Books
Books
The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech
The telephone marks the place of an absence. Affiliated with discontinuity, alarm, and silence, it raises fundamental questions about the constitution of self and other, the stability of location, systems of transfer, and the destination of speech. Profoundly changing our concept of long-distance, it is constantly transmitting effects of real and evocative power. To the extent that it always relates us to the absent other, the telephone, and the massive switchboard attending it, plugs into a hermeneutics of mourning.
The Telephone Book, itself organized by a "telephonic logic," fields calls from philosophy, history, literature, and psychoanalysis. It installs a switchboard that hooks up diverse types of knowledge while rerouting and jamming the codes of the disciplines in daring ways. Avital Ronell has done nothing less than consider the impact of the telephone on modern thought. Her highly original, multifaceted inquiry into the nature of communication in a technological age will excite everyone who listens in. The book begins by calling close attention to the importance of the telephone in Nazi organization and propaganda, with special regard to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In the Third Reich the telephone became a weapon, a means of state surveillance, "an open accomplice to lies." Heidegger, in Being and Time and elsewhere, elaborates on the significance of "the call." In a tour de force response, Ronell mobilizes the history and terminology of the telephone to explicate his difficult philosophy.
Ronell also speaks of the appearance of the telephone in the literary works of Duras, Joyce, Kafka, Rilke, and Strindberg. She examines its role in psychoanalysis—Freud said that the unconscious is structured like a telephone, and Jung and R. D. Laing saw it as a powerful new body part. She traces its historical development from Bell's famous first call: "Watson, come here!" Thomas A. Watson, his assistant, who used to communicate with spirits, was eager to get the telephone to talk, and thus to link technology with phantoms and phantasms. In many ways a meditation on the technologically constituted state, The Telephone Book opens a new field, becoming the first political deconstruction of technology, state terrorism, and schizophrenia. And it offers a fresh reading of the American and European addiction to technology in which the telephone emerges as the crucial figure of this age.
Perverse Decolonization?
Jan Sowa, David Riff and 1 more
Conversations and essays that question the twisted and oppressive climate in a world where true decolonization has yet to begin.
New nationalisms, toxic patriotisms and systems of exclusion have been on the rise for the last decade, reinforced by technology and rooted in colonialism, slavery and class oppression. Our time offers a unique twist on these age-old structures: rhetorics of decolonization are now weaponized by autocratic regimes, just as they are normalized in the phantasmagoria of cultural practices. It is this paradoxical and entangled situation that we, perhaps somewhat emotionally, started to refer to as "perverse decolonization." This book is the result of a (self-)critical project of discussions, workshops, exhibitions and meetings in Cologne, Poland, Israel, Hong Kong and Chicago. Its conversations and essays question the twisted and oppressive climate in a world where true decolonization has yet to begin.
Contributions by Avital Barak, Saddie Choua, Cosmin Costinaş, Ekaterina Degot, Natasha Ginwala, Andrzej Leder, Georgy Mamedov, Walter Benn Michaels, Joanna Rajkowska, David Riff, Aneta Rostkowska, Joshua Simon, Jan Sowa, Hito Steyerl, Mark Terkessidis, Mi You.
Published in February 2022
English edition
15 x 21 cm (softcover)
164 pages
Xenogenesis
An extensive and comprehensive polyphonic exploration of the work of The Otolith Group, coming at a pivotal point in their practice.
The work of this London-based artist's collective comprised of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun covers politics of race and diversity and incorporates film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face.
Presenting all bodies of work contained in the Xenogenesis exhibition, this publication includes many materials and graphics from The Otolith Group's broader practice, including performance, lecture and research material. The outcome of over four years of collaboration, research and conversation, the publication is not a chronological exhibition catalogue or retrospective but a cross-section of their work which includes substantial contributions from the artists themselves, in the form of writing and direct engagement with its production.
The publication also brings together important thinkers, scholars, art historians and writers from disparate fields, who know and have worked with the group, as well as those who are writing from a contemporary perspective. They include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Annie Fletcher, Anselm Franke, Shanay Jhaveri, George E. Lewis, Mahan Moalemi, Fred Moten, Grant Watson, Vivian Ziherl and the late Mark Fisher each of whom reflect on a particular aspect of the Group's practice with supplementary materials such as archival images, documented conversations, early lecture performances as well as other accompanying texts and examinations of their research sites.
