Devoted to Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), this monograph appears with an exhibition at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, which brings together around 100 works from over fifteen years of production (1968–1985). The exhibition explores how the artist never ceased to reinvent herself through political and vibrant contemporary work, developing an original, ephemeral sculptural language, at times performative in act and informed by her research into primitive myths and rock art. It reveals her relationship to the visible and invisible, her way of rendering the unspeakable intelligible through traces of the body and its relation to nature.

This book on the films of Anton Vidokle features essays and conversations by theorists, curators, and artists exploring the themes of technological immortality and resurrection informed by Cosmist philosophy.

Citizens of the Cosmos examines the artist Anton Vidokle's films and the Cosmist philosophy underpinning them. It features essays and conversations with Vidokle by seminal contemporary theorists, curators, and artists: Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Raqs Media Collective. This is the first book to survey Vidokle's Cosmism-related filmic output, begun in 2014, and includes full scripts from the films.

The book's contributors speculate on Vidokle's Cosmist conceptions of technological immortality, utopian resurrection, museology, and space travel, grappling with how these ideas embroil or crystallize contemporary theories, practices, and technologies: atmospheric manipulation, cryonics, biopolitics, extraplanetary prospecting, geo-engineering, transhumanism, genetics.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi disagrees with the Cosmist conjecture of death as a flaw in the conception of the human being. Elizabeth Povinelli digests the life-nonlife mattering of dust through relationships to and from the human and more-than-human ancestors to come.

Boris Groys contemplates the gravitational forces between Cosmism and communism according to cosmic and social orders, grounded as they are in the laws of both physics and socialist politics. Keti Chukhrov considers the formation of thinking through madness, dying, and reasoning according to Cosmist philosophical and religious debates and beliefs.

Raqs Media Collective and Anton Vidokle discuss different cultures of death, finitude, and rituals. Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins examine the in-betweeness of the categories of life and death through the designs of terraforming vehicles navigating interplanetary space travel.

Daniel Muzyczuk investigates Vidokle's interests in the context of the history of the collection at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, while Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle converse about filmmaking references and methods, from voiceover narrative to editing processes.

Edited by Miguel Amado. Contributions by Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Raqs Media Collective, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth A. Povinelli.

Can radical film practices help to understand a disintegrating world? Can they have a healing effect? How can we maintain structures of solidarity in the field of radical media production for societies in turmoil and transition? And what does radical cultural practice look like in times such as ours, when everywhere we turn there seem to lurk even more acute challenges?

Edited by members of the Berlin chapter of the International Radical Film Network, this collection investigates practices of audio-visual production that act on and struggle with the conditions of our time. The contributions were created by film practitioners, artists, activists, as well as academics and critics.

Publication including the films Transformation Scenario, 70.001, and Faux Terrain, as well as a visual essay, a glossary and texts by Heike Geißler, Fanni Fetzer, and Franciska Zólyom.

“When I visited the Elias Canetti archive at the Zentralbibliothek Zurich, I was looking for manuscripts and sketches for his major work Crowds and Power (1960). I imagined that Canetti must have made drawings, as the behaviour of the various crowd types he identified was described in such detail. I hoped that these drawings would help me transfer the group behaviour he describes to virtual figures in an animated film.

The archive of manuscripts, arranged by Elias Canetti himself, was handed over to the Zurich library and contains the notes and sketches he completed during the development of Crowds and Power, a period of almost forty years. However, in this context I found no drawings—Canetti had only made graphic lists on various themes. So where did Canetti's precise descriptions of the scenes come from?”

Clemens von Wedemeyer (born 1974 in Göttingen, lives and works in Berlin) creates films, videos and media installations poised between reality and fiction, reflecting power structures in social relations, history and architecture.

Edited by Fanni Fetzer and Franciska Zólyom.
Texts by Heike Geißler, Fanni Fetzer, Franciska Zólyom.

