rile*books

Poet, writer, and translator Cecilia Pavón emerged in the late 1990s as one of the most prolific and central figures of the young Argentine literary scene—the so-called “Generation of the 90s”: artists and writers whose aesthetics and politics were an earnest response to the disastrous impact of American-exported neoliberal policies and the resulting economic crisis of 2001. Their publications were fragile—xeroxed, painted on cardboard—but their cultural impact, indelible.

A cofounder of Buenos Aires’s independent art space and publishing press Belleza y Felicidad—where a whole generation of soon-to-be-famous Argentine artists showed their work for the first time—Pavón pioneered the use of “unpoetic” and intimate content—her verses often lifted from text messages or chat rooms, her tone often impish, yet brutally sincere.

In 2015, Pavón’s first volume of collected poems, ‘A Hotel with My Name’, was published in English. Contemporary writers in the United States, Australasia, and Europe discovered a deep affinity with her work. Pavón’s protagonists, Ariana Reines noted, “are absolute women, guileless dreamers, saints in sneakers, on sidewalks, in jail, in Zara, on buses, in nightclubs, in bed.”

Translated by Pavón’s own poetic protégé Jacob Steinberg, ‘Little Joy’ collects the best of Pavón’s short stories written between 1999-2020, originally published in three volumes in Spanish.

A materialist analysis of the links between global capitalism, energy politics, and racial oppression in Palestine. 

Why has Palestine become a defining fault line of contemporary politics?

Challenging mainstream narratives that reduce Palestine to ancient hatreds, humanitarian tragedy, or legal abstractions, Resisting Erasure places Israeli settler-colonialism within the broader historical arc of imperialism, race, and fossil capitalism in the Middle East.

Resisting Erasure is a succinct and far-reaching critique of the socio-economic and political forces that sustain the Israeli settler-colonial project. An essential introduction for anyone looking to understand what Palestine reveals about the world – and what it demands of us today.

A lyric essay written through Kathy Acker's evocative prose, public statements, and private archives.

A cover of Kathy Acker’s career and a study of the development of narrative in her books deftly tracing Acker’s interactions with a diverse palette of avant-gardisms, world letters, cultures, and theory. Martin follows Acker through New York’s downtown St. Mark’s Poetry Project scene, Black Mountain College, and the Beats, as Acker embarks on her own deconstructions of subjects autobiographical and historical, art procedurals, proto-conceptual writing, legacies, and spirits.

Horse Saison est une revue apériodico-saisonnière sur les chevaux et l’espèce équine en général. Cette revue est née d'une envie de penser et de montrer le monde équestre autrement. Chaque numéro présentera des contributions variées d’artistes d’horizons aussi différents que leurs pratiques artistiques, toustes s’étant intéressé.es pour le magazine au monde équin et à son écosystème.

Avec les contributions de : Xavier Klein, Mona Glassfield, Eliot Duran, Maxence Doucet, Twotma, Eric Kinny, Lois Ladent, Coldruru, Euro Love, Bérénice Béguerie, Emile Barret et Aurélien Masson

Abattre les arbres, boucher les fontaines, renverser les pierres réunit les 4 tomes d’un conte épisodique initialement paru en auto-édition tout au long de l’année 2021.
”Abattre les arbres, boucher les fontaines, renverser les pierres” sont les mots d’une archéologue s’exprimant à la radio au sujet des intentions des premiers chrétiens arrivant en Grande Bretagne. Cette formule a attendu de longues années dans mes notes avant de devenir un récit d’images.

La collection Perruches se consacre à rassembler des conversations d’artistes s’intéressant dans leur pratique à des animaux autres qu’humains. Chaque artiste est ainsi pour l’occasion considéré·e comme un « terrain » d'étude au sens ethnographique du terme, ou comme un monde à venir découvrir et comprendre.

The Perruches collection is dedicated to bringing together conversations by artists whose practice interested in non-human animals. Each artist is considered as a “field” for study in the ethnographic sense of the term, or as a world to be discovered and understood.

Ces entretiens tentent de rendre compte des différentes relations que ces praticien·ne·s de l’art entretiennent avec le vivant. Pour ce premier opus, la collection Perruches a invité l’artiste peintre Tatiana Defraine.

These interviews attempt to capture the different relationships that these art practitioners have with living things. For this first opus, the Perruches collection has invited the painter Tatiana Defraine.

Facsimilé d'un carnet inédit de Pascal Doury réalisé par Jonas Delaborde (Der Vierte Pförtner Verlag) et co-produit par les Editions l'Amazone, réalisé dans le cadre de la publication des Archives Elles Sont de Sortie suite à la parution de Choquer le monde à mort. Elles Sont de sortie. Bruno Richard - Pascal Doury.

