Essays

Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay
Anne Carson
Princeton University Press - 17.00€ -

Anne Carson's remarkable first book about the paradoxical nature of romantic love. Since it was first published, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson's lyrical meditation on love in ancient Greek literature and philosophy, has established itself as a favorite among an unusually broad audience, including classicists, essayists, poets, and general readers.

Beginning with the poet Sappho's invention of the word "bittersweet" to describe Eros, Carson's original and beautifully written book is a wide-ranging reflection on the conflicted nature of romantic love, which is both "miserable" and "one of the greatest pleasures we have."

Oh, Tongue (english edition)
Simone Forti
Nero Editions - 20.00€ -

A new revised version of the notebook of the legendary American dancer, artist and choreographer Simone Forti in which she shares her poetry as well as her thoughts on dance, the body, writing, the state of the world. A collection of experimental texts, imagined dialogues, news animations and poetic thoughts on life and politics. The book contains an afterword by Fred Dewey and a postscript by poet and Fluxus artist Jackson MacLow.

American dancer and choreographer Simone Forti (born 1935 in Florence, Italy) has been a leading figure in the development of contemporary performance over more than fifty years. Artist, choreographer, dancer, writer, Forti has dedicated herself to the research of a kinesthetic awareness, always engaging with experimentation and improvisation. Investigating the relationship between object and body, through animal studies, news animations and land portraits, she reconfigured the concept of performance and dance. Forti emigrated from Italy with her family via Switzerland to Los Angeles in 1938, where she subsequently studied for four years with choreographer Anna Halprin and has since spent most of her life. She joined the experimental downtown art scene in New York during the emergence of performance art, process-based work and Minimal Art and spent a fruitful time in Rome in the late 1960s, where she used the spaces of L'Attico to study and perform. Her work is seen as a precursor of the famous Judson Dance Theater—a group of artists experimenting with dance, including Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer—and Minimal Art, although she prefers to be referred simply as a "movement artist."

Monitoring Control
Paolo Cirio
Nero Editions - 15.00€ -

Combining art and activism, semiotics and capitalism, art and finance, control and subversion, Monitoring Control by Paolo Cirio represents a critique of the social manipulation imposed by new technologies, while examining the counter-control that individuals can implement to dismantle these forces, sabotage them, and protect themselves.

The book presents a collection of ten texts by Paolo Cirio, artist, hacktivist, one of the most attentive investigators in the artistic field of the effects of the information society. With a text by Bruce Sterling and a conversation between Christian Marazzi, Marco Scotini, and Paolo Cirio himself, it gives visual and verbal form to all the forces that control our existence: new media such as Instagram, Facebook, mugshot websites, Google Street View, etc., highlighting the overt yet covert ways in which these tools control our daily activities and lives.

The volume is accompanied by a gallery of images representing some of the thousands of patents of algorithms collected by Cirio on the web to highlight the tools used on the Internet and by artificial intelligence for surveillance and social manipulation.

Theater, Garden, Bestiary – A Materialist History of Exhibitions
Tristan Garcia, Vincent Normand (eds.)
Sternberg Press - 28.00€ -

This volume both gathers and expands on the results of the research project “Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions” held at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, and proposes to draft a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of art institutions. It undertakes a transdisciplinary history, at the nexus of art history, science studies, and philosophy, exploring the role the exhibition played in the construction of the conceptual categories of modernity, and outlines a historiographical model that grasps the exhibition as both an aesthetic and epistemic site.

Contributions by Etienne Chambaud, Elitza Dulguerova, Anselm Franke, Tristan Garcia, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Yuk Hui, Pierre Huyghe, Sami Khatib, Jeremy Lecomte, Stéphane Lojkine, Rafael Mandressi, Vincent Normand, Peter Osborne, Filipa Ramos, Juliane Rebentisch, João Ribas, Pamela Rosenkranz, Anna-Sophie Springer, Lucy Steeds, Olivier Surel, Etienne Turpin, Kim West, Charles Wolfe.

Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984-2021
Gary Indiana
Seven Stories Press - 24.00€ -

Whether he's describing Tracy Emin or Warhol, the films of Barbet Schroeder ("Schroeder is well aware that life is not a narrative; that we impose form on the movements of chance, contingency, and impulse....") or the installations of Barbara Kruger ("Kruger compresses the telling exchanges of lived experience that betray how skewed our lives are..."), Indiana is never just describing.