This collection of writings by artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia (born 1988) gathers six essays that offer a framework for fugitive cinema. Written in the wake of the 2019-20 Hong Kong Protests ignited by the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement, Sia's writings survey the rise of a new documentary vernacular being produced by a wave of emerging filmmakers breaking from the nostalgia of Hong Kong's cinematic golden age. As a practitioner and thinker, Sia has been at the forefront of a nascent generation of artists working to trace social unrest and political crackdowns. Drawing from personal experience and historical study, her writings offer urgent reflections on a cultural landscape changed by censorship and surveillance.

An essential counterpart to her oeuvre, this volume is a critical intervention into global film studies, the politics of film/photographic practices and experimental approaches to documentary. Film stills from filmmakers Chan Tze-woon and the anonymous collective Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, photographs by artist An-My Lê and images from Sia's short film The Sojourn (2023) are interspersed between each essay, inviting the reader to consider a cinema by other means.

Published on the centenary year of Pasolini’s birth, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper is a dual edition that stages a dialogue between cinema today and Pasolini’s timeless films and words.

The two complementary volumes slide into one another, forming a unique set that evokes and celebrates Pasolini’s enduring influence. The smaller book features his epic autobiographical poem ‘Poet of the Ashes’, in a revised translation by esteemed poet Stephen Sartarelli; the larger book comprises original tributes by vital filmmakers from across the contemporary cinema landscape.

Twenty filmmakers shared personal reflections in the form of essays, poems, photographs, drawings and more: Catherine Breillat, Luise Donschen & Helena Wittmann, Jia Zhangke, Radu Jude, Payal Kapadia, Alexandre Koberidze, Dane Komljen, Mike Leigh, Mariano Llinás, Roberto Minervini, Valérie Massadian, Luc Moullet, Ben Rivers, Angela Schanelec, Ulrich Seidl, Basma al-Sharif, Deborah Stratman, Anocha Suwichakornpong and Gustavo Vinagre.

Collected Stories is, as implied by the title, a collection of stories, curated by Ben Rivers. Fiction and poetry have always been an essential source of inspiration for his filmmaking. On the occasion of the retrospective Ghost Strata, and other stories, held at Jeu de Paume in Paris in November 2023, he decided to bring his films in conversation with writers who have influenced him over the years. Rivers invited fourteen authors to watch one of his films and respond in writing in any way they wished. Imaginative and surprising, the fables, essays and poems of Collected Stories come together in a beautiful celebration of the work of one of contemporary cinema’s vital artists, doubling as a testament to the reciprocal nature of inspiration.

The authors of these collected stories are Gina Apostol, Chloe Aridjis, Kevin Barry, Xiaolu Guo, Golan Haji, M John Harrison, Daisy Hildyard, Nathalie Léger, Vanessa Onwuemezi, Helen Oyeyemi, Iain Sinclair, Irene Solà, Lynne Tillman and Marina Warner.

In the fourth title of the acclaimed DecadentEditions series, Dennis Lim explores the oeuvre of South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo via his 2005 film. Forty minutes in, we realise we’ve been watching a film within the film. The ‘real’ characters leave the cinema and find themselves reenacting what they just saw, as a chance encounter invites a suicide pact. Is it life imitating art, or the other way around? Dennis Lim is a film curator, teacher, and writer. He is currently the Artistic Director of the New York Film Festival.

‘Inland Empire’ is a film by David Lynch about a once-feted Hollywood actress who is cast in a movie that is rumoured to be cursed. From a queer, feminist perspective, film critic Melissa Anderson examines how Lynch’s late masterpiece is not only a brilliant evocation of how images work on the mind, but how powerful “acteurs” are in the creation of dreamlike cinema. Laura Dern’s astonishing performance, as the film’s realities splinter and identities multiply, is elucidated by Anderson through her deep affection and respect for Lynch. The book is part of the Decadent Editions series, which examines one film for every year of the 2000s, each a milestone of contemporary cinema.

