Denise Ferreira da Silva

An examination of the relationship between coloniality, raciality, and global capital through a black feminist poethical framework, inspired by Octavia E. Butler's sci-fi novel Kindred (first volume in the On the Antipolitical series).

Unpayable Debt examines the relationship between coloniality, raciality, and global capital through a black feminist poethical framework. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler's 1979 sci-fi novel Kindred, in which an African American writer is transported back in time to the antebellum South to save her owner-ancestor, Unpayable Debt relates the notion of value to coloniality—both economic and ethical. Focusing on the philosophy behind value, Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes capital as the juridical architecture and ethical grammar of the world. Here, raciality—a symbol of coloniality—justifies deployments of total violence to enable expropriation and land extraction.
First volume in the On the Antipolitical series, edited by Ana Teixeira Pinto, devoted to the historical study of the depoliticization process, situating it within the neocolonialcontinuum that animates the digital frontier as the new locus of settler becoming.
 
Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva's academic writings and artistic practice address the ethical questions of the global present and target the metaphysical and ontoepistemological dimensions of modern thought. Currently, she is a Professor and Director of The Social Justice Institute (the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice) at the University of British Columbia.

Edited by Ana Teixeira Pinto.

Amateur is the first comprehensive publication about Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s moving-image work and accompanying installations. Developed over the past ten years, these works explore communication and interaction between individuals, often set against the backdrop of a unique public location in order to cast attention towards repressed, incomplete, and unresolved histories. Through the staging of these encounters in film, Van Oldenborgh enables multiple perspectives and voices to coexist, and brings to light political, social, and cultural relationships and how they are manifested through social interactions. The publication is generously illustrated and brings together a wealth of texts by artists, curators, and writers who have been key interlocutors with Van Oldenborgh, and offer in-depth observations and reflections on a work from her oeuvre.

Contributors: Nana Adusei-Poku, Ricardo Basbaum, Frédérique Bergholtz, Eric de Bruyn, Binna Choi, David Dibosa, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Avery F. Gordon, Tom Holert, Nataša Ilić, Charl Landvreugd, Sven Lütticken, Anna Manubens, Ruth Noack, Grant Watson.

Design: Julia Born

Publishers: If I Can’t Dance; The Showroom, London; and Sternberg Press, Berlin

The contributors to Otherwise Worlds investigate the complex relationships between settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to explore the political possibilities that emerge from such inquiries. Pointing out that presumptions of solidarity, antagonism, or incommensurability between Black and Native communities are insufficient to understand the relationships between the groups, the volume's scholars, artists, and activists look to articulate new modes of living and organizing in the service of creating new futures. Among other topics, they examine the ontological status of Blackness and Indigeneity, possible forms of relationality between Black and Native communities, perspectives on Black and Indigenous sociality, and freeing the flesh from the constraints of violence and settler colonialism.

Throughout the volume's essays, art, and interviews, the contributors carefully attend to alternative kinds of relationships between Black and Native communities that can lead toward liberation. In so doing, they critically point to the importance of Black and Indigenous conversations for formulating otherwise worlds.

Contributors. Maile Arvin, Marcus Briggs-Cloud, J. Kameron Carter, Ashon Crawley, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Chris Finley, Hotvlkuce Harjo, Sandra Harvey, Chad B. Infante, Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, Lindsay Nixon, Kimberly Robertson, Jared Sexton, Andrea Smith, Cedric Sunray, Se’mana Thompson, Frank B. Wilderson

A volume assembling new and existing documents that revisit, mix and remix moments in the work of artist Christian Nyampeta.

The volume is composed of affections, alliances, appearances, material, and memories that exceed singular authorship, in the form of dedications, documents, elegies, film stills, footnotes, photographs, poetry, presences, and translations. Together they draw a biography of research: the journeys of engaging with art learning and making in, with, and against the worlds of today.

This stream of existing documents is sequenced alongside new contributions by Omar Berrada, Binna Choi, Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski, Natacha Nsabimana, and Isaïe Nzeyimana.

The publication emerges from a close collaboration with GfZK (Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig) over the last three years. During this time, two projects were held at GfZK: A Flower Garden of All Kinds of Loveliness without Sorrow, 2018–2019, and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, 2021.

Literature, history, theology and philosophy, as well as insights from experiences and encounters in practice between contemporary art and design percolated into the two exhibitions; public programs; and an ongoing scriptorium, in which the artistic works staged gatherings of artists, theorists and mythologists from Rwanda and further afield who would otherwise never meet.

Titled Togetherward, a word invented by philosopher and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva to describe the rhythm of Nyampeta's method, the volume preludes a series of publications in images, writing, sound, film, and musical recordings that revisit the layers and sediments of the global events of the previous decade—all driven by the burning question of how to live together.

Edited by Vera Lauf and Christian Nyampeta.

Age! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! (Apart from greasing the wheels of capitalist reproduction.) In this queer manifesto, Simon(e) van Saarloos weaves a wealth of militant sex-liberationist, afrofuturist, transfeminist and decolonial imaginaries into their anti-ageist sails, charting a confident course across contemporary society’s generational hang-ups as well as visiting, in some more personal moments, their own.
-Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation and Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto starts with what it is not: it is not a socio-economic argument against ageism, celebrating “the elderly” as economically viable. Author Simon(e) van Saarloos is not interested in natural arguments about age, which portray different age groups as valuable because of assumed inherent qualities. Instead, this manifesto starts with an experience of childhood sexual abuse, and moves on to dissect the ways in which constructions of “age” and “youth” function to support and reproduce white supremacist patriarchy. The book includes two reproductions of works by painter Samantha Nye.