Indiana champions shining examples of literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver the coup de grãace when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breath-in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent way-about high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it's also political, plus it's a riot of fun on the page

GARY INDIANA is a novelist and critic who has chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. From Horse Crazy (1989), a tale of feverish love set against the backdrop of downtown New York amid the AIDS epidemic, to Do Everything in the Dark (2003), "a desolate frieze of New York's aging bohemians" ( n+1), Indiana's novels mix horror and bathos, grim social commentary with passages of tenderest, frailest desire. In 2015, Indiana published his acclaimed anti-memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love, following it up in 2018 with Vile Days, a collection of his art criticism for the Village Voice. Called one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today" by the London Review of Books, "the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society" by Jamaica Kincaid, and "one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche" by the Guardian, Gary Indiana remains both inimitable and impossible to pin down. 

The Autobiography of a Language
Mirene Arsanios
Futurepoem - 22.00€ -

Here the mirror image of the almost hallucinatory, heart-rending loss of the familiar is literary defamiliarization. Arsanios both mourns and blasts apart the notion of the mother tongue, reminding us that for each “mother tongue” at least another tongue is silenced. Desire propels her genre-defying writing, which grief notwithstanding still manages to tongue languages, and that is her genius. — Mónica de la Torre

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, and Guernica, among others. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace fellow, and an ART OMI resident in fall 2017. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday night reading series at the Poetry Project from 2017–19.

Women Looking at Women Looking at Women
Annemarie Wadlow
Page Not Found - 20.00€ -  out of stock

In what ways have women artists come together to investigate their own image? This publication delves into histories of feminist and queer collective practice, expanding on the various ways women claim agency of their identity, via collaborations that connect intergenerational and far-away friendships. Each chapter features artistic and theoretical case studies that discuss images produced by women artists, about women artists; proposing that to gaze upon someone represented with care and autonomy provides more affirmative ways to relate to ourselves. It discovers that to pay homage to overlooked knowledge of women artists builds a case for the artist as researcher. Only by engaging in both roles can we unveil what is not taught in the mainstream and inspire a more inclusive, generous future.

Each aspect of the book’s design is a collaborative endeavour, expanding the notion of individual authorship. It is with this sentiment that creating the publication became research in itself, via collaboration with both direct peers and an extended genealogy.

“Women Looking at Women Looking at Women” is designed by Marijn van der Leeuw, Esther Vane, India Scrimgeour, Hannah Williams and Annemarie Wadlow.

Annemarie Wadlow (1993, UK) is a research-led artist working between moving image, writing and photography. Her work explores the middle ground between image and imagination, questioning notions of inheritance, personal identity and belonging. She is the co-founder of Nice Flaps, an artist initiative that hosts experimental life drawing sessions.

La Société n'existe pas: Images de la guerre civile sous Margaret Thatcher
Maxime Boidy
Même pas l'hiver - 9.00€ -

« La société n’existe pas » : la formule de l’ancienne Première ministre britannique Margaret Thatcher est restée célèbre. On connaît moins ses ramifications en images, de la guerre civile anglaise du XVIIe siècle jusqu’à l’art contemporain en passant par la culture populaire en Grande-Bretagne. De photographies en affiches, de manuscrits en frontispices, ce livre traverse l’histoire pour cerner les échos visuels du thatchérisme. Son point de départ est une pièce de l’artiste Jeremy Deller : la reconstitution d’une bataille ouvrière entre mineurs grévistes et policiers survenue en 1984. Maxime Boidy en extrait une série de scènes qui sont autant d’infléchissements de l’idée de « corps politique ». Ce faisant, il dessine la discrète et brûlante actualité de ces formes symboliques, à l’heure de la guerre civile qu’a imposé le thatchérisme globalisé.

Maxime Boidy est enseignant-chercheur en études visuelles. Il s’intéresse principalement à l’histoire des savoirs de l’image et à l’iconographie politique sous toutes ses formes.

Un Moyen Âge émancipateur
Thomas Golsenne et Clovis Maillet
Même pas l'hiver - 9.00€ -

Une récente enquête menée dans les écoles d’art et de design francophones aboutit à un constat étonnant : beaucoup d’étudiante·s affirment que l’artisanat est l’avenir de l’art et que les sorcières détruiront le patriarcat. Iels s’approprient un imaginaire composite mêlant fantasy et moines copistes, herboristerie médiévale et communalisme. Dans le même temps, des slogans en latin sont tagués sur les murs par de jeunes révolutionnaires. Des remèdes au capitalisme pourraient-ils se trouver dans le monde qui précéda son avènement ? Pour sonder cet imaginaire politique et artistique construit sur un passé lointain, Clovis Maillet et Thomas Golsenne analysent des œuvres contemporaines, des sources médiévales et la pensée de Silvia Federici et William Morris qui, chacun·e à leur endroit, proposent une vision du Moyen Âge émancipatrice.