Ten shots of the sky, each ten minutes long. That’s all it takes to describe James Benning’s film from 2004. And yet, this simplicity conceals a rich and absorbing drama, one of the great works of the American avant-garde. Scholar and critic Erika Balsom unfolds its hidden intricacies of meaning, extending its lessons with crystalline prose, a comparable sense of depths, and an exhilarating, maximalist intimation of what criticism can do and become. She brings you from the film itself into the mind of the artist, through philosophical musings and art historical scholarship. The book is part of a Decadent Editions series of 10 books about 10 films.

A Toast to St Martirià is an improvised speech given by the cult Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra at the St Martirià fiesta in Banyoles, the town of his birth. Transmitting his subversive attitude and impulsive lust for life, it is a journey through his formative years and early relationships – established in the nightlife of his hometown – that have shaped his particular conception of cinema, art and life. ‘Cinema should be this, making perception of time and space more intense.’

Translated by Matthew Tree
Afterword by Alexander García Düttmann

The Catalan artist and filmmaker Albert Serra was born in 1975. His films usually depict European myths and literature. In 2001, he co-founded the production company Andergraun Films. His Honor of the Knights was selected by Cahiers du Cinéma as one of the ten best films of 2007. For Story of My Death, Serra was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2013. For The Death of Louis XIV, Serra received the Prix Jean Vigo in 2016. Pacifiction was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022.

Matthew Tree was born in London in 1958. He taught himself Catalan in 1979 and moved to Catalonia in 1984. Since then he has published nine works of fiction and non-fiction written in Catalan, and five written in English. He writes regular columns for Catalonia Today magazine in English and El Punt Avui newspaper in Catalan. He has translated works by Jordi Puntí, Maria Barbal, Monika Zgustová, Joel Joan, Marta Marín-Dòmine and Albert Serra, among others. Two of his English novels, Just Looking and Almost Everything, will appear in Catalan translation at the start of 2025.

This book presents Léa Morin's research into the first, long forgotten film by Moroccan filmmaker Mostafa Derkaoui, About Some Meaningless Events (1974), which led to its recent restoration and international distribution. Far from being confined to a cinematographic history, this "book-archive, book-inquiry, book-action" sketches out, from the multiple paths opened up by the film, a constellation of micro-histories on the cultural, artistic and political Morocco/Casablanca of the 1970s.

The book includes a DVD with the film.
 
Mostafa Derkaoui is a filmmaker and pioneer of modern Moroccan cinema, born in 1944 in Oujda, Morocco. He graduated from the Lódź Cinema School and lives in Casablanca.

Since returning to Morocco in 1972, he has continued the explorations he began in the student films he made in Poland, for a free and socially-engaged cinema that could contribute to both decolonial thought and the search for a Moroccan cinematic identity, and which would also encourage formal innovation and radicality.His avant-gardist vision was to come up against the official and repressive one of the 1970s Moroccan state (and of the remaining colonial institutions). His first film, De quelques événements sans signification [About Some Meaningless Events, 1974], made with a collective of Casablancan artists and intellectuals, was banned. It was later restored by the Filmoteca de Catalunya and L'Observatoire Art et Recherche in 2019.

Edited by Léa Morin.
Preface by Mostafa Derkaoui.
Texts by Ahmed Boughaba, Nadir Bouhmouch, Tarek Elhaik, Ali Essafi, Filmoteca de Catalunya (Rosa Cardona, Mariona Bruzzo et Esteve Riambau), Mohamed Jibril, Toni Maraini, Léa Morin, Mostafa Nissabouri, Marie Pierre-Bouthier, Noureddine Saïl, Rasha Salti et Monika Talarczyk.

An overview of Phill Niblock's work since the 60's, through about twenty essays and interviews by musicologists, art critics and historians, various documents, scores, and more than 8 hours of videos on 2 double layer DVDs.
With a career spanning more than 40 years, Phill Niblock has not only proven himself as one of the most preeminent composers of the American musical avantgarde, but also an accomplished filmmaker and performer. He is also revered as an events producer through his Experimental Intermedia Foundation, providing a venue and a label that has been of great assistance to numerous other artists and musicians in helping to make their work known.

