The Against Nature Journal #1

A layered and polyphonic investigation that, setting out from the Orobic Alpine territory in Northern Italy, explores the mountainside not merely as a natural backdrop but as an epistemological lens through which to understand and rethink the contemporary world.

The book originated as an online magazine and an expansion of the biennial program Thinking Like a Mountain (2024–25), a project inspired by Aldo Leopold's exhortation to abandon an anthropocentric gaze in favor of a geological outlook on the peaks, thereby acknowledging the intrinsic value of every natural element. An Orobic Journey developed independently from the exhibition program and is not limited to mere documentation; instead, it functions as a parallel research tool articulated through essays, conversations, and visual documentation, featuring contributions from artists, scientists, researchers, anthropologists, ornithologists, curators, academics, architects, writers, and other experts. 

Embracing Ursula K. Le Guin's "carrier bag theory," An Orobic Journey brings together non-heroic tales of resistance, adaptation, and cohabitation. The book opens with a reflection on species migration and "migratory restlessness": a condition that does not only concern the spontaneous return of wolves to the Alps or the transit of birdlife, but becomes a metaphor for a shared condition of continuous movement and searching. The future of the mountain—amid tourist monocultures and acts of transformative care—is investigated by conceiving the Alpine landscape as a political space shaped by power relations, images, and collective memories, and inhabited by multispecies communities that dwell in a place, weaving intergenerational relationships. With both a poetic and political approach, An Orobic Journey attempts to rethink ways of looking at the mountain landscape while imagining new collective rituals.

A photographic archive of the transgender community in Bologna in the 1980s. With critical texts by scholars and queer theorists.

This book is inspired by the pictures that Giordano Bonora, a young streetcar operator and aspiring photographer, took of Bologna's small transgender community in 1980 (although it would be more correct to speak, in this case, of proto-Transgenderism). Reproduced here for the first time, these raw and gilded images reflect—during a period in Italy characterized by subversive movements and political revolts that were not just rooted in questions of identity—attempts made by T* people at a construction of the self outside the binary logic of the genotypically XY male/genotypically XX female. By people like Valérie—a woman's face, a hairless chest with no breasts, a fleur-de-lis tattooed on the shoulder, and two pairs of pantyhose—for whom “gender” is not determined biologically but something to be embraced depending on the circumstances. A box containing a jigsaw puzzle with a picture that is constantly changing. Bundled with the photographs, a handful of texts set out to explain how the question of gender involves two cultural levels of sexual difference, the normative and the dissident, and how the decision-making power over organs outside heteropatriarchal systems of sexuality and processes of disidentification are the stakes in the new “somato-political” struggle against hegemonic regimes of oppression conducted by enchanting, allied, opaque, and vulnerable bodies.

Texts by Paolo Barbaro, Paul B. Preciado, Helena Velena, Salvatore Vitale, Wendy Vogel.

With a preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge and an introduction by Sara Ahmed.
Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Born in New York, she had her first poem published while still at school and her last the year she died of cancer. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent. This edition brings Lorde’s essential poetry, speeches and essays, including ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, together in one volume for the first time.

The fourth in a series of publications, featuring writing by graphic design students of EKA GD MA. Typing... includes essays, scripts, translations and stories on a wide range of topics: killing vowels and milling fonts, personal knowledge management, shortcuts, tedious/careful/tiring/joyful typesetting, type of Georgianness, typing in 3rab(izi) and typing in all lowercase.

With contributions by Anna Wittenkamp Rich, Archil Tsereteli, Fa(tima)-Ezzahra El Khammas, João (Juca) Pedro Nogueira, Karthik Palepu, Laura Martens, Linnea Lindgren, Rok Ifko Kranjc.

Designed by Fatima-Ezzahra El Khammas and Laura Martens
Cover by Hanafi Gazali

This special, limited-edition issue of Plaster celebrates Akomfrah’s commission for the British Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. The linen presentation box contains: an essay by Akomfrah’s long-time friend and collaborator, the BAFTA-winning film curator June Givanni; an interview with Akomfrah by Harriet Lloyd-Smith; original portraits by photographer Siam Coy and a fold-out poster featuring an exclusive still from Akomfrah’s film installation, Listening All Night To The Rain, now screening in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

With creative direction by Constantine // Spence and design by Emma Ralph.