Maître de conférences en histoire de l’art et études visuelles à l’Université de Lille, ancien directeur de l’unité de recherche Bricologie à la Villa Arson à Nice, Thomas Golsenne a publié Carlo Crivelli et le matérialisme mystique du Quattrocento (2017).

Professeur·e d’histoire et théorie des arts dans les écoles d’art d’Angers et de Genève, Clovis Maillet est aussi artiste performeur·euse en duo avec Louise Hervé et médiéviste. Iel est l’auteur·ice du livre Les Genres fluides : de Jeanne d'Arc aux saintes trans (2020).

Un énoncé surpris par hasard
Lytle Shaw
Même pas l'hiver - 9.00€ -

Lorsqu’Allen Ginsberg s’enregistre sur un magnétophone et capte fortuitement des émissions de radio, le souffle du vent et des conversations, des agents du FBI et de la CIA l’écoutent, à la recherche d’aveux involontaires. En considérant ces agents comme de sérieux théoriciens de la poésie, Lytle Shaw montre qu’ils s’inspirent des expérimentations d’avant-garde et transforment une technique libératrice en un outil répressif.

Lytle Shaw enseigne la littérature à l’Université de New York. Il a publié Frank O’Hara : The Poetics of Coterie en 2006 (University of Iowa Press) et Fieldworks : From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics en 2013 (University of Alabama). En 2021, est paru New Grounds for Dutch Landscape (OEI).

Le Discours des autres
Craig Owens
Même pas l'hiver - 25.00€ -

Craig Owens (1950-1990) a bouleversé la théorie de l’art en une décennie d’intense travail. À la fin des années 1970, aux États-Unis, il s’engage dans l’aventure intellectuelle postmoderne, en quête d’alternatives à un discours moderniste cramponné aux problèmes formels. Owens se penche sur des pratiques artistiques conçues à la croisée des médiums, comme celles de Robert Smithson ou de Trisha Brown. Lecteur des philosophes poststructuralistes, il soutient que les oeuvres se composent de signes ouverts à l’interprétation. Owens place ainsi les spectateur·ices au premier plan, tout en apportant une inscription théorique inédite aux performances de Laurie Anderson et aux oeuvres postconceptuelles de Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine ou Martha Rosler. Attentif au genre des artistes et inspiré par des réflexions sur le pouvoir du regard masculin, Owens écrit ensuite sur le féminisme et la domination. Ses essais prennent une tonalité sociale et politique. Ils touchent aussi à des questions ouvertes par les études postcoloniales. Autant de recherches interrompues par le sida, dont Owens meurt en 1990. 

Ce recueil, établi, introduit et traduit par Gaëtan Thomas, permet de suivre les expérimentations d’une oeuvre portée par une réflexivité exceptionnelle.

Gaëtan Thomas est historien (médialab Sciences Po, Paris). Il a établi le recueil Pictures: S’approprier la photographie, New York 1979-2014 (Le Point du Jour, 2016) qui rassemble des textes de Douglas Crimp.

Immutable: Designing History
Chris Lee
Onomatopee - 22.00€ -  out of stock

Immutable: Designing History explores the banal genre of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity). This is framed as a ~5,000 year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing — from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed ledgers, like the blockchain. Immutability figures as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering a variety of techniques (material, technological, administrative, etc.) of securitization against the entropy of a document's movement through space/time, and the political.

This project is driven by a contrast: design educators tend to teach forms like logos, books, websites, etc., but not passports, money, property deeds, etc., in spite of these being, I contend, design's most profoundly consequential forms.

As an alternative historiography, Immutable gestures both towards anthropologist Laura Nader's call to "study up" (on those in power), and the radical educator Paolo Freire's recognition of the "limit situation" as a generative condition for emancipatory praxis. The book's aim is to orient graphic design towards the vocation of imagining, naming, and remembering beyond the horizons of its role as a managerial, administrative, and colonial instrument that imposes a rationality of vision and accountability upon what is knowable, thinkable and sayable.

Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. He is a graduate of OCADU and the Sandberg Instituut. His research/studio practice explores graphic design's entanglement with capitalism and colonialism/ity through the banal genre of the document. He is also currently developing a typographical project that narrates the oscillating status of Asians between the "model minority" and "yellow peril" as a function of the consolidation of Euro-American settler identity. Chris is an Assistant Professor in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at the Pratt Institute.

The Material Kinship Reader
Clementine Edwards, Kris Dittel
Onomatopee - 22.00€ -

What does it mean to acknowledge one’s closeness to, enmeshment in or even kinship with the material world? And what does it mean to question family structures – the way they organise, coerce and make deviant certain lifeforms – and dwell in other possibilities of kin-making?

Not just a jolly rethinking of objects or a polyamorous romp through relationships, The Material Kinship Reader reckons with the extractavist histories of materials and the social relations that frame much of contemporary life.

Spanning fiction and theory, the collection of texts expand the idea of an artist’s book by bringing words into conversation with an aesthetic proposition. Clementine Edwards’ artwork is the visual weft to the book’s written net. From colonial conquest to climate collapse, The Material Kinship Reader tells toxic and tender stories of interdependence among all things sentient and insentient.

Including contributions by Sara Ahmed, Hana Pera Aoake, Roland Barthes, Joannie Baumgärtner, Heather Davis, Kris Dittel, Clementine Edwards, Ama Josephine B. Johnstone, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sophie Lewis, Steven Millhauser, Jena Myung, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Michelle Murphy, Ada M. Patterson, Kim TallBear and Michelle Tea

On the Benefits of Friendship
Isabelle Graw
Sternberg Press - 22.00€ -

Isabelle Graw reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus.

By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity—if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.

"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships." 
— Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

"Isabelle Graw has written the Elective Affinities for the twenty-first century, as a feminist novel and a dysfunctional family portrait set in the contemporary art world."
— Violaine Huisman, author of The Book of Mother

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder ofTexte zur Kunst in Berlin.

When the Roots Start Moving – First Mouvement – To Navigate Backward – Resonating with Zapatismo
Chto Delat + Free Home University
Archive Books - 22.00€ -

To Navigate Backward: Resonating with Zapatismo a book-within-a-book, the first of three mouvements (as in a musical composition) is a collection of essays titled When the Roots Start Moving: Chto Delat and Free Home University—investigating predicaments of rootedness and rootlessness and notions of belonging and of displacement across different geographical and epistemological coordinates.

Zapatismo—the insurgent movement of Indigenous peoples from Mexico—emerges as a form of belonging, a home (or a homecoming) for our hopes and political imaginaries, providing a praxis to learn from and with. The contributors of this book, without romanticizing or objectifying the Zapatista struggle toward Autonomy, offer their understanding of the Zapatistas' movement, of their poetics and politics within an Indigenous cosmovision and cosmopolitics, but also in relation with the current global ecological and social crises.

The book extend the research and practice of artistic collective Chto Delat, long since adopting Zapatismo as a lens to self-reflect and emblematically reminding of how the Zapatista imaginary continues to inspire those who are looking for emancipatory tools: through art, language, radical pedagogy and conviviality, as a practice of commoning and collectively reimagining an otherwise.

To Navigate Backward: Resonating with Zapatismo is a small act of reciprocity—in preparation for the Zapatistas' visit to the European continent, a gesture of solidarity with those who, with fierce care, leave their homes to reverse imposed trajectories, to look in the same direction and share a common horizon.

The conversation hosted in this book by Free Home University will continue in the following two mouvements—Between Displacement and Belonging and Motherlands/Mother Earth.

The collective Chto Delat (What is to be done?) was founded in early 2003 in St. Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism. Chto Delat sees itself as an artistic cell and also as a community organizer for a variety of cultural activities intent on politicizing "knowledge production". The activity of collective takes responsibility for a postsocialist condition and actualization of forgetten and repressed potentiality of Soviet past and often works as a politics of commemoration. From its inception, the collective has been publishing an English-Russian newspaper focused on the urgent issues of Russian cultural politics, in dialogue with the international context. In 2013, Chto Delat initiated an educational platform—School of Engaged Art in Petersburg and also provides resources for a space called Rosa's House of Culture.

