The practice of Dramaturgy - Working on Actions in Performance

Love & Lightning: A Collection of Queer and Feminist Manifestos is a thematically ordered, inconclusive collection of queer, feminist and queer-feminist manifestos. Girls Like Us Magazine and author Sarah van Binsbergen have composed a publication showcasing the different forms a manifesto might have, from classical, activist formats to more poetic, associative texts. The manifestos highlighted in this book cross borders, forms and disciplines, refuse binary logics, transcend our concepts of time and space and surpass the neoliberal logic.

Love & Lightning does not claim to be a complete anthology, but it rather aims to show the myriad of ways manifestos can be composed, and what their legacy until this day is. It presents manifestos from 1851 until now, divided into eleven chapters, introduced in their socio-historical and geographical contexts, with many from Asia, Africa, Latin-America. Not only does this publication give new insight in the style of the manifesto, it aims to emancipate the reader to propose their own revolution, whether big or small.

Manifestos include: Ain’t I a Woman by Soujourner Truth; Work Will Not Save Us: An Asian American Crip Manifesto; Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey; The Manukan Declaration of the Indigenous Women’s Biodiversity Network; W.I.T.C.H. Manifesto; Fag Hags Fight Back!!!; Manifesto for Maintenance Art by Mierle Laderman-Ukeles; Dyke Manifesto from the Lesbian Avengers; Killjoy Manifesto by Sara Ahmed; Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation by Laboria Cuboniks; The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto from Sandy Stone; Refugia! Manifesto for Becoming Autonomous Zones by subRosa; Countersexual Manifesto from Paul B. Preciado; and many, many more.

Exhibiting for Multiple Senses looks into artistic and curatorial research practices that emphasize the multisensory character of the human body in the encounter with artworks. For some time now, numerous contemporary artists and curators have moved beyond the primacy of the visual in the experience of art exhibitions. The book discusses this shift by bringing together experimental exhibition-making, curatorial theory, art, design, and museum research, disability activism and crip theory. Its intent is to demonstrate resonances between curatorial theory and practice and between disability and crip art activism. While the latter is still often regarded as relevant for only small portions of visibly disabled people, in recent years neurodiversity and invisible disabilities have proven to be relevant for the sensory experiences of much larger parts of exhibition audiences.

Exhibiting for Multiple Senses shares famous and lesser-known examples of experimental exhibitions as well as of artistic practices linked to exhibitions. By mobilizing the senses of touch, smell, taste, and hearing, as well as applications of multimodal technologies and insights from neuroscience, these examples all explore abilities and possibilities of the complex and diverse sensory apparatus that is the human body.

Contributors: David Bobier, Luca M. Damiani, Stephanie Farmer & Hettie James, Eva Fotiadi, David Gissen & Georgina Kleege, Adi Hollander, Lilian Korner, Elke Krasny, Renata Pękowska, Caro Verbeek

A new collection from one of Latin America's most dynamic radical thinkers—in the tradition of Frantz Fanon and Eduardo Galeano.

Through a survey of the most marginalized voices across Latin America—feminists, the Indigenous, people of African descent, and inhabitants of urban favelas and rural towns—Zibechi introduces the Anglo world to a range of critical perspectives and new forms of struggle in Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Bolivia. His book contributes to global geographies of autonomous and anti-state thinking, including that of the revolutionaries in Rojava and Abdullah Öcalan, ideological theorist of Kurdish resistance, for a rich and dynamic survey of movements of nonstate power. Constructing Worlds Otherwise comes at a time when the global left—struggling to expand its vision in an era of climate chaos and rising authoritarianism—finds itself at an impasse, desperate to animate and renew its critical imaginary.

Edited by Astrid Kaminski, Jeroen Versteele, Julie De Meester. A personal and intimate look behind the scenes of Meg Stuart's creative process over more than a decade. 

