A Book for Disappearance

The Compost Reader series sees the world as an interconnected being, where all its parts relate to one another. Composting as a way of cultivating consciousness through questions instead of answers, and from uncertainty and doubt. Hydro-memories, a talking lion, sounds that live in a snail shell, a dry swamp, a herbal medicine witch girl, ephemeral queer performances, chemical-sensing tentacles, stone eaters, scriptures-fossil, heavy cheese-like lids, dolphins in traffic, blue humanities, and digital forensic public spaces are some of the matters fermenting in this Compost Reader.

Authors:
Filipa Ramos
Panamby
María Morata and Lorenzo Galgó
Marie Skousen
Natasha Thembiso Ruwona
Zachary Schoenhut
Pauline Ruffiot
alfonso borragán
Valeria Mata and Maxime Dossin
Esther Gatón
Cristóbal Olaya Meza
Paloma Contreras Lomas

Series Co-editors: Yuri Tuma, Gabriel Alonso

Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.

The new publication triangulates between geopoetics, geopolitics, and cultural geography; a 464 page issue with some 50 contributors as well as a large section on Swedish philosophical geographer Gunnar Olsson.

Ursula K. Le Guin witnessed and contributed to many of the twentieth century’s rebellions and upheavals, including women’s liberation, the Civil Rights movement and US anti-war and environmental activism.

Spanning fifty years of her life and work, Space Crone brings together Le Guin’s writings on feminism and gender for the first time, offering new insights into her imaginative, multispecies feminist consciousness: from its roots in deep ecology and philosophies of non-violence to her self-education about racism and her writing on motherhood and ageing.

For so it happens that when the poets speak, objects appear closer to their own shadows. The poet's mouth fills up with horses and marble, and his verses start to shine like rivers. These rivers then turn back to flow through the very palace he is depicting. The poet's own words begin to weigh down on him, as though he were holding up a palace with his palms. Then he travels, and the palace is obliterated. Countries and nations change, and naught remains but what the poets had seen. Of what the poets had seen, naught remains but its image in anthologies. And when the libraries have been flooded or burned to the ground, nothing but the commentaries on those anthologies are left, and all that one finds in these commentaries is that which was appropriated and wrought a thousand times over. 

Hussein Nassereddine is a multidisciplinary artist. His work in installation, writing, video and performance originates from a practice around language that builds fragile monuments - some verbal, some sonic, some tactile - rooted in collective histories and resources of poetry, ruins, construction and image-making.

Translated from Arabic by Ben Koerber.