Sound American #26 – The OCCAM Issue
An issue dedicated to Éliane Radigue's ground-breaking compositional work, OCCAM Ocean as seen through the eyes of her chevaliers de Occam, the performers who, in collaboration with Radigue, have brought the sprawling musical eco-system to life.
Sound American releases for its twenty-sixth issue the OCCAM Issue, which focuses on the radical musical eco-system of French composer Éliane Radigue's OCCAM Ocean project. In a first for the publication, this issue is built solely around interviews with the performers that have collaborated with Radigue to produce this body of work over the last decade. Contributors include Charles Curtis, Carol Robinson, Rhodri Davies, Catherine Lamb, Julia Eckhardt, Silvia Tarozzi, Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, Laetitia Sonami, and Frédéric Blondy. All interviews were conducted by SA's editor, Nate Wooley, also a performer of Radigue's music. The issue features an opening invocation from Radigue herself, followed by writing on the history and practice of the OCCAM pieces, interviews, and a concluding essay by Wooley on his own experience performing OCCAM X. This special issue concludes with the last of a three-part series of “exquisite corpse” compositions, written especially for SA by inti figgis-vezueta in response to the preceding work of Moor Mother and Amirtha Kidambi.
This issue also comes with a special one-of-a-kind pull-out poster detailing the entire OCCAM Ocean composition in all of its interconnected glory. Designed by Remake Designs, this is a unique graphic perspective on the human web of collaboration that Radigue has created.
Je dors, je travaille
Conceived as a "bio-monograph", this catalogue offers a unique insight into the life and work of the French artist, sculptor and ceramist Valentine Schlegel. It features a large iconography, archives, and texts by sculptor and Schlegel specialist Hélène Bertin.
Valentine Schlegel developed her constantly changing daily art practice between Paris and Sète. Like a Swiss Army knife, she eventually mastered several techniques, producing everyday objects with sculptural shapes that include wooden flatware, ceramic vases, leather bags, and plaster fireplaces. Designed without any inherent hierarchy, and often in collaboration with the artist's friends, this body of work is made up of objects in a range of sizes and uses, from the fantastic to the quotidian. Schlegel also created many architectural elements in plaster intended for home interiors. Because of their immovable nature, these sculptures for everyday life are also the reason why Schlegel's work has remained little known. If she did not address only the world of art exhibitions through her work, she was nevertheless part of historic events at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at a time when the Pompidou Center did not exist.
Today, through Schlegel's practice, this publication, conceived as a "bio-monograph" devoted to Valentine Schlegel, seeks to highlight other addresses of art. Including new iconography and archival material, with biographical notes written by Hélène Bertin that provide readers with a clearer picture of both Schlegel and her approach, this reference monograph documents for the first time all of the fireplaces that Valentine Schlegel created for private homes—about one hundred from 1959 to 2002. The other aspects of her work are also discussed in order to understand the whole of her practice, intimately linked to her way of life, where the questions of autonomy of production and friendship are central.
Fourth edition (2021), expanded edition with English texts.
Tentacle
Plucked from her life on the streets of post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo, young maid Acilde Figueroa finds herself at the heart of a Santería prophecy: only she can travel back in time and save the ocean – and humanity – from disaster. But first she must become the man she always was – with the help of a sacred anemone. Tentacle is an electric novel with a big appetite and a brave vision, plunging headfirst into questions of climate change, technology, Yoruba ritual, queer politics, poverty, sex, colonialism and contemporary art. Bursting with punk energy and lyricism, it’s a restless, addictive trip: The Tempest meets the telenovela.
Be Good, If You Can't Be Good, Be Good at It Boom Boom Boom Boom
Rebecca Jane Arthur, Eva Giolo
BE GOOD, IF YOU CAN’T BE GOOD, BE GOOD AT IT Boom Boom Boom Boom is a publication composed of letters, notes, anecdotes,translations, stills and images: all traces of the creative process. The artists Rebecca Jane Arthur and Eva Giolo bring together their correspondence on the act of writing and of filmmaking, in all its complexity, struggles and playfulness.