Simon(e) van Saarloos is the author of Take ‘em Down (Publication Studio Guelph) and Playing Monogamy (Publication Studio Rotterdam). They were the curator of the 2021 exhibition on Abundance (“We must bring about the end of the world as we know it” – Denise Ferreira da Silva) in Het HEM and are also the host of *The Asterisk Conversations podcast. Van Saarloos is currently a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric department at UC Berkeley.

An acoustic mapping of colonial history.

From his longstanding engagement to "un-mute" colonial sound collections captured during the European colonial period, Satch Hoyt's practice has been dedicated to intervene those collections and awake their sonicity, releasing phonogram recordings and instruments of different regions in Africa from the museological silence. For Hoyt, the sonic opens a portal to the acoustic mappings of history—testimonies of enslavement, resistance, empowerment and liberation, and also the amalgamations of today and the future. 

For the book launch, Satch Hoyt in collaboration with Dirk Leyers performs live, intertwining historical and present recordings, vintage instruments and electronic music. By combining processed electric flute, electronic percussions, Congolese Sanzas, Brazilian Berimbau, synthesizers and recordings, Hoyt uncoveres layers of diasporic experience, reimagining memories of the African Diaspora from contemporary and future spaces in which, as Hoyt stays in the book, "the recorded past becomes the present".

"Imagine a counter-journey through a multi-media mixing board of Afro-Sonic resistance beginning on the Southwest coast of Africa in 1483 and playing back live the layered improvisations of Angolan musicians and artists from the Congo, Angola, Brazil, and Portugal. With breathtaking scope, Satch Hoyt has scrambled the signals of settlers and colonial theft. He chronicles here his archival research and exuberant artistic collaborations across a map of Afro-sensibility that resoundingly displays that culture is a living activity and a practice of creative hospitality and ultimately, the jam". —Tsitsi Jaji, author of Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism, and Pan-African Solidarity (2014)

Contributions by Satch Hoyt, Anselm Franke, Paz Guevara, Louis Chude-Sokei, Sofia Lemos, Fred Moten, Greg Tate, Jihan El-Tahri, Kiluanji Kia Henda, MC Sacerdote, Khris, Suzana Sousa, Benjamin Sabby, ÀRÀKÁ collective, Alberto Pitta, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Rui Vieira Nery.

Who determines what is remembered and commemorated, and why? How can we commemorate something that is both in the past and a daily reality? In Take 'Em Down, Simon(e) van Saarloos is inspired by the historically invisibilized lives of LGBT people and queers. They demonstrate the power of forgetting and wonder if and how it’s possible to live without a past. At the same time, Van Saarloos criticizes the way that a ‘white memory’—including their own—treats some stories as self-evident while other histories are erased.

"Amidst a global pandemic that has fundamentally changed our world, along with Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Topple Monuments Movements and ongoing struggles for LGBTQIA liberation, Simon(e) van Saarloos' Take 'Em Downasks us to reenvision monuments and acts of commemoration. They also champion forms of Queer forgetting as acts of resistance. They call upon the work of some of the greatest thinkers, scholars and writers Arendt, Orwell, Halberstam, Rankine, Moten, Hartman and more to raise critical issues around memory, mourning and social justice. In this text Saarloos joins their ranks in creating important new visions and challenges for our world. It’s a text demanding to be contemplated and shared widely."
Pamela Sneed, Author of Funeral Diva, City Lights 2020

Simon(e) van Saarloos is the author of Playing Monogamy (PS Rotterdam).  They were the curator of the 2021 exhibition on Abundance (‘We must bring about the end of the world as we know it’ – Denise Ferreira da Silva) in Het HEM and are also the host of *The Asterisk Conversations podcast. Van Saarloos recently started a PhD in the Rhetoric department at UC Berkeley.

Translation by Liz Waters.  Introduction by Pamela Sneed, New York-based poet, performer, visual artist, and educator.

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.

Event and Duration is a collection of texts that offer various perspectives on the notions of ‘event and duration’, and suggest ways that time can be thought and measured otherwise. The selection of texts are drawn from the field of performance studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, science fiction and the visual arts among others, all of which were read in If I Can’t Dance’s reading groups in Amsterdam, São Paulo and Toronto as part of the artistic programme VI – Event and Duration (2015–16).

Contributors: Octavia E. Butler, Paul Chan, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Elizabeth Freeman, Amelia Groom, The Invisible Committee, R.D. Laing, Henri Lefebvre, Jota Mombaça, José Esteban Muñoz, Peter Pál Pelbart, Paul B. Preciado; and artist pages by Becket MWN.

176 p, ills colour, 15 x 22 cm, pb, English, 2021

A collective book that proposes to question human and non-human existence in the current social context, spanning different cosmogonic views.

The Vita Nova editorial project had its genesis in the Fórum do Futuro: a programme of debates, artist talks, and performances, held annually in the city of Porto, that brings together guests from different artistic and scientific practices to reflect on fundamental issues for contemporary societies. Given the impossibility of holding the 2020 edition, due to the challenges posed by the pandemic, the Fórum do Futuro is instead presenting a book that proposes to question human and non-human existence in the current social context, spanning different cosmogonic views. The book consists of four thematic sections that combine different artistic, scientific, philosophical and technological perspectives in written and visual essays, stories and interviews.

Texts by Sophia Al-Maria, K Allado-McDowell, Shumon Basar, Guilherme Blanc, Rosi Braidotti, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, GPT-3, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kirsten Keller, Filipa Ramos, Tabita Rezaire, Jenna Sutela, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Suzanne Treister, Aby Warburg, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Feifei Zhou.