This bilingual book (French / English) provides an in-depth look at all these activities, through various essays and interviews, either newly written, previously unpublished, or that have never been available in French before. These were written by very different people—from musicians who have played Niblock's music, to fellow composers, from long-time friends to specialized musicologists and art historians. They discuss such various matters as musical and cinematographic aesthetics, psychoacoustic processes, historical background, philosophical insights and technical advice for playing the music, or just give their personal recollections of time spent together with Niblock.

The book is accompanied by 2 double-sided DVDs of atypical videos: Remo Osaka, a continuation of The Movement of People Working series, with a quite peculiar soundtrack; two separate DVDs of the Anecdotes from Childhood, best viewed together as an installation; and Katherine Liberovskaya's 70 for 70 (+1), Seventy (one) Sides of Phill Niblock, realized in 2003/2004 on the occasion of his 70th birthday, which portrays the composer through memories recounted by friends and relatives.

With writings by Phill Niblock, Rich Housh, Erika King, Guy de Bièvre, Volker Straebel, Richard Glover, Alan Licht, Seth Nehil, Rob Forman, Johannes Knesl, Arthur Stidfole, Juan Carlos Kase, Raphael Smarzoch, Jens Brand, Bob Gilmore, Ulrich Krieger, Richard Lainhart, Bernard Gendron, Susan Stenger, Mathieu Copeland, and liner notes from the first two LPs.

Mapping the practices of performative cinema today.

Texts by Érik Bullot, Filipa César, Esperanza Collado, Thomas Clerc, Alexis Guillier, Franck Leibovici, Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson, Peter Miller, Rabih Mroué, Uriel Orlow, Simon Ripoll-Hurier, Roland Sabatier, Clara Schulmann.

The prospects of revolutionary feminism, from Želimir Žilnik's canonical film.
Canonical within the Yugoslav New Film of the late 1960s and the 1970s, Želimir Žilnik's Early Works (1968) follows the female revolutionary Jugoslava as she leaves her lumpenproletariat family to spread the teachings of young Marx and Engels among the peasants and factory workers. The violent responses to this proselytizing mission, which include the rape of Jugoslava and the beating of her three male comrades, invoke the repression of the 1968 student movement in socialist Yugoslavia. The film's allegorical examination of the contradictions of Yugoslav state socialism culminates when Jugoslava becomes the object of her comrades' violence, who shoot her and set her body on fire.

This edited volume, a part of Antonia Majaca's ongoing collaborative investigation Feminist Takes, initiates a discussion of the filmic—and historical—fate of Jugoslava and the prospects of revolutionary feminism.

From his beginnings in the lively amateur film scene of Yugoslavia in the 1960s, filmmaker Želimir Žilnik (born 1942, based in Novi Sad, Serbia) has gone on to make more than fifty films, including a number of feature films and TV productions, often in the genre of docudrama. He received international recognition early on, winning the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 1969 Berlin International Film Festival for Early Works. In the 1970s his films encountered political opposition, and he left Yugoslavia for West Germany, where he realized several independent films, including some of the earliest films dealing with the topic of guest workers. In the 1980s, after leaving Germany—due to his films once again facing political opposition and censorship—and returning to Yugoslavia, he made numerous TV and feature films through which he portrayed early symptoms of the country's growing social conflicts, continuing in the 1990s with films dealing with the maladies of the post-socialist transition as well as questions of migration.

Edited by Antonia Majaca, Rachel O'Reilly, Jelena Vesić.
Texts by Ivana Bago, Angela Dimitrakaki, Branislav Dimitrijević, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Rose-Anne Gush, Vesna Kesić, Vedrana Madžar, Antonia Majaca, Jaleh Mansoor, Ruth Noack, Bojana Pejić, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Rasha Salti, Kerstin Stakemeier, Jelena Vesić, Giovanna Zapperi.