The letters unpack themes such as the challenge of making personal work and the strength found in sharing vulnerability; the act of writing itself, language and translation; writing on moving images, on their practices and that of others; and the notion of a place as a container of memories, of interiority and the confrontation with home. The publication uses words and texts as images, and all images of persons or things are hidden. The publication acts as a negative to the films that we create, revealing that which cannot be.
Publisher: Les éditions du CVB
Publication Date: March 2021
Language : English & French
ISBN: 978-2-9601799-7-2
Softback, 311 pages, fully illustrated
Under the Rainbow - Over the Weather
Speculative fiction magazine with contributions by 16 international (comic)artists/ writers/ designers/ curators/ witches. Exploring the world in the 4th millennium through images, words and dreamscapes.
Plastic coil bound with plastic covers.
Transparent cover with “A Short Manifesto” by Dutch conceptual artist Stanley Brouwn.
48 fold out pages, 185x262mm (foldes out to 185x365)
Riso printed on 100gr Munken Lynx by Hocus Bogus Publishing
Edition of 150
Cover design by Finn Melvin Caird
Design, layout and proofread by Yahaira Brito Morfe
Edited, printed and bound by Dennis Muñoz Espadiña
Language: English
SSaliva: Landscapes
‘Landscapes’ is a first attempt to highlight Ssaliva’s visual work. Through a selection of 100 images – digital paintings based on original photographs or screenshots – the book takes us on a scenic journey into the artist’s mind. Recalling a wide variety of references from the fields of photography, painting, landscape architecture and even Internet art, Ssaliva’s paintings bear witness to a wistful sensitivity to urban and rural exploration. Ssaliva has made his region a real playground. Walking through the “indeterminate” or empty spaces of Liège and its surroundings, the artist showed his empathy for the interstices and other abandoned places charged with history. This is what he tried to transcribe in the modification of his digital paintings: A veil wrapping his landscapes in mysteries. With this book, Ssaliva sets a coherent backdrop to his musical production, further completing the puzzle of an instinctive body of work inscribed in the pure romantic tradition.
"François Boulanger is an audiovisual artist born in Liège, Belgium in 1983. He started producing music by the end of the 90’s/early 2000’s and producing his visual work around 2010. Active under several monikers, he started his experimental project ‘Ssaliva’ in 2011 which today covers the entire spectrum of his works. Under this alias, he developed hypnotic soundscapes based on sparse rythms, lush tones and crystallised textures. A personal and romantic rendition of a life amidst nature and city pollution.
His work as Ssaliva also consists of documenting equally ethereal and removed places in pictures, two compulsive and lonely processes that have made him accumulate thousands of strange, escapist mental landscapes. His approach to visual arts is similar to music in terms of process too, stretching images and melodies, compressing bits of it, adding colors and samples until they become part of his own vision. Sometimes ghostly, sometimes sacred, an instantly recognizable form of melancholia.” — Munix
The Elder Femme and Other Stone Writings
The Elder Femme and Other Stone Writings is Odete’s first poetry collection. What starts as an essayistic archaeology searching for traces of transgender lives in mythical Antiquity soon branches off into myriad poetic and visual forms, from intimate free verses and scribbled notes to historical reports, earthy speculations, and magical enchantments. Weaving both English and her native Portuguese, there is a porosity and impermanence to Odete’s language. Equally evocative and testimonial, the book offers, in Odete’s own words, a “paranoid archaeology” that dilutes the borders between the personal and the collective. The Elder Femme works as portal, voicing those that came before and those still to come, as in its opening poem: “one day/ i’ll thank her/ my mother/ for teaching me/ how to glue/ shattered vases”.
Odete is a multidisciplinary artist working between the fields of music, visual arts, writing, performance, and theatre, born in Porto in 1995. Her writings have previously appeared in Trains Magazine, Tranfeminist Zine, and others. Her work in music includes the edited EPs and albums THE CONSEQUENCES OF A BLOOD LANGUAGE (Genome 6.66 Mbp, 2021); Water Bender (New Scenario, 2020); For those who are bored paranoid(Self-release, 2019); Mooring (Rotten: Fresco, 2019); and Matrafona(Naivety, 2018). Her performances have been presented at Teatro São Luiz (Lisbon), CTM Festival (Berlin), BOCA Biennial of Contemporary Arts, MAAT Museum (Lisbon), Galeria Municipal do Porto (Porto), and Teatro Municipal Campo Alegre (Porto). In 2020 she won the ReXform Award for performing arts, from which resulted the project On Revelations and Muddy Becomings on which her first book is based.