Free Home University exists at the crossroad of engaged art, experimental pedagogy, and political commitment since 2014. Based in Lecce (Italy), FHU has been carrying out artistic investigations and processes of convivial research, engaging with communities of struggle and practice. Artists, farmers, activists, asylum seekers, scholars, thinkers and doers collectively inform learning spaces, through living, studying, and creating together.

Unannounced Voices – Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions
Zdenka Badovinac
Sternberg Press - 12.00€ -  out of stock

Alternative forms of curatorial and institutional work suitable to our novel conditions, when the relationship between physical and online work must be revised.

In our current era of global pandemic and violent political upheaval, the question must be asked: What is our future and whose voices will announce it? These can only be situated voices, each with its own body and space, formed through dialogue within their own communities and in reaction and resistance to dominant discourses. Museum director, curator, and writer Zdenka Badovinac argues that these situated voices of people, artworks, and exhibitions, rooted in the local, can bring incisive, productive change. The call of these voices, in rethinking art, curation, and institutions, is the subject of this powerful essay.

Zdenka Badovinac is a curator, writer and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb. She served as Director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana (1993-2020). In her work, Badovinac highlights the difficult processes of redefining history alongside different avant-garde traditions within contemporary art.

Wonderflux – A Decade of e-flux Journal
E-flux journal
Sternberg Press - 18.00€ -

Wonderflux brings together a group of longtime contributors with graphic artists to collaborate on illustrated essays and develop a new pictorial language around some of the emergent consistencies and overarching issues that defined the first decade of e-flux journal.

In Wonderflux you will find yourself in front of disappearing mirrors held up to curators, critics, and artists; sailing through counterfactual universes; face-to-face with cold-blooded killers, faceless men, weary but buoyant prophets; all the while imbued with stubborn thriving and stubborn refusal to be moved or monetized, and once in a while having earnest conversations with robot(s and) workers.

The authors included here have shaped the varied concerns and urgencies of e-flux journal since 2008. As a theory-driven art journal made up entirely of hypertext and digital images and embraced by academic circles, we sometimes wonder about the artistic and sensual use of text and image. Does the thinking of some of our favorite authors also speak to a place beyond floods of automatic links and references and rectangular photographic portals? To a broader and more applied artistic domain like the imaginative sensibility of illustration, where entire worlds arise from the simple and deliberate placement of lines on paper?

Contributions by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Raqs Media Collective & Freddy Carrasco, Liam Gillick, Elizabeth A. Povinelli & Clara Bessijelle Johansson, Martha Rosler & Josh Neufeld, Reza Negarastani & Keith Tilford, Hu Fang & Mojo Wang, Keller Easterling & Meijia Xu.

Cottonmouth Kisses
Clint Catalyst
Manic D Press - 16.00€ -

With wicked sarcasm and brilliant agility, Catalyst shreds the surface of all his many subjects—gay relationships, backwater adolescence, and spiraling addiction—and ignites a bonfire of personal honesty. Whether he's writing about a chance sexual encounter at a Goth club or revealing the inner thoughts of young hustlers, Catalyst grinds platitudes into toxic dust with a vivid, whip-smart voice.

"Clint Catalyst has the magical knack for turning the most ethereal of thoughts and feelings into tangible imagery. He creates beauty with an original hybrid of brutality and love that takes my brain to its favorite place." - Anthony Kiedis, Red Hot Chili Peppers

Making Matters: A Vocabulary for Collective Arts
Janneke Wesseling, Florian Cramer (eds)
Valiz, Amsterdam - 22.50€ -  out of stock

The world today faces overwhelming ecological and social problems and the concern for material existence on earth is more pressing than ever. Making Matters spells out various roles that visual artists and designers play facing these issues. Collective action is necessary and inevitable.

Collective action often changes the artist’s identity and working habits: from individuality and autonomy to collectivity and collaboration, both locally and globally. These developments have given rise to new kinds of collective art and design practices: artists work together with non-artists, make products for their local environment and take on multiple identities, such as researcher, community activist, computer hacker or business consultant. 

Making Matters looks at art practices across all continents that do not conform to a Western concept of art nor to traditional distinctions between art, design, research and activism—where the boundaries between art, design, research and activism become blurred or are dissolved.

The entries in this vocabulary experiment with concepts and keywords of current art practices that may no longer be recognizable as art.

