A Witch Recipe for Grievers

Chilli is one of the most popular food ingredients in contemporary China, and symbolic of modernisation. More Than Chilli goes beyond its trendy façade to explore Chongqing, known for its tradition of spicy food. From the perspective as a local, Rossy Liu reflects on her own personal memories associated with chilli. A combination of fragmented scenes, objects, dialogues, movements and sounds are drawn on to unravel the locality of culinary identity. While chilli has become a ubiquitous flavour in today's global society, the book emphasises the hidden intimacy that still exists between Chongqing locals and their unfiltered connection to chilli.

Oswell Blakeston (1907–1985), though one of the great British masters of short horror and supernatural fiction, has never before had these tales collected. Here, for the first time, the bulk of his output in the genre is brought together, including numerous extremely hard to find pieces. Added to this are two appendices, the subject of which is the artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956), who Blakeston was closely associated with.

Mapping constellations between five specific pre-colonial cosmological examples extending from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa, this work reframes cosmology as a multi-dimensional and scalable practice of situated technologies and embodied cartographies. The resulting publication which was produced during the Jan van Eyck residency is a culmination of several years of research and exploration into precolonial cosmologies and spatial orders rooted in the African Sahel extending to the Horn of Africa.

The (Incomplete) Cosmic Catalogue is an output of a research project that was initially commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture as part of the multi-disciplinary research fellowship, The Digita Now: Architecture and Intersectionality in 2022.

In Água Viva Clarice Lispector aims to 'capture the present'. Her direct, confessional and unfiltered meditations on everything from life and time to perfume and sleep are strange and hypnotic in their emotional power and have been a huge influence on many artists and writers, including one Brazilian musician who read it one hundred and eleven times. Despite its apparent spontaneity, this is a masterly work of art, which rearranges language and plays in the gaps between reality and fiction.

Clarice Lispector (December 10, 1920 – December 9, 1977) was a Brazilian writer acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War. 

The first monograph dedicated to the Neapolitan feminist and pacifist artists' collective: unpublished documents, images, photographs, and manifestos are accompanied by new creative, political, and historical contributions, evoking the collective joy of Le Nemesiache's history so as to bring a sense of myth back into the world, rewriting and embodying it anew.

Nemesiache is an informal feminist group co-founded in Naples in 1970 by the multidisciplinary and visionary artist and writer Lina Mangiacapre (1946-2002). The collective, which included up to twelve women (centered around Claudia Aglione, Fausta Base, Silvana Campese, Consuelo Campone, Conni Capobianco, Bruna Felletti, Anna Grieco, and Teresa Mangiacapre), fostered an experimental artistic practice and a way of being in the world rooted in feminism, mythology, folktales, sci-fi, and radical imagination, while also introducing "transfeminism" in the early '80s. 

Throughout their long-lasting practice spanning several decades, the group retrieved an androgynous mythosophy to transcend art as mere representation and challenge the feminine as a modern identity category. Their distinct transformative approach within both Italian and Western feminist art history led not only to the emergence of an interdisciplinary practice—encompassing film, performance, writing, rituals, poetry, music, collage, costumes, protests, and conferences—but also the creation of a new political language, grounded in cosmological creativity and justice through mythological rituals.

Edited by Sonia D'Alto.
Texts by Chiara Bottici, Federica Bueti, Cairo Clarke, Sonia D'Alto, Giulia Damiani, Giusi Palomba, Imma Tralli & Roberto Pontecorvo, Elvira Vannini, Giovanna Zapperi, Arnisa Zeqo.