Published 2021.
150 copies, first edition, original in English and Portuguese bilingual
Novel On Yellow Paper
I am a forward-thinking girl, and don’t stay where I am. ‘Left right, be bright.’
Pompey Casmilus, Stevie Smith’s loquacious alter ego, works as a secretary and writes down on yellow office paper this wickedly amusing novel. “Dear Reader,” she addresses us politely in the whirlwind of her opinions on death, sex, anti-Semitism, art, Greek tragedy, friendship, marriage, Nazism, gossip, and the suburbs. But most of all Pompey talks about love.
When Smith first tried to get her poems published in 1935, she was told by a publisher to “go away and write a novel.” Novel on Yellow Paper, the happy result of this advice, made its author an instant celebrity and was acclaimed as “a curious, amusing, provocative and very serious piece of work” (The London Times Literary Supplement, 1936).
Published 1936, 2022
Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971), was an English poet and novelist.
The Books Of Jacob
In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas, and a new unrest, begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires with throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumors of his sect's secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs. The story of Frank, a real historical figure around whom mystery and controversy swirl to this day, is the perfect canvas for the genius and unparalleled reach of Olga Tokarczuk. Narrated through the perspectives of his contemporaries, those who revere him, those who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is— The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.
In a nod to books written in Hebrew, The Books of Jacob is paginated in reverse, beginning on p. 955 and ending on p. 1 - but read traditionally, front cover to back.
Gedichten en gedachten in het Frans
Written in La Ferme Arpoix (Ceaux-en-Loudun) and Paris, 1998. Dedicated to Guy.
Staple bound, ltd. to 200 copies. Riso-printed on Munken Pure Rough 120gsm by Risiko Press in Borgerhout, covers silkscreened on Eskaboard by Maarten de With, copy editing by Sis Matthé, design by Kaye & Matthé, typeface: Elementa.
[The title of this book is in Dutch, the text is in French]
"Met dank aan Eliane Van De Velde en Marie-Sophie Beinke."
Biarritz
Written and edited in Biarritz, Borgerhout and Midsommarkransen, 2016—2021. Dedicated to Räffi, with much love. Another version of this text was published in Pfeil Magazin 10 (Montez Press, 2018); editor: Anja Dietmann, copy-editor: Stacy Skulnik. Epigraph from Numéro Deux (1975) by Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard. Presented on Saturday February 5th 2022 at Kransen, Borgerhout.
128x201mm, 40p, staple bound. Riso-printed on Arcoprint Edizioni Avorio 90g and Clairefontaine Blue 210g. Design by Kaye–Matthé, typefaces: Tribute, Gillies Gothic Light. Printed by Risiko Press at Kransen, covers silkscreened at Afreux, bound by Drukkerijcollectief De Wrikker. Edition of around 200.
Les sous-communs – Planification fugitive et étude noire
A political and aesthetic critique of racial capitalism and modes of social experimentation in the form of resistance to the colonial commons.
Stefano Harney (born 1962) is Honorary Professor at The Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia and a Visiting Critic at Yale School of Art. He has held teaching positions in New York, Leicester, London, and Singapore. He now teaches at the Dutch Art Institute. An interdisciplinary scholar, his research spans (the intersections of) social sciences, arts and humanities, as well as the fields of business and management.
Preface by Jack Halberstam.
Collective translation (original title: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Minor Compositions, 2013).
Graphic design: Sophie Demay & Maël Fournier-Comte (In the Shade of a Tree).
published in February 2022
French edition
12,5 x 19,5 cm (softcover)
208 pages
Having and Being Had
“My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,” Eula Biss writes, “the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.” Having just purchased her first home, the poet and essayist now embarks on a provocative exploration of the value system she has bought into. Through a series of engaging exchanges—in libraries and laundromats, over barstools and backyard fences—she examines our assumptions about class and property and the ways we internalize the demands of capitalism. Described by the New York Times as a writer who “advances from all sides, like a chess player,” Biss offers an uncommonly immersive and deeply revealing new portrait of work and luxury, of accumulation and consumption, of the value of time and how we spend it. Ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokemon, Biss asks, of both herself and her class, “In what have we invested?”
Eula Biss is the author of four books, including the New York Times bestseller On Immunity: An Inoculation, which was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review, and Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her work has appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere, and has been supported by an NEA Literature Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Spike #69 — Storytelling
There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. But how does this formula stand up when competing interests are fighting for narrative control? Where does self-expression end and branding begin? Let’s rewrite the story of how stories are written. Spike’s cast includes a Pomeranian and a psychoanalyst, an anthropologist and anonymous Instagrammers. Their tales are varied (and variously faithful), but what business do we have going to bat for consensus reality? They break out of tired oppositions to embrace anxiety, headlessness, and nonsense. So stop fronting, set your subjectivity aside, and settle in for some show and tell. For better or worse, stories are a way of remaking – not just recounting – the world!
With contributions by Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Joshua Citarella, Tea Hacic-Vlahovic, Martin Herbert, Omar Kholeif, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Sean Monahan, features on Tracey Emin, Sophie Calle, Julien Ceccaldi, Ho Tzu Nyen, and many more, as well as reviews from Hong Kong to Los Angeles to Vienna.
Nosferasta: The Book
Marking the first UK commission by Brooklyn-based filmmakers Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer in collaboration with Oba, Gasworks has published a 176-page book that explores the ever-expanding vampiric universe of Nosferasta.
Spanning 500 years of colonial destruction, human trafficking and blood sucking, Nosferasta is a Rastafarian vampire film that reimagines Oba’s origin story in the late 15th century, when he is seduced by the vampire Christopher Columbus, ensuring his undying allegiance to the colonial project. Combining film forms and jumping across multiple timelines, Nosferasta examines the guilt of being complicit in imperial conquest, while acknowledging the extreme difficulty of unlearning centuries of vampiric conditioning. Ultimately, the film tackles an uncomfortable question:
How can you decolonise yourself, if it’s in your blood?
Interspersed with excerpts from Oba’s literacy diaries, Nosferasta: The Book features critical essays, speculative fiction and visual contributions by Peggy Ahwesh, Lou Cornum, Alex Esco, Sabel Gavaldon, Adam Khalil, Mutabaruka, Oba, Austin Sley Julian, Bayley Sweitzer, and Laura Vallés. Designed by fag tips (aka Virgil b/g Taylor).
Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller
Contributions by John Waters, Mink Stole, Gary Indiana, et al.
Cookie Mueller was a firecracker, a cult figure, a wit, a wild child, a writer, a go go dancer, a mother, an unlikely queer icon, an alchemist, a lightning rod in dark times. A child of suburban 50‘s Maryland and post-beatnik 60’s freakdom, she made her name first as an actress in the films of John Waters, and then as an art critic and columnist, a writer of hilarious and sublime stories and short fiction and a maven of the Downtown art world. Edgewise tells the story of Cookie‘s life through an oral history composed from over 80 interviews with the people who knew her. After tracing back some of the steps of the author’s 7-year trip in search of Cookie, the voices take us from the late 60’s artist communes of Baltimore to 70’s Provincetown where romantics and queers crawled the dunes and discos, to the sleepless creative high of post-industrial Bohemian New York, through 80‘s West Berlin and Positano, and into the depths and contradictions of Cookie’s life and loves.
Since her death from AIDS in 1989, Cookie’s work and life have made her an underground icon. Her original texts, first published by Hanuman Books and Semiotext(e), have been reprinted by Serpent’s Tail, and she is remembered for her appearances in the No Wave films and theater of Amos Poe, Michel Auder, Gary Indiana and others.
Along with the text, Edgewise consists of original artwork, unpublished photographs and archival material, and photo contributions by Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, David Armstrong, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar and others.
Edgewise is a meditation on memory and story-telling.
Hypnotised: A Journey Through Trance Music 1990-2005
Trance has been the flagship for electronic music across the globe during the nineties and early zeroes. The sound’s trademark optimistic and euphoric aspects has brought some of the most compelling musical pieces of its time, and undoubtedly had a significant influence on future electronic music to come. Yet, its historical significance has been highly overlooked.
