Maru Mushtrieva

The title of publication series ‘Agathe Bauer’ stands for a broadly misheard hook “I’ve got the power” from a German 1990 Eurodance hit ‘The Power’ by the band Snap! The hook that turned the song into a hit, came from Jocelyn Brown’s track ‘Love's Gonna Get You’, but neither her name nor the track appears in the credits. And, here is where Agathe Bauer comes in - a mysterious being who acquires agency through the homophonic misinterpretation of the main hook “I’ve got the power”.

In ‘Issue Zero: Picking Up Promises’ Agathe has an agenda. Nothing could be as it would have been, but she is here to trace the sources of how it has become. Agathe Bauer is here to analyze the capacity of misinterpretation to unveil asymmetric power structures in knowledge systems and by tuning into the social-political, cultural and aesthetic dimension of it.

‘Issue Zero: Picking Up Promises’ features contributions by: Gabriela Acha, [{“CIBELLE”(CAVALLI}BASTOS)], Lynn Hershman Leeson, Romy Kießling, Markues, Luzie Meyer, Maru Mushtrieva, Claudia Pagès, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Miriam Stoney, Christine Sun Kim, Eric Winkler, Miriam Yammad, Anna Zett.

Conceptualized and edited by Gabriela Acha, Romy Kießling, Maru Mushtrieva.
Designed by Timur Akhmetov.

keeps crashing down the same period in my text between the paragraphs and i forgot about the crush is a book by Stine Sampers, 114 pages of her collected "predictive text songs" written between April 2018 and January 2019 in Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp, Alveringem, Amsterdam and Berrias-et-Casteljau with a Samsung Galaxy S5 (stolen in October 2018 in Brussels) and a Samsung Galaxy S7 (that had to be taught vocabulary). Cover image by Deveny Faruque, afterword by Maru Mushtrieva:

"Here, the longing for the Other – unsurmountable distance – is actualized not only by the content but also by the compositional design itself. What at first glance appears to be a stream of consciousness, is in fact a synthesis of vocabulary from past text messages. While composing them, Stine Sampers used her phone’s algorithm to decide what to say next, with suggestions coming from the text messages previously exchanged with her friends. The words from different contexts, once chosen carefully, now belong to the careless vocabulary of a machine, welcomed into a loop of misrecognition."

Published Nov 2020