„Ungenießbare Zeichnungen“ is a series of visual traces by artist Shin Kudo. „Ungenießbar“ means „Unenjoyable“ in German, which is a term that is used to describe a certain category of fungi, considered not edible but also not poisonous. What is enjoyable and what is not? For whom should it be enjoyable? Spores, Blood vessels, nature energy, Alien….Shin Kudo’s intuitive drawing triggers our feelings between our daily world and the world that we often overlooked - The world full of life circling and endless streaming.

The book contains 24 drawings from the “∞” series and the spore print series “The Unknown Friends”, following with an interview conversation with the artist. 

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge.

Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore.  But what if we really can’t take jokes anymore?

This book argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that it has been lost in the era of divisive identity politics. Comedy flares up debates about censorship and cancellation, keeping us divided from one other. This goes against the true universalist spirit of comedy, which is becoming a thing of the past and must be recovered.

Upside-down trees with roots reaching toward the cosmos, glasses, pitchers, transparent vessels, and bodies blending human and animal, male and female features populate Jacopo Pagin’s works. These figures reveal themselves in their decadent and symmetrical being, caught within a web of references centered on the evocative power of the gaze.

The first monograph dedicated to Jacopo Pagin, designed and edited by Ismaël Bennani and Orfée Grandhomme and featuring a critical contribution by Alessandra Franetovich, brings together over 200 drawings and paintings to explore the visionary, obsessive, and hypnotic qualities of the artist’s work and its profound connections with exotic, mediumistic, and new-age practices.

The book is co-published with Make Room, Los Angeles.

60 painted portraits of friends at work from the art world and culture.

In the expanded field of contemporary art, it is common to consider "work" and "pleasure" as one and the same thing. In this sense, it is easy to see how "labor" rapidly doubles as "labor of love," the subtext being that doing what one enjoys is invaluable no matter what. Inhabiting this dichotomy, Ben Wolf Noam's book Work Portraits Portrait Work is both a visual exploration of work in the cultural field and a statement of personal artistic intentions. Presenting 60 painted portraits of friends from the art world and culture in general, the book is a compendium of artists, musicians, chefs, filmmakers, actors, writers, and academics depicted while laboring in their chosen workplaces. At the same time, it is also a conceptual reflection on the complex nature of work in the cultural field, the relationship between subjectivity and collectivity, self-representation and belonging. The outcome is a surprisingly heartwarming object, somehow suggesting that work in the arts is never solely an individual affair. As Dean Kissick writes in one of the four texts specifically commissioned for the book— with Laura Adler, Gabriel Winant, and Ashley Mears —"art is a communal project." Furthermore, Work Portraits Portrait Work serves as a record of a specific time and place—most portraits depict people close to Noam himself, often in studios, apartments, cafés—but it does so embodying a fantasy of such time and place. The subjects of the paintings become a community, and this community becomes a character in Ben's narrative about what making art today might signify: a representation of what artistic representation could look like.

Conceived as a visual résumé, Installation Views provides both a comprehensive overview of Charlotte Posenenske's solo exhibitions and a record of her numerous group shows.

In her Manifesto, Charlotte Posenenske stated: "I find it difficult to come to terms with the fact that art can contribute nothing to the solution of pressing social problems."
Developing her artistic practice throughout the 1960s, Posenenske produced a body of work that uniquely combined several strands of the art of the period: conceptualism, minimalism, and socially engaged participatory art. Her Manifesto, published in Art International in May 1968, lays out the social demands on art as well as the impossibility of fulfilling those demands. Shortly after its publication, Posenenske left the art world behind to pursue her studies in sociology, undertaking a new career in that field.

Conceived as a visual résumé, Installation Views provides both a comprehensive overview of Charlotte Posenenske's solo exhibitions and a record of her numerous group shows. The book features an essay written by curator Erlend Hammer on the role of documentary photographs in the circulation of works of art. 

The book was published in conjunction with the eponymous show at the Haugar Art Museum in Tønsberg, Norway—the first full-scale presentation of the artist's oeuvre in Scandinavia. The exhibition showcased works from all the artist's major series of modular sculpture. Consisting of works made over the course of less than 12 months, between 1967 and 1968, preceding the abrupt end to Posenenske's career as an artist, the exhibition had the character of a snapshot. We are left wondering whether her withdrawal from the art world was a logical or necessary consequence of the development of the series. What are we to do with Posenenske's assertion that art is powerless to effectively change society for the better?