Focusing on Akerman's works of the last two decades, a period during which she diversified her creative practice, this collection traces her artistic trajectory across different media.

From her documentaries 'bordering on fiction' to her final installation, NOW, the volume elucidates the thematic and aesthetic concerns of the later works, placing particular emphasis on self-portraiture, the exploration of intimacy, and the treatment of trauma, memory and exile. It also attends to the aural and visual textures that underpin her art. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches as well as engaging more creatively with Akerman's work, the essays provide a new optic for understanding this deeply personal, prescient oeuvre.

A collection of writings by and interviews with Duras about her filmmaking, first published in French by P.O.L. in 2021 and translated into English by Daniella Shreir.

Working chronologically through her nineteen films, made between 1966 and 1985, this collection of reflections by Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) includes non-standard press releases, notes to her actors, letters to funders, short essays on themes as provocatively capacious as ‘mothers’ and ‘witches’, as well as some of the most significant interviews she gave about her cinematic and writing practices (with filmmakers and critics including Jacques Rivette, Caroline Champetier and Jean Narboni).

In Duras's hands, all of these forms turn into a strange, gnomic literature in which the boundary between word and image becomes increasingly blurred and the paradox of creating a cinema that seeks ‘to destroy the cinema’ finds its most potent expression.

Yet, Duras is never concerned only with her own work, or even with the broader project of making cinema: her preoccupations are global, and the global crucially informs her perceptions of the way in which she works. With the audiovisual as a starting point, her encyclopaedic associative powers bring readers into contact with subjects as diverse as the French Communist Party, hippies, Jews, revolutionary love, madness and freedom, across four decades of an oeuvre that is always in simultaneous dialogue with the contemporary moment and world history.

MARGUERITE DURAS (1914–1996) published over forty novels, numerous essays, novellas and plays and made nineteen films. She was part of the French Resistance, joined then left the Communist Party, and actively protested against the war in Algeria. She collaborated repeatedly with actors including Jeanne Moreau, Delphine Seyrig and Gerard Depardieu. Her films speak of her childhood in Indochina and the French colonies, of desire (burning and frustrated), madness and domesticity. Contemporary filmmakers including Claire Denis, Alice Diop and John Waters have cited Duras’ cinema as inspiration for their own work. 

An overview of John Akomfrah's work, with contributions by Julia Grosse and Nelly Y. Pinkrah, an interview with the artist, along with a foreword by Sebastian Baden.

John Akomfrah creates thoughtful video works of haunting audiovisual intensity. He tells of the radical changes and crises of the present and past on characteristic large-format screens. From November 9, 2023 to January 28, 2024, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting for the first time a comprehensive overview of the artist's work in Germany, featuring a selection of three major multichannel installations from recent years: The Unfinished Conversation (2012), Vertigo Sea (2015), and Akomfrah's new work, Becoming Wind (2023). A co-founder of the influential London-based Black Audio Film Collective (established in 1982), Akomfrah's work interweaves newly shot film sequences with archival material to create multilayered, at times associative collages, frequently in the form of simultaneous narrative structures.

Akomfrah's immersive installations critically examine colonial pasts, global migration, and the climate crisis. He addresses one-dimensional historical representations by allowing multiple perspectives to emerge in the narrative, disrupting the notion of linearity and the illusion of a one and only truth.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2023-2024.

John Akomfrah (born 1957) is a British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator. His works are characterised by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, cultural identity, temporality and aesthetics and often explores the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside the artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, who he still collaborates with today.

Daytime Noir is a limited edition artists book by Laida Lertxundi, designed by Gabrielle Pulgar and released by Artspace Aotearoa on the occasion of Scores for Transformation, the third in the cycle of exhibitions that orbit the question “where does my body belong?” The book includes new writing by Laida Lertxundi, Ren Ebel, and Luna Miguel.