Hypnotised is the first encyclopedia to cover the global trance movement during its most prolific years. The 322-page book spans a near-complete discography of supposedly essential albums, labels and releases, alongside exclusive photos and in-depth interviews with influential artists and label owners.
The Well-Dressed Wound
A gleeful grotesquerie and savage satire, featuring Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln and the Devil, along with Civil War dead, deconstructed couture, and gay ghosts.
The Well-Dressed Wound is Derek McCormack's play script "séance" a fashion show by the dead for the living. In the depths of the Civil War, in a theater in P. T. Barnum's American Museum on Broadway, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln participate in a staged spiritualistic rite. But the medium conducting them has invited along another being: the Devil, disguised as twentieth-century French fashionista Martin Margiela (aka "King Faggot"). What follows is the most fiendish runway show ever mounted, complete with war dead, deconstructed couture, and gay ghosts infected with all manner of infectious agents, including oozy AIDS.
While his previous fictions have explored the darker corners of country music, high fashion, and camp, The Well-Dressed Wound is McCormack's most radical work yet, occultishly evoking the evil-twin muses of transgressive literature, Kathy Acker and Pierre Guyotat. The creation thus conjured is a gleeful grotesquerie, a savage satire not so much of fashion as of death, a work that, as Bruce Hainley observes in Artforum, puts "the 'pus' back in opus." Here death and life spin on a viral double helix of contamination and couture, blistering and bandages, history and hysteria, semen and seams. "Being dead is so very now," Hainley opines. "This tiny tome (a time bomb, a tomb) is to die for and radically alive."
Mauve Desert
First published in 1987, Nicole Brossard's classic novel returns to Coach House in a new edition. A seminal text in Canadian and feminist literature, Mauve Desert is a must-read for readers and writers alike.
This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert, fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor chasing fear and desire, cutting loose from her mother and her mother's lover, Lorna, in their roadside Mauve Motel. In the second book, Maudes Laures reads Mauve Desert, becomes obsessed with it, and embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning. The third book - Mauve, the horizon - is Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert. Like all good translations, it is both the same and revealingly different from the original.
Nicole Brossard's writing is agile and inventive; from moment to moment gripping, exhilarating and erotic. Her language drifts and swells like sand dunes in a desert, cresting and accumulating into a landscape that shifts like wind and words; she translates the practice of translation, the pulse of desire.
Le Chauffage — Issue #2
Francesca Percival, Felix Rapp and 1 more
Le Chauffage (french for “The Heater”) is an artist-run publication based in Brussels and Vancouver. It is conceived as a cross-continental, community oriented platform. Le Chauffage brings together the work and writing of artists / friends from different cities with the intent to spark discussion and fuel casual forms of critical discourse.
The second issue of Le Chauffage contains photographs and texts, photographs of text, photographs as text and vice versa. Loosely thinking through the format of The Photo Essay celebrated by John Szarkowski in an eponymously titled exhibition at MoMA in 1965, this issue considers some of the artistic possibilities that can be found in such an archaic and historically male-dominated form.
Many of the contributions that make up this second issue are not photo essays per se. But each one of them considers the printed page as a space in its own right. The magazine becomes an interior where words and images entertain a malleable and distinctly porous relationship. At times, it is also a space where artists and writers from different cities were invited to meet and collaborate. And since interest in other people is also an interest in yourself, it is always unclear who is really transforming who?
Contributions by: Bob Cain & Linda Miller, Moyra Davey, Laurie Kang, Niklas Taleb, Madeleine Paré & Diane Severin Nguyen, Josephine Pryde, Slow Reading Club, Ken Lum, Isaac Thomas, Vijai Maia Patchineelam, Artun Alaska Arasli & Graeme Wahn, Stephen Waddell, Maya Beaudry & Chloe Chignell, Lisa Robertson, groana melendez, Victoria Antoinette Megens and Will Holder.
Editors: Emile Rubino and Felix Rapp
Co-Editor: Francesca Percival
Design: Francesca Percival and Felix Rapp
Cover Design: Francesca Percival
Printed by: Cassochrome, Belgium
Edition of 350
Beyond the World's End
In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises.
Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms.
Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in works by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.