Editorial committee: Florian Cramer, Anja Groten, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Pia Louwerens, Marie-José Sondeijker, Janneke Wesseling

Contributors:  Aliens in Green, a.pass / Lilia Mestre, Florian Cramer, Display Distribute / Elaine W. Ho, Feral Atlas / Lili Carr & Feifei Zhou Anja Groten, Thalia Hoffman, Jatiwangi art Factory / Bunga Siagian & Ismal Muntaha, Eleni Kamma, Frans-Willem Korsten, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Pia Louwerens, Dani Ploeger, Kate Rich, Femke Snelting, Olu Taiwo, Janneke Wesseling, West / Baruch Gottlieb, West / Akiem Helmling, Z. Blace

The New Sentence
Ron Silliman
Roof Books - 22.00€ -

Originally appearing in 1977 and now in its 11th printing, this classic collection of essays by one of the sharpest minds in American contemporary poetic thought remains Roof's best seller to date. It is a collection with rich insight into Silliman's own monumental poetical work and the writing of his peers, a book which both illuminates the concerns of the era in which it was written and radiates outward with a tremendous scope that continues to bear fruit for the contemporary reader.

On Figure/s. Drawing After Bellmer
Kate Macfarlane, Michael Newman, Sharon Kivland, & Louis Mason (eds)
Ma Bibliotheque - 17.00€ -  out of stock

Raised by a fascist father in Nazi Germany, the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) dedicated his œuvre to a perverse rewriting of the symbolic order. Famous for the two dolls he constructed in the mid-1930s, his transgressive ideas around the body as anagram were shared by his partner Unica Zürn. Both broke received codes of behaviour and the implicit rules of language, providing fertile ground for artists and other thinkers, including feminists, to similarly rewrite the body. ON FIGURE/S is published in parallel with the exhibition FIGURE/S: drawing after Bellmer (Drawing Room, London, September 2021). It gathers responses to its themes: body as letter, word and sentence; perversion and enjoyment; technical and forensic drawing in pursuit of pleasure; the other than human—becoming object, plant, animal. This book is a way to think through and with works of art and their histories, involving multiple textual forms, collage, and drawing, which take the radical and transgressive energy of Bellmer and Zürn in unexpected directions.

Contributors: Paul Buck,  Lola Bunting , Alice Butler, Paul Chan, Iris Colomb, Vincent Dachy, Zoë Dowlen, Rachel Genn, Aurelia Guo,  Mathew Hale, Tom Hastings, Rebecca Jagoe, Sharon Kivland, Sarah Lederman, Kate Macfarlane, Kumi Machida, Louis Mason, Reba Maybury, Jade Montserrat, John Murphy, Michael Newman, Bernard Noël, Tamarin Norwood , Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Aura Satz, Sophie Seita, Anne Lesley Selcer,  Isabel Seligman, Sarah Wilson 

On Care
Rebecca Jagoe & Sharon Kivland, (eds)
Ma Bibliotheque - 21.00€ -

Care is a matter of responsibility for human and nonhuman allies, an ecological network. Care is an imperative, and acting with care approaches the world beyond selfhood. ON CARE, an aggregate of voices, discusses the politics of caring, support, and the role of welfare in an increasingly neoliberal society. It questions who is seen as worthy of care, whose narratives are given attention, and whose lives are overlooked in a complex web of assemblages: conceptions of medical authority, the co-option of self-care in political rhetoric, care as a commodity in the hospitality industry, intergenerational intimacy, sexecology; care as utopian and care as transactional. ON CARE maps a constellation of perspectives, as testaments, fictions, and essays, addressing the relation between good health, interdependence, and the ethics of (self)care. 

Contributors: Tom Allen, Uma Breakdown, Alice Butler, Oisín Byrne, Julia Calver, Jamie Crewe, Juliette Desorgues, Rachel Genn, Laura Godfrey-Isaacs, Laura González, Holly Graham, Helen Hester, Justin Hogg, Juliet Jacques, Mati Jhurry & Rebecca Jagoe,  Juliet Johnson, Sophie Jung, Daisy Lafarge, Elisabeth Lebovici, Rebecca Lennon, Rona Lorimer, Katharina Ludwig, Mira Mattar, Martina Mullaney, Cinzia Mutigli, Carolina Ongaro, Molly Palmer, Roy Claire Potter, Nat Raha, Helena Reckitt, Ruiz Stephinson, Erica Scourti, Victoria Sin, Himali Singh Soin & Tyler Rai, Miguel Soto Karlovic,  Isabella Streffen, Jamie Sutcliffe, Maija Timonen, Lynn Turner, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Daniella Valz Gen, Nina Wakeford, Alberta Whittle 

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