French Cooking for One

Spring 2020. During lockdown in a mountain village with his partner and young child, Yann Chateigné Tytelman becomes haunted by the presence of his dead father. Provoked by memories of him, of their laconic relationship and of the class antagonisms that emerged between them – the father was a manual labourer while his son ‘turned his back’ and entered the art world – Chateigné Tytelman starts writing letters, piles of them, which have as their subject that most mystical, most incomprehensible of phenomena: silence.    

Condensed into a series of short fragments, Blackout interweaves the letter to the father with the observations of an art theorist who surveys with precision the occurrences and experiences of silence in painting, music, literature and philosophy.

"Dolto’s Dominique is the only case I’ve found that rivals Freud, and brings us up to date, replete with questions of incestuous trauma, repressed sexualities, autism and cognitive disability, and a profound sense for the contradictions of polite society and histories of colonial and racist violence. I love this child and encountering Dolto’s otherworldly voice as an analyst." — Jamieson Webster

While the child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto stands alongside Jacques Lacan as a leading light of the Other French School, she has been little translated and remains curiously unknown in the English-speaking world. First published in 1971, Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent is frank and close to the clinical experience. A masterpiece of the genre, it is at once a granular psychological portrait of a troubled adolescent and his familial inheritance, and a historical case study, set in the France of the 1960s, of the of the relationship between subjectivity, nationality, and time and space.

With a foreword by Michael Ryzner-Basiewicz

Translated by Ivan Kats, revised by Lionel and Sharmini Bailly

Cover image by Mike Kelley, Untitled 1975

Françoise Dolto (born 6 November 1908, Paris) was a psychoanalyst and paediatrician. Alongside private practice at her home, where she saw adults and children, Dolto practised in four institutions where she saw only children patients: the Polyclinique Ney, the Centre Claude Bernard, the Hôpital Trousseau and the Centre Etienne Marcel. From 1967 to 1969, Dolto answered adult and child listeners of the French radio station Europe No. 1, live and anonymously under the name ‘Docteur X’. The programme enjoyed excellent ratings, but Dolto found dialogue to be hindered by the demands of live broadcasting and advertising. In 1976, she agreed to return to radio with Lorsque l’enfant paraît on France Inter, on the condition that she replied to listeners’ letters, which enabled her to go into depth. The programme was a huge success, and would make her a household name. In 1978 Dolto retired as an adult psychoanalyst: her fame had become such that it distorted the therapeutic relationship with patients. She now devoted herself to prevention, training of young analysts, group and individual supervision, publications, conferences and radio and television broadcasts. She also continued her work with children in the care of the Aide Sociale à l’Enfance, some of whom she received at her home until the end of her life. In 1979, along with a small team, she founded the Maison Verte, a place for early-years socialisation welcoming children from ages zero to four along with their caregivers, for sessions of play and talk. This model spread throughout France and Europe, to Russia, Armenia and Latin America. Dolto is the author of more than a dozen books, and several essays, interviews and seminars. In English, her books have been translated as Psychoanalysis and Pediatrics (Routeledge, 2013) and The Unconscious Body Image (Routledge, 2022). Françoise Dolto died on 25 August 1988 in Paris.

What is sleep? How can this most unproductive of human states—metaphorically called death's shadow or considered the very pinnacle of indolence—be envisioned as action and agency? And what do we become in sleep? What happens to the waking selves we understand ourselves to be?

Written in the spring of 2013, as the Egyptian government of President Mohammed Morsi was unraveling in the face of widespread protests, The Book of Sleep is a landmark in contemporary Arabic literature. Drawing on the devices and forms of poetry, philosophical reflection, political analysis, and storytelling, this genre-defying work presents us with an assemblage of fragments that combine and recombine, circling around their central theme but refusing to fall into its gravity.  

"My concern was not to create a literary product in the conventional sense, but to try and use literature as a methodology for thinking," El Wardany explains. In this volume, sleep shapes sentences and distorts conventions. Its protean instability throws out memoir and memory, dreams and hallucinatory reverie, Sufi fables and capitalist parables, in the quest to shape a question. The Book of Sleep is a generous and generative attempt to reimagine possibility and hope in a world of stifling dualities and constrictions.

Johanna Drucker's The Century of Artists' Books is the seminal full-length study of the development of artists' books as a twentieth-century art form. By situating artists' books within the context of mainstream developments in the visual arts, Drucker raises critical and theoretical issues as well as providing a historical overview of the medium. Within its pages, she explores more than two hundred individual books in relation to their structure, form, and conceptualization. This latest edition of the book features a new preface by Drucker and includes an introduction by New York Times senior art critic Holland Cotter.

The book Posting brings together a selection of feminist posters from Dutch archives to reflect on posting as an activist strategy, holding the potential to create counter-publics to mainstream culture and to fight against the erasure, exoticization, or tokenism of bodies and experiences that deviate from normative preconceptions.

As is the case for many professions, in the history of Dutch graphic design the absence of women, non-binary, queer, Black designers is striking. This doesn’t only point back to systematic processes of exclusion in the first place, but also to the biases at play regarding whose work is remembered and archived. While efforts have been made to add forgotten names to the existing canon, the many posters, flyers and other printed matter shelved in queer and feminist archives remind us to question the notion of single authorship altogether and instead study graphic design as a decisively collaborative and transdisciplinary practice, which is especially true for community-led and volunteer-based projects.

The posters featured in this book point to this rich landscape of feminist organizing, and were found at the International Institute of Social History and the International Archive for the Women’s Movement (IAV-Atria) in Amsterdam.

In recent years, collective approaches to curatorial practice have become prominent, and not for the first time. While the myth of the stand-alone curator has been largely dismantled in favor of recognizing the myriad other actors and agencies—from artists to installers, from gallery attendants to directors, and others—who make their work possible, contemporary curatorial practices encompass far more than bringing simply more collaborators together. Through a collection of essays and experimental texts, Not Going it Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating offers readers a layered and contextual understanding of this phenomenon, its debates, and possibilities across a range of temporalities, positions, and geographical perspectives.

Edited by Paul O'Neill with Gerrie van Noord / Elizabeth Larison

With contributions from:
Maria Berríos / Pip Day / Sofía Olasooaga
Nikolett Erőss / Eszter Lázár
Index and PRAKSIS Teen Advisory Boards
Elizabeth Larison
Nina Möntmann
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
Gerrie van Noord
Paul O‘Neill
Agnieszka Pindera
Serubiri Moses
Gregory Sholette