Scrapbook – 40 ans de Light Cone

A workbook by Flatform on displacement, conceived and curated by Giuliana Prucca.

The book is published under four different covers and with four different layouts, randomly distributed.

Founded in 2006 and based in Berlin and Milan, Flatform is a video and media arts collective, at the border between experimental cinema and contemporary art, that creates time-based works, film events, and installations, most of which revolve around landscape and biopolitics. Distributed by Light Cone in Paris and by Video Data Bank in Chicago, works by Flatform have competed in major film festivals including Cannes, Rotterdam, Venice, Toronto, and have been shown worldwide in art venues such as Centre Pompidou, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hirshhorn Museum, MAXXI Museum, Eye Filmmuseum, Wexner Center for the Arts and Garage Center for the Arts.

Co-published by Light Cone and Avarie.

The fifth issue of Rab-Rab: Journal of Political and Formal Inquiries in Art includes stories about nation traitors, fierce masses, socialist women struggles, love-forms, psychedelic counter-revolutionaries, workers unions, Brecht fiddlers, jazz surrealism, Soviet trains, and anti-fascism.

Among the contributors to the fifth issue are Anna Thew, Yehuda Safran, Peter Gidal, Cana Bilir-Meier, David Black, Marjo Liukkonen, Alejandro Pedregal, Peter Hallward, Minna Henriksson, and Jyrki Siukonen.

It has also two extensive dossiers. One dedicated to Franklin Rosemont is presented by Joe Feinberg and is introducing some unpublished and difficult to find texts parallel with writings of T-Bone Slim and Joe Hill. The other dossier on Robert Linhart is presented by Tevfik Rada, and it includes a translation of a chapter from Linhart's book on productivism, an article against Western bourgeois dissidents, and an interview with him.

Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016 is a collection of essays by Peter Gidal that includes “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film” and other texts on metaphor, narrative, and against sexual representation.

Also discussed in their specificity are works by Samuel Beckett, Thérèse Oulton, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. Throughout, Gidal’s writing attempts a political aesthetics, polemical as well as theoretical. One of the foremost experimental film-makers in Britain since the late 1960s, Peter Gidal was a central figure at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, and taught advanced film theory at the Royal College of Art. His previous books include Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings (1971), Understanding Beckett (1986) and Materialist Film (1989).

‘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.

DEARS is a print magazine for transversal writing practices at the crossroads of art, poetry and experimental writing. It brings together authors and writers from different backgrounds and constitutes a dedicated platform for texts escaping the usual genres and disciplinary boundaries.

DEARS promotes the exploration of new forms of language as a way to foster new forms of living together, and emphasizes the growing relevance of trans- versal writing practices in this respect.

DEARS no. 5 / Summer 2023 / ever.over

With texts by Diaty Diallo, Douglas Keaney, Dzifa Benson, Sevinç Çalhanoğlu, Jana Vanecek, and an epigraph by Trinh T. Minh-ha.

This DVD includes three seminal early films: 
Key, 1968, 10 min.
Clouds, 1969, 10 min.
Room Film 1973, 1973, 55 min. 

Peter Gidal's films have been an influence on several generations of artists. An important theorist and writer as well as a filmmaker since the late 1960s, Gidal was a pioneer of 'structural-materialist' film and his work has been shown around the world, including retrospectives at the ICA in London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. You can read more about Peter Gidal on LUX Online.

Telling Invents Told is the first collection of writings by artist and filmmaker Lis Rhodes.

It includes the influential essay Whose History? alongside texts from works such as Light Reading, Pictures on Pink Paper and A Cold Draft, together with new and previously unpublished materials. Since the 1970s, Rhodes has been making radical and experimental work that challenges hegemonic narratives and the power structures of language. Her writing addresses urgent political issues – from the refugee crisis to workers’ rights, police brutality, racial discrimination and homelessness – as well as film history and theory, from a feminist perspective.

An important figure at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, Rhodes was also a founding member of Circles, the first British distributor of film, video and performance by women artists.

Gabriel Abrantes has been making a career in cinema; with numerous international exhibitions, he's been keeping prolific, with video installations, drawing, painting, and now also VR. This book, published by maat and Mousse, attests exactly this. A book that is predominantly visual and clearly structured, efficient in transposing a certain formal and conceptual attitude that runs through Abrantes's work into the book's aesthetic approach, expressing humour and irony visually within a relatively classical framework.

"The juxtaposition of references to art and cultural history with personal and socio-political commentary is a guiding thread throughout Programmed Melancholy." writes Emily Butler, in one of the essays included in this book (other texts are an interview with the artist and short essay by Rosa Lleó). Butler continues: "His works engage with our emotions, with a range of personal feelings, often humorous, potentially rousing ethical and political beliefs. Unstable, multi-faced, polysexual, his characters waver between expressing personal emotions and wider social, environmental and political concerns."