Drawing on two recent 35mm films Autoficción (2020) and Inner Outer Space (2021) as well as recent works on paper, the pubilcation explores the parameters of what it takes to run an artistic practice navigating the many facets of a full life: parenting, teaching, exhibiting, working. The full colour, hand stitched book presents us with ‘film stills’ that come alive when we, as readers, engage with its physical form.

The pubilcation is an edition of 100.

Première publication dédiée à l'œuvre singulière de l'artiste coréenne-américaine Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), à la croisée de la performance, de l'art conceptuel, de la vidéo et de la poésie, dont l'un des motifs principaux concerne sa représentation de l'Histoire, marquée par l'expérience de l'exil et de la migration, de la dislocation temporelle, culturelle, géographique et sociale.

Dans le courant de sa brève vie, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha a produit un travail artistique, littéraire et critique qui en fait une figure exemplaire, même si encore trop méconnue, de l'art contemporain américain. Est ici retracé ce parcours singulier qui se forge à la lumière d'une période exceptionnelle à la fois de l'histoire et de l'histoire de l'art. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha est à Berkeley en 1968, à Paris en 1976, à New York en 1980 et s'engage dans une pratique de l'art et de la pensée où sont brassés les concepts les plus novateurs des théories visuelles ou filmiques, de la philosophie, de la linguistique et de la littérature comparée. 

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Berkeley, 1968 est aussi une réflexion inédite sur la représentation de territoires culturels déplacés et leur rapport à la mémoire.

Historienne de l'art contemporain, Elvan Zabunyan est maître de conférences habilitée à l'université Rennes 2 et critique d'art. Ses recherches portent sur l'art nord-américain depuis les années 1960 et notamment le tournant 1970 autour des questions raciales et féministes. Elle travaille depuis le début des années 1990 sur les problématiques issues des cultural studies, des théories postcoloniales et des études de genre en cherchant à construire, grâce à ces pensées critiques, une méthodologie de l'histoire de l'art contemporain articulée autour d'une histoire culturelle, sociale et politique. Elle a publié Black is a color, une histoire de l'art africain américain (Dis Voir, 2004), co-dirigé plusieurs livres et a écrit de nombreux articles dans des ouvrages collectifs, des catalogues d'exposition et des périodiques.

A scrapbook on Baillie's life and career, with stills, ephemera and writings by filmmakers across generations.

This is the first book on the West Coast avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Baillie (1931-2020), famed for the films Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964), Castro Street (1966) and All My Life (1966) and for his influence on directors such as George Lucas (one of Lucas' charitable foundations helped fund the digital transfer of Baillie's films) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Alongside stills from Baillie's films, the book fosters a dialogue between Baillie and filmmakers and writers across several generations, including experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton, filmmaker and anthropologist J.P. Sniadecki and Jonas Mekas, along with suites of images by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, British artist and experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers and Brazilian artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz, among others. Reproductions of correspondence and other ephemera are also included.

From under the luminous glare of the laptop and cinema screen, From Troubled Dreams Under A Glare Of Sky gathers newly commissioned essays from nine writers in Scotland, exploring ideas of cinema and metamorphosis.

Considering films in the programme of the 76th Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) and beyond, the texts ranging in style, form and focus-encompass dreams and awakenings, the fatigue of cultural production, queerness and transness, Blackness and sacred spaces, and depictions of the immigrant. Each text creates space to understand, to make sense of what is on screen and what is out of frame.

Filmmakers discussed include Kelly Reichardt, Cauleen Smith, Celine Song, Paul B. Preciado, Babak Jalali, Liu Jian, Ng Choon Ping and Sam H. Freeman, Huw Lemmey and Onyeke Igwe. Expanding on an eclectic array of new and retrospective cinema, the collection seeks to introduce readers to a burgeoning Scottish scene of fresh voices in film and cultural criticism.