Since the early nineties, Meg Stuart, and her dance company Damaged Goods, based in Brussels, have produced a remarkable and audacious body of choreographic work. In 2010, Damaged Goods published Are we here yet?, which spans the first twenty years of Meg Stuart's career. In the follow-up book Let's not get used to this place, the choreographer looks back on more than a decade of works through reflections, interviews, scores, and notes on the practice of creating, performing, teaching and living dance. These are mixed with reports, essays and poetry by collaborators and other observers, photos, performance texts and archive material. The book's title, gleaned from one of Stuart's recent video works, ties together these multifarious sources in a desire to discard tried and tested strategies, explore new contexts, and transgress the edge of what we (do not) know. 
Let's not get used to this place gives a sense of the plentitude of motions, inspirations and personalities that energize Meg Stuart's creative cosmos. It offers a personal and intimate look behind the scenes of the creative process, and expands this to include the world around it. As a journey through her more recent career, an inspiring manual and a work of art in its own right, it has a wide appeal to an international base of artists, students and peers, and to anyone who is interested in performance.

Contributions by Jean-Marc Adolphe, Preethi Athreya, Mariana Tengner Barros, Sandra Blatterer, Esther Boldt, Márcio Kerber Canabarro, Varinia Canto Vila, Descha Daemgen, Jorge De Hoyos, Igor Dobricic, Brendan Dougherty, Doris Dziersk, Tim Etchells, Moriah Evans, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Jule Flierl, Alain Franco, Davis Freeman, Ami Garmon, Philipp Gehmacher, Jared Gradinger, Ezra Green, Claudia Hill, Maija Hirvanen, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Astrid Kaminski, Kiraṇ Kumār, Göksu Kunak, André Lepecki & Eleonora Fabiano, Jean-Paul Lespagnard, Marc Lohr, Matthias Mohr, Anne-Françoise Moyson, Anja Müller, Kotomi Nishiwaki, Jeroen Peeters, Alejandro Penagos, Léa Poiré, Leyla Postalcıoğlu, Ana Rocha, Tian Rotteveel, Hahn Rowe, Isabela Fernandes Santana, Maria F. Scaroni, Bernd M. Scherer, Kerstin Schroth, Gerald Siegmund, Charlotte Simon, Mieko Suzuki, Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Poorna Swami, Meg Stuart, Margarita Tsomou, Kristof Van Boven, Elke Van Campenhout, Myriam Van Imschoot, Jeroen Versteele, Doug Weiss, Stefanie Wenner, Jozef Wouters, John Zwaenepoel.

From award-winning writer Sarah Schulman, a longtime social activist and outspoken critic of the Israeli war on Gaza, comes a brilliant examination of the inherent psychological and social challenges to solidarity movements, and what that means for the future. 

For those who seek to combat injustice, solidarity with the oppressed is one of the highest ideals, yet it does not come without complication. In this searing yet uplifting book, award-winning writer and cultural critic Sarah Schulman delves into the intricate and often misunderstood concept of solidarity to provide a new vision for what it means to engage in this work—and why it matters. 

To grapple with solidarity, Schulman writes, we must recognize its inherent fantasies. Those being oppressed dream of relief, that a bystander will intervene though it may not seem to be in their immediate interest to do so, and that the oppressor will be called out and punished. Those standing in solidarity with the oppressed are occluded by a different fantasy: that their intervention is effective, that it will not cost them, and that they will be rewarded with friendship and thanks. Neither is always the case, and yet in order to realize our full potential as human beings in relation with others, we must continue to pursue action towards these shared goals. 

Within this framework, Schulman examines a range of case studies, from the fight for abortion rights in post-Franco Spain, to NYC’s AIDS activism in the 1990s, to the current wave of campus protest movements against Israel’s war on Gaza, and her own experience growing up as a queer female artist in male dominated culture industries. Drawing parallels between queer, Palestinian, feminist, and artistic struggles for justice, Schulman challenges the traditional notion of solidarity as a simple union of equals, arguing that in today’s world of globalized power structures, true solidarity requires the collaboration of bystanders and conflicted perpetrators with the excluded and oppressed. That action comes at a cost, and is not always effective. And yet without it we sentence ourselves to a world without progressive change towards visions of liberation. 

By turns challenging, inspiring, pragmatic, and poetic, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity provides a much-needed path for how we can work together to create a more just, more equitable present and future.

While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution, Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers—arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the page. Printers' extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. Printers and presses did more than report on the movement; they were constitutive of it, and their vitality in anarchist communities helps explain anarchism’s remarkable persistence in the face of continuous harassment, arrest, assault, deportation, and exile. By inquiring into the political, material, and aesthetic practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance.