To Become Two

An extensive and comprehensive polyphonic exploration of the work of The Otolith Group, coming at a pivotal point in their practice.

The work of this London-based artist's collective comprised of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun covers politics of race and diversity and incorporates film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face. 

Presenting all bodies of work contained in the Xenogenesis exhibition, this publication includes many materials and graphics from The Otolith Group's broader practice, including performance, lecture and research material. The outcome of over four years of collaboration, research and conversation, the publication is not a chronological