Amanda

Printed on thick cardboard, this book throws you right back into the child-like explorer mode we know from when we were young. It illustrates the mindful written words of Lisa Gutscher journey through the inner body based on a large archive from found images, screenshots and other image sources to unfold a whole new world in front of your eyes.

Part prose poem, part reflection on the relations between writing and place, Lagoon tells the story of the slow undoing of an idyll. In it the narrator walks for hours during long summer nights, gazing through the windows that line the streets. In between, she reflects on how she might write about the shifting space of the lagoon, where she spent summer holidays with her family years ago. In adolescence, the narrator watches quietly as her mother, father and sister go about building their holiday home. But she can sense something is awry, she just does not fully understand what.

Lagoon is the first novella by McCulloch.

Lagoon by Samantha McCulloch is the first title in Kunstverein Amsterdam's new imprint called First Drafts, which, inspired by artist and publisher Anne Turyn, celebrates experimental and commercially unviable work by publishing completed manuscripts that haven’t yet found a home in their first draft form. Importantly, each title is also the first attempt by the author to write in that particular form, or, to write at all.

Dolce Stil Criollo’s fifth issue, "Extraordinarily Apotropaic," aims to rethink reality in its current ordinary form by discovering and creating charms and rituals for changing it into one where there is less harm. The issue features poems in multiple languages; a map of dreams; a video game-turned-manga; a section that functions as a kineograph; a collaboration with the Huni Kuin people; and more. We also curated a collective project, “Cinema of Hope,” which brings together 11 moving image artists in search of the apotropaic moment, caught on film. 

The cover of our fifth issue features one of five “santinho” inserts. Designed like prayer cards, they contain a collaged portrait of a musical artist (Pivaratu, Pivete Nobre, Iya, Swatch, Devil Gremory) on the recto and the rap lyrics they wrote in response to our theme on the verso.

Contributors include Andrés-Monzón Aguirre, Aykan Safoğlu, Azul Caballero Adams, Belinda Zhawi, Daniel Machado, Daniel Moura, Devil Gremory, Enorê, Esvin Alarcón Lam, Gabriel Massan, Hick Duarte, Itamar Alves, Iya, Jennifer Pérez, Jesse Cohen, Johan Mijail, Juan Pablo Villegas, Kasra Jallilipour, Kent Chan, Keratuma (Mileidy Domicó), Laura Huertas Millán, Lucía Melií, Lucía Reissig & Bernardo Zabalaga, Maria Thereza Alves, Masha Godovannaya, Mayada Ibrahim, Najlaa Eltom, NIna Djekić, Ophelia S. Chan, Pivaratu, Pivete Nobre, Ricardo Pinheiro (Ganso), Roberto Tejada, Sofía Córdova, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Swatch, Thales Pessoa, and Thiago Martins de Melo.

Languages: Spanish, 
Portuguese, English, Japanese and Arabic

Pati Hill's cult novel, available for the first time since 1976.

Impossible Dreams was Pati Hill's last published novel, released in 1976 after it was partially published two years earlier in the Carolina Quarterly under the title "An Angry French Housewife." Hill tells the story of Geneviève, a middle-aged woman whose life is turned upside down when she unexpectedly falls in love with her neighbor, Dolly. Mixing anecdotes with existential thoughts, the novel describes the gradual disruption of the heroine's daily life. Almost every chapter (the length of which varies from a single sentence to no more than three pages) is accompanied by a xerograph of a photograph, selected by Hill with permission from its maker. The resulting combination of text and image constitutes her most ambitious attempt to produce a work in which "the two elements fuse to become something other than either."

This novel is also one of the most incisive examples of Hill's writing—dry and impartial, yet managing to capture the contradictory feelings of her characters. In a letter addressed to the photographer Eva Rubinstein asking for reproduction rights, she writes: "My book is about a woman with a little girl and a husband who falls in love with a woman and a little girl and a husband and loses them all, just like in your mirror. It doesn't sound very cheerful but it is mainly funny."

Daisy, an independent publishing house, releases a facsimile of the out-of-print work that, after almost 50 years since its initial publication, has become a coveted collector's item.

"Impossible Dreams charmed me with its droll and irreverent tone when it was first published. Hill's use of embedded photographs was unexpected and transgressive for its me. Brilliant!"
Anne Turyn, photographer, educator and founding editor, Top Stories

Pati Hill (1921, Ashland, Kentucky – 2014, Sens, France) left behind a litterary and artistic output spanning roughly 60 years . After a short but dazzling career as a model, between 1951 and 1962 she wrote a dozen short stories—several of which were published in George Plimpton's prestigious literary journal, The Paris Review—and five books which earned her real critical recognition. Hill published One Thing I Know in 1962 after giving birth to her first and only daughter. She was then forty-one years old, and would later claim to have decided at that time to "stop writing in favour of housekeeping.''

Edited by Ana Baliza and Baptiste Pinteaux.

New series of paintings by the Swiss artist, that examine the role of humankind in nature and within its social fabric on a philosophical-anthropological level.

"I asked Andriu Deplazes if he had always wished to be a painter. No, he said. For a time, he had trained to be a classical musician, but turned away from music because there was something repellent about the need to demonstrate virtuosity. To be a virtuoso, as the moral world depicted in these paintings clearly shows, is not the same as having virtue. And yet, at the same time, there are still traces of virtuosity in Deplazes' practice: in the idealised landscapes that he renders, and in the easy depiction of animal life. It is only humans that he will not denigrate with such perfection. Their overpainted faces do not allow them to be captured as things, but rather present them as subjects. They elude categorisation because they are responding, in real time, to what they see in us." Adam Jasper

Born 1993 in Zurich, Andriu Deplazes lives and works in Zurich, Brussels and Marseille. His paintings create a kind of parallel cosmos that questions the habitual ways of seeing and expectations of the beholder. Wide landscapes in colourfully powerful large format are the setting for curious characters who sometimes melt into the vegetation around them or appear strangely remote from it. His work has been exhibited throughout Europe since 2015.

An artist's book by New York-based author and artist Sam Pulitzer (born 1984), The Premise of a Better Life combines photographs with ethical and existential questions addressed to the viewer, in an allegory of the contemporary condition. These photographs of everyday things, ambiguous details, nondescript landscapes and cityscapes were mostly taken in New York, although the city appears as the pale reflection of a model city.

Each picture is accompanied by a question: "Can you afford yourself?" "Are you waiting for a moment that just won't come?" "If you knew then what you know now, would it make a difference?" "Do you trust happiness?" The montages offer a complex, personal, at times satirical image of the present age.

An original essay by Pulitzer unfolds the project's philosophical and political issues, notably discussing a key reference for the project, Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope.

Valerie Solanas's rarely published, legendary play, Up Your Ass, explodes social and sexual mores and the hypocritical, patriarchal culture that produces them through her signature irreverence and wit, incisiveness and camp.

The play, whose full title is Up Your Ass Or From the Cradle to the Boat Or The Big Suck Or Up from the Slime, marches out a cast of screwy stereotypes: the unknowing john, the frothy career girl, the boring male narcissist, two catty drag queens, the sex-depraved housewife, and a pair of racialized pickup artists, among others. At the center is protagonist Bongi Perez—a thinly veiled Solanas—a sardonic, gender-bending hustler who escorts us through the back alleys of her street life. The fictionalized predecessor to SCUM Manifesto, the play shares the same grand, subversive, implicative language, equally spitting and winking, embracing the margins, the scum, and selling a trick along the way.

Valerie Solanas (1936-1988) is an American radical feminist intellectual, known for her SCUM Manifesto—a pamphlet with which she declares the power of women and imagines a political future through the margin—, and for having tried to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Edited by Leah Whitman-Salkin.
With a contribution by Paul B. Preciado.
Graphic design: Roxanne Maillet.