn, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Zhu Shengze, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Maya Da-Rin, Camila Freitas, Gong Li

An in-depth Afro-Brazilian roundtable with Tatiana Carvalho Costa, Janaina Oliveira, Everlane Moraes and Kênia Freitas; sections on Kira Muratova and Anne Charlotte Robertson; essays on subtitles, diffractive cinemas, ecocriticism/the anthropocene, literary adaptations, intimacy coordinators, strike on film, representing the internet,

Interviews with Betzy Bromberg, Zia Anger & Ashley Connor, Brett Story, Amandine Gay, Andrea Luka Zimmerman & Therese Henningsen

Experimental criticism from Kathryn Scanlan, Jen Calleja and Elissa Suh.

In Hope Against Hope, the Out of the Woods collective investigates the critical relation between climate change and capitalism and calls for the expansion of our conceptual toolbox to organize within and against ecological crisis characterized by deepening inequality, rising far-right movements, and, relatedly, more frequent and devastating disasters. While much of environmentalist and leftist discourse in this political moment remain oriented toward horizons that repeat and renew racist, anti-migrant, nationalist, and capitalist assumptions, Out of the Woods charts a revolutionary course adequate to our times.

At the center of the renewed political orientation Hope Against Hope expounds is an abolitionist approach to border imperialism, reactionary ecology, and state violence that underpins many green solutions and modes of understanding nature. It reminds us of the frequent moments and movements of solidarity emerging in the ruins all around us. Their stunning conclusion to the disarray of politics in our seemingly end times is the urgency of creating what Out of the Woods calls "disaster communism", the collective power to transform our future political horizons from the ruins and establish a climate future based in common life.

Out of the Woods is a transnational political research and theory collective, a loose grouping of decolonial, small-c communist, antiracist queer-feminist thinkers working together to think through the problem of ecological crisis.

‘Tokyo Papers’ comprises a collection of 41 monoprints created by Dutch graphic designer and typographer Karel Martens between 2019 and 2020. In 2018, Martens received a package from artist-curator Pierre Leguillon that contained filled-in Japanese forms which he had found at a street market in Tokyo. Martens was intrigued by the collection of thin paper with a rectangular black-blue layer of carbon on the back. In 2019 he started to print on these back sides, but because the overprinting on the carbon layer caused unwanted damage, he switched to printing them on the front sides as well. “The closing image is related to Tokyo in a different way,” he explains.

An account of Spring Brakers, a project launched during the so-called First Wave. Spring Brakers was an online platform hosting video performances by a different artist each week alongside podcasts on various topics focusing on other labels or musical persuasions.

For this publication, all of the musicians who participated in the project are profiled, resulting in a grounded and oddly inspiring collection of testimonies of how artistic practices are shaped by an era that is still ongoing.

Artists include locals such as Bear Bones, Lay Low, Quanta Qualia, Vica Pacheco, KRAMP, Orphan Fairytale, and more, as well as far-out friends like Ka Baird, MSHR, Jung An Tagen, Eric Frye, and so on.

Each profile has a handy QR to redirect to each artist's video, and each copy includes a code to download a compilation made especially for the publication.

"1 Million Roses for Angela Davis" traces Davis' immense influence and legacy as activist and scholar on contemporary artists today, while simultaneously teasing out the contradictions her presence and agenda posed to the GDR's interpretation and application of Marxism.

"A Million Roses for Angela Davis" was the motto of a 1970–72 solidarity campaign in East Germany in support of US philosopher, Communist, and Black Power revolutionary Angela Davis, who at the time was being held on terrorism charges in California.

The large-scale movement firmly anchored the "heroine of the other America" within the cultural memory of a now-vanished social utopia, which after her acquittal welcomed her as a state guest. For her part, Davis had hoped for an internationalist movement promoting a socialist, feminist, and non-racist democracy—the antithesis of her experiences of violence and oppression as a Black woman in the United States. This moment of hope provides the historical starting point for the exhibition at the Albertinum in Dresden. The group show features archival materials, historical portraits of Davis by state painters of the GDR, new commissions, and other works by an array of contemporary artists focusing on the issues that the now emeritus professor campaigned for at the time, which are still pressing today. It aspires to initiate discussion on the background, flaws, and unfulfilled potential of the unusual relationship between Davis and the GDR.

The contributions in this accompanying reader unfold how Davis's iconic image came to be inscribed within a global history of resistance, and introduce all of the participating artists with short texts.    

"And if we believe that revolutions are possible, then we have to be able to imagine different modes of being, different ways of existing in society, different social relations. In this sense art is crucial. Art is at the forefront of social change. Art often allows us to grasp what we cannot yet understand." —Angela Davis

Works by Yael Bartana, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sophie Calle, Contemporary And, Sadie Barnette, CHTO DELAT?, Melvin Edwards, Ângela Ferreira, Bernhard Franke, Coco Fusco, Ellen Gallagher, Claudia Martínez Garay, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Arthur Jafa, Steffani Jemison & Justin Hicks (Mikrokosmos), Iris Kensmil, Hassan Khan, Kapwani Kiwanga, Raja Lubinetzki & Petra Schramm, Julie Mehretu, Heinz-Detlef Moosdorf, Senga Nengudi, Ahmet Öğüt, Slavs and Tatars, Julia Phillips, Alex Martinis Roe, Elske Rosenfeld, Anri Sala, Willi Sitte, Cauleen Smith, Nancy Spero, Gabriele Stötzer, Strawalde (Jürgen Böttcher), Nasan Tur, Lewis Watts, Carrie Mae Weems, Christoph Wetzel, Charles White, Heinz Wodzicka. 

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, from October 10, 2020 to January 24, 2021.

Gabriel Abrantes has been making a career in cinema; with numerous international exhibitions, he's been keeping prolific, with video installations, drawing, painting, and now also VR. This book, published by maat and Mousse, attests exactly this. A book that is predominantly visual and clearly structured, efficient in transposing a certain formal and conceptual attitude that runs through Abrantes's work into the book's aesthetic approach, expressing humour and irony visually within a relatively classical framework.

"The juxtaposition of references to art and cultural history with personal and socio-political commentary is a guiding thread throughout Programmed Melancholy." writes Emily Butler, in one of the essays included in this book (other texts are an interview with the artist and short essay by Rosa Lleó). Butler continues: "His works engage with our emotions, with a range of personal feelings, often humorous, potentially rousing ethical and political beliefs. Unstable, multi-faced, polysexual, his characters waver between expressing personal emotions and wider social, environmental and political concerns."

When she started writing the Corona Tales, Chus Martínez had been weighing how people and the media were addressing the outbreak of the virus as an unprecedented disaster. One possible contribution, as curator and writer, would be to write a short story a day and post it on an Instagram account that many could access…

Martínez grew up with her grandparents till she was four, and so did her cousin, while both their parents migrated to a big city—hers to Barcelona, his to Basel—to work. The grandparents' childhood was marked by extreme poverty: the Spanish flu left the grandfather orphan of both parents; the grandmother's family, from the same small village in the north west coast of Spain, was also forced to encourage their children to help and work for money. These circumstances were reflected by them—with no trace of sorrow or bitterness.

The recovery was so slow that the author's mother could not afford to attend school and it was only when she married that she and her father enrolled a night course. The stories about these two generations, posted daily, from Basel, around 7pm, offered a chance for gathering, if just virtually, demanding to identify vulnerabilities, how the COVID-19 crisis was being generalized, and how to research ways of doing. Accompanied for the first time in this book by new imagery, they provide tools for reflecting in the past and present tense.

Published December 2020

Oh mio cagnetto is the artist's first book of writings, conceived as an artwork. It is a collection of 81 little poems that revolve around the missed and mourned figure of a puppy.

These short nursery rhymes all open with the same words and employ the same structure: two rhymed couplets in traditional meter. A seemingly naïve, childish voice speaks of violence, death and grief, yet never slips into pure plaintive lament. Balancing pathos with humor, the poems turn the puppy into a figure that evokes a broader sense of loss.
Oh mio cagnetto, was written between 2018 and 2020 and is now in the collection of MACRO in Rome. It intentionally plays on the ambiguity of its nature, as both a book distributed in conventional ways and an art object that belongs to a museum.

Diego Marcon (born 1985 in Busto Arsizio, Italy, lives and works in Paris) is a visual artist working mostly with film and video.

Diaries of an avatar: a Bible-style artist's book of writings by Martine Syms

A new artist's book by California-based artist Martine Syms (born 1988), Shame Space explores the possibilities of narrative and identity, collecting journal writings by the artist from 2015 to 2017 in which she attempts to capture her shadow self, alongside image stills from the video project Ugly Plymouths. The text entries form the voiceover of Mythiccbeing (pronounced "my thick being'), a "black, upwardly mobile, violent, solipsistic, sociopathic, gender-neutral femme" digital avatar who has iterated across several of Syms' recent exhibitions. In Syms' installations, Mythiccbeing manifests variously in video, audio and as an interactive chatbot that responds to the viewer's communications with messages and animations.

In Shame Space, the character's autofictional, diaristic commentary is gathered into 15 chapters. Its design updates the Bible format with its A5 size, embossed leather-textured cover and silver edge painting. The Ugly Plymouths still-image selection was coded using a programming script, such that the design, like the chatbot's SMS responses, is an exercise in machine automation.

Published Dec 2020

Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family—blood and chosen—arrives with just the right food and some redemption.

Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.

& colin kaepernick is my president, who kneels on the air
bent toward a branch, throwing apples down to the children
& vets & rihanna is my president, walking out of global summitswith wine glass in hand, our taxes returned in goldto dust our faces into coins
& my mama is my president, her grace stuntson amazing, brown hands breaking brown bread overmouths of the hungry until there are none unfed & my grandma is my president
& her cabinet is her cabinetcause she knows to trust what the pan knowshow the skillet wins the war  
—from “my president”

As Angela Y. Davis has proposed, the "path to prison," which so disproportionately affects communities of color, is most acutely guided by the conditions of daily life. Architecture, then, as fundamental to shaping these conditions of civil existence, must be interrogated for its involvement along this diffuse and mobile path. Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality aims to expand the ways the built environment's relationship to and participation in the carceral state is understood in architecture. The collected essays in this book implicate architecture in the more longstanding and pervasive legacies of racialized coercion in the United States—and follow the premise that to understand how the prison enacts its violence in the present one must shift the epistemological frame elsewhere: to places, discourses, and narratives assumed to be outside of the sphere of incarceration.  

Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality offers not a fixed or inexorable account of how things are but rather a set of starting points and methodologies for reevaluating the architecture of carceral society and for undoing it altogether.  

With contributions by Adrienne Brown, Stephen Dillon, Jarrett M. Drake, Sable Elyse Smith, James Graham, Leslie Lodwick, Dylan Rodríguez, Anne Spice, Brett Story, Jasmine Syedullah, Mabel O. Wilson, and Wendy L. Wright.

Published September 2020

A lost gem of permutational conceptualism from a key figure in artist's book culture, available again

Known internationally as one of Mexico's most important conceptual artists, Ulises Carrión (1941-89) played a decisive role in defining and conceptualizing the genre of the artists' book through his manifesto, The New Art of Making Books (1975), which he wrote soon after the 1972 publication of SONNET(S) and his move from Mexico City to Amsterdam, where he opened the legendary bookshop gallery, Other Books and So, the first space dedicated exclusively to artists' publications and an important precursor to such artists' book hubs as Printed Matter.

One of Carrión's earliest bookworks, SONNET(S) represents a landmark shift in the artist's output from poetry to artists' books. Here, Carrión takes a single poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti through 50 typographic and procedural permutations. This republication is supplemented by new essays on Carrión's bookworks by contemporary artists, writers, and scholars from Mexico, Europe and the US. 

Published March 2021

Poet, translator, and educator Aditi Machado’s The End is an essay about the ends of poems and the ends of time. Through close readings of a range of poets and thinkers (including Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, and Lyn Hejinian), an interrogation of the received aesthetics of US writing workshops, and reflections on her own poetic practice, Machado examines notions of epiphany, closure, excess, and economy.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral.

Aditi Machado is the author of Some Beheadings (Nightboat) and the translator of Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia (Action). Her poetry and criticism also appear in chapbook form as well as in journals like Lana Turner, VOLT, Chicago Review, Western Humanities Review, and Jacket2. Her second poetry collection Emporium (forthcoming) recently received the James Laughlin Award. Machado works as an Assistant Professor at University of Cincinnati.

Since its founding as a cultural studies group in 1999 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, KUNCI Study Forum & Collective has experimented with methods of producing and sharing knowledge through acts of collective study at the intersections of affective, manual, and intellectual labor. This pamphlet is a collaboratively authored epistolary essay that narrates the discourse behind the development of KUNCI’s School of Improper Education, an initiative that posits studying together as a tactical approach to creating the conditions for social movement. Founded in 2016, The School of Improper Education is an avenue through which unlearning can be practiced, where unknowingness can be transformed into a series of productive tools for understanding the contemporary social ecosystem and articulating the resourcefulness of an independent art and cultural organization.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral.

KUNCI Study Forum & Collective experiments with methods of producing and sharing knowledge through acts of studying together at the intersections between affective, manual, and intellectual labor. Since its founding in 1999 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, KUNCI has been continuously transforming its structure, ways, and medium of working. Initially formed as a cultural studies study group, at present KUNCI’s practices emphasize collectivizing study by way of space-making, discussion, research, publishing, and school-organizing. KUNCI traverses and connects institutional, disciplinary, and geographical boundaries. KUNCI’S membership is informal and based on friendship, as well as principles of self-organization and collaboration.

Don Mee Choi is the author of three books of poetry and hybrid essays, and an award-winning translator of contemporary Korean women’s poetry. In this pamphlet, Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, she explores translation and language in the context of US imperialism—through the eyes of a “foreigner;” a translator; a child in Timoka, the made-up city of Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence; a child from a neocolony.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral.

Dean Blunt is one of the most important British artist of the current century because he fundamentally does not care about Britain. His importance makes it shocking that such little critical attention has been paid to his work. His indifference explains it.

Dhanveer Singh Brar’s ‘Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit)’ looks to initiate a conversation that needs to be had about Dean Blunt, about Britain (through Blunt’s indifference to it), and about Blackness in Britain (through the depth and complexity of Blunt’s feeling for it). Using the 2016 album ‘BBF Hosted By DJ Escrow’ as a means of navigation, Brar hears Blunt in order to access the long contested dream of Britain’s disappearance that was conducted under the name of Black British Arts. Partial (in the sense of his relation to Blunt) and partial (in the sense of unfinished), ‘Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit)’ see’s Dhanveer Singh Brar give the dream a grammar, if not a name.

Dhanveer Singh Brar is a theorist and scholar who teaches in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His is a member of Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective and Lovers Discourse. Brar’s second book ‘Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early Twenty-First Century’ will be published by Goldsmiths Press/MIT Press in Spring 2021

"To encounter BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow through Dhanveer Brar’s ears is to see Babylon through his eyes, and to sense Britain—to uncover with 'accuracy, brutality and beauty' the complexities of its meaning—through the social music, social vision and social feel of those who refuse the Britishness that is withheld from them. Brar discerns Dean Blunt’s rightful place in a cultural field where critical discourse and sonic dream are fundaments of a dub university curriculum whose various approaches show the absolute necessity and generativity of stealth, flaw and the resistance to category. Blunt’s “love letter to the blackness of Hackney” deserves the most rigorous, gentle, erudite attention. Happily, Dhanveer Brar is here to provide it." – Fred Moten.

The More-than-Human reader brings together texts that reflect on the state of post-anthropocentric thinking today, by writers from a wide range of disciplines. Focusing on the ecologies and technologies of climate injustice and inequalities, as well as the destructive structures lurking within anthropocentrism, More-than-Human proposes complex entanglements, frictions, and reparative attention across species and beings.

Thinking past the centrality of the human subject, the texts that compose this reader begin to imagine networks of ethics and responsibility emerging not from the ideologies of old, but from the messy and complex liveliness around and beneath us. 

Rather than attempting to be a comprehensive compendium on the topic (which would be virtually impossible), More-than-Human provides a cross-section of the breadth and vitality of a literary, scientific, and conceptual milieu where multiple strands of work intersect even as they are frequently regarded as belonging to separate disciplinary discourses.

Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, Ramon Amaro, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Octavia Butler, Georges Canguilhem, Marisol de la Cadena, NASA History Department, Silvia Federici, Scott F. Gilbert, Édouard Glissant, Jack Halberstam, Donna Haraway, Myra J. Hird, Kristina Lyons, Patricia MacCormack, John T. Maher, Michael Marder, Timothy Mitchell, Reza Negarastani, Jussi Parikka, Elizabeth Povinelli, Paul B. Preciado, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Filipa Ramos, Isabelle Stengers, Elly R. Truitt, Anna L. Tsing, Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, Jason Wallin, Kathryn Yusoff and Joanna Zylinska.

DEARS Magazine on transversal writing, with texts by Season Butler, Crystal Z Campbell, Nicole Bachmann, Alessandro De Francesco, Benjamin Egger, Florinda Fusco, Gilles Furtwängler, Donna J. Haraway, Serafina Ndlovu, Rose Rand and Riikka Tauriainen.

Every Monday in 2017 and 2019, comedic performance artist Morgan Bassichis created a to-do list. THE ODD YEARS is a collection of those lists, which served both as a way to generate material for live performances and as a place to archive the logistical, emotional, and political business that just kept piling up throughout this two-year project. A record of routine and impossible tasks—some completed and others left unfinished—THE ODD YEARS is one response to the oddness of times in which intensified crisis becomes ordinary.  

THE ODD YEARS is the fourth title in the Document Series, an interdisciplinary publishing initiative that highlights work by time-based artists in printed form.

Morgan Bassichis is a comedian and musician living in New York City. Morgan's performances include Nibbling the Hand that Feeds Me (Whitney Museum, New York 2019), Klezmer for Beginners (Abrons Arts Center, New York, 2019), More Protest Songs (Danspace Project, New York, 2018), and The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions: The Musical (New Museum, New York, 2017).

Long, long before the Information Age ended, young Hildegard of Bingen finds beauty in the moral and spiritual ruins of her medieval world. In her forty-third year, she inscribes her cosmic visions into Scivias, an indescribably beautiful codex of writing and illuminations thought to be destroyed during the evacuation of Earth.

In a sea cave with cracked amethyst walls on Avaaz, Pinky Agarwalia discovers fragments of this visionary text containing hitherto unknown pathways to a lost vision of human co-existence with plants and non-humans - and the seeds of its rebirth on Avaaz.

Bursting with mythic quantum energy, Hildegard's vital linguistic potion viriditas, threaded throughout her communiqués, is a lush, verdant, renewable life-force. Her ecological message may be just the magic needed for rebirth on Avaaz. Hildegard's mystic toolkit for the future includes a cosmology, medicine, a morphology of crystals, recipes - and the symbols of a new language.

As Pinky Agarwalia traces the diagrams with her fingertip, she suddenly understands - a vision that appears without warning in her own mind - that she must first immerse these materials in water, a guarded substance. In the water, the molecules of the hidden language dissolve, freeze then reconfigure into new shapes, the crystalline language communicated not through sound but by feeling and light. Lingua Ignota, Hildegard's mysterious invented 'unknown language', arrives just in time for a world in flux, one whose coordinates are being recast.

Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), also known as Saint Hildegard and the Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary, and polymath. She is considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.

Huw Lemmey is a writer and publisher. He writes on culture, politics and sexuality, and is the author of the novels Chubz and Red Tory (Montez Press).

Glaring: a sustained look of anger, an obvious fact, a situation of such brightness and intensity that vision is obscured. In his debut book of poems, Benjamin Krusling is concerned with reading domination and violence and entering their psychotic motion, the better to do otherwise. Through the thicket of anti-blackness, militarism, surveillance, impoverishment, and interpersonal abuse and violence, Glaring investigates the things that haunt daily life and make love difficult, possible, necessary.

Benjamin Krusling's Glaring is the winner of our 2019 Open Reading Period, and was selected by guest judge Lucy Ives.

The notion of a mother seems simple enough. But just one shy cut beneath the surface lies a multitude of facets, problems, questions, contradictions and wonders all connected to the idea of maternity. Biologically speaking, every person has a mother; perhaps it is the one fact we all have in common. Nevertheless this issue, dedicated to Mother, raises more questions than it is able to answer. Precisely because everyone appears to understand what a mother is, many crucial aspects of the topic are never questioned and are instead taken as a given. Is a mother defined by just having a child, or is it a child that defines the mother? Can we look at the mother without assuming womanhood? Can we untie the gendered attributes bound to the role of a mother? And what exactly are the notions of gender and sex that are connected to the common idea of motherhood? Where do they stem from? What kind of social, biological and economic pressure do mothers and potential mothers face?

In this issue, we explore alternative family structures and how responsibilities of parenting might be shared; prevailing working conditions for mothers in the arts; difficulties, challenges and prejudices mothers face in their professional lives, and what an ideal work environment might look like. Simultaneously, this issue deals with disappointments and unfulfilled expectations in the mother-child relationship, and again at that relationship in the social context. We picture the past and the present in the process of envisioning what maternity could look like in the future

Contributors 
Adrian Williams, A.L. Steiner, Alexander Rischer, A.M. Bang, Andrew Stone, Anne Döring, Axel Loytved, Burk Koller, Ceyenne Doroshow, Eva Ďurovec, Flaka Haliti, Hanne Lippard, Henrik Olesen, Johannes Sturm, Julie Béna, Katharina Bosse, Lauren Strom-Berg, Lena Greene, Lila de Magalhaes, Lili Reynaud Dewar, Matheus Rocha Pitta, Nadine Droste, Nicola Gördes, Nicolaas Schmidt, Patricia Gray, Penny Goring, Peter Piller, Raphaela Vogel, Stella Rossié, Ulla von Brandenburg, Vincent Ramos.

Aleen Solari’s work is shaped profoundly by insights into various subcultures. These insights are partly drawn from her own experiences, partly borrowed from members of certain scenes who she invites to be part of her work. Her sculptural practice moves in and out of life within these groups, and is full of codes and quotations from antifa members, football hooligans, bored youth clubs or those embedded in neonazi networks. 

Direct Into Chaos is a book that dives deep into these worlds, shape-shifting between fiction, documentation and artwork. In ghost written texts, Solari fictionalises her own artistic biography, morphing interviews with football hooligans who had their phones tapped by the police, into a dream world where they receive generous compensation for years lived under surveillance. 

In this publication – in a chaotic, dreamlike state of mind – fiction and documentation, art and activism meld into something new.
Aleen Solari is an artist who lives in Hamburg, Germany

A heart-rending meditation on aging, grief, and the universal experience of facing death.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard, and taught at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, from 1958-1972. In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Then, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War (1959-1975), she began to write poetry and became, in her words, "an American poet." In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L'Orient le Jour. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translated into more than ten languages. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. Adnan is the author of more than a dozen books in English, including Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986), The Arab Apocalypse (1989), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and Sea and Fog (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry. In 2014, she was awarded one of France's highest cultural honors: l'Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Many of her poems have been put to music by Tania Leon, Henry Treadgill, Gavin Bryars, Zad Moultaka, Annea Lockwood, and Bun Ching Lam. Her paintings have been widely exhibited, including Documenta 13, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, The New Museum, and Museum der Moderne Salzburg. In 2014, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective of her work.