ISSUE 1: pirate.lov3r.2024.mkv

A richly illustrated exploration of Sung Hwan Kim’s complex record of migrant stories, displacement and belonging, border-crossings and translation.

In A Record of Drifting Across the Sea (2017–), Sung Hwan Kim looks at histories of migration. The artist parses the traces –archival and bodily – left by undocumented Korean migrants who came to the US by way of Hawai’i at the turn of the twentieth century, and ponders over their impact on other migrant and indigenous communities. As an ongoing film and installation series, comprising two chapters and a third in progress, A Record unsettles the limits of the ‘one work’ with its distributive, open-ended and collaborative nature.

In this speculative inquiry, Janine Armin explores each chapter in Kim’s multi-layered work as a mycelial network of feelers entangling and extending the wider work in-process. Engaging history through embodiment, folklore and myth, as much as through archival material, Kim navigates and crosses the boundaries between displacement and belonging. Focusing on the artist’s attempt to escape from representation, Armin illuminates and attends to the different stories and non-sovereign ways of being together towards which his work points us.

This title is part of the One Work book series, which focuses on artworks that have significantly changed the way we understand art and its history.

Seventeen interviews conducted with Med Hondo over a period of almost half a century, most of the interviews originally published in French were translated into English.

To read Med Hondo opens us up to many perspectives: to his work and its time-historical contexts, to his interests and obsessions, to his standpoint with regard to the intertwining of politics, economics, and culture. Med Hondo describes the school of pronunciation until such point as the slightest accent is erased; he observes the insults immigrants in France have had to tolerate, and fuses their stories and histories with the present; he builds bridges to the Caribbean and to the Western Sahara, to Algeria and Burkina Faso, to Niger and Senegal, to South Africa and the USA. This publication aims to draw attention to Med Hondo's cinema and legacy.

The book originated in the long-term project Cours, cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi—Run, comrade, run, the old world is behind you—The Cinema of Med Hondo.

Franco-Mauritanian director, screenwriter, producer and actor, also known for his work in dubbing, Med Hondo (1936-2019) is one of the great figures of African cinema. His militant work denounces neo-colonialism, racism, the rupture between the peoples of Africa, immigration policies and the resulting social violence.

I Want reviews the eponymous duo's double-projection film installation examining issues of gender, sexuality and performativity—and inspired by the words of punk poetess Kathy Acker and convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which was presented at their 2015 solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary.

The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors.

Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration. Alongside generous color documentation, written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse unpack and reflect upon both the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work.

‘May my story be beautiful and unwind like a long thread . . .’, she recites as she begins her story. 

The storyteller is the living memory of her time: at once an oracle, weaver, healer, warrior, witch, protectress, teacher and great mother. Her powers are to do with passing on – not only the stories but transmission itself: ‘what grandma began, granddaughter completes and passes on to be further completed.’

In contrast to the idea that a story is ‘just a story’, pioneering postcolonial feminist theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha recodes ideas about truth and fantasy to tell a different story about power, civilisation, history, medicine and magic. Grandma’s Story shows how creative speech is connected to women’s powers of enchantment, drawing upon and speaking with storytellers including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Clarice Lispector, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko and Zora Neale Hurston – all who may be known as ‘she who breaks open the spell’. 

The story as a cure and a protection is at once musical, historical, poetical, ethical, educational, magical, and religious.

Exhibition catalogue of filmmaker, visual artist, and writer Pedro Neves Marques's solo project "Vampires in Space" at the Portuguese Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022.

"In space it's always night." A family of vampires travels through space, carrying life to a faraway planet. Alone, they recall their past, offering an open-ended narrative about the role of fiction in our lives, with a special care for transgender experiences.

This book includes an interview, film scripts and poetry by Neves Marques, curatorial texts by João Mourão, Luís Silva, alongside visual documentation and other contributions by Manuela Moscoso and Filipa Ramos.

The work of Pedro Neves Marques (born 1984 in Lisbon, Portugal) combines anthropological research, cinema, publishing, poetic and fictional writing. Their hybrid aesthetic, that blends science fiction and documentary realism is influenced by the history of feminist and queer sciences, and projects us into futures that question the control of our bodies, our desires and the world around us beyond the register of dystopia. In doing so, they explore how we might transform our imaginaries of gender, new technologies, ecology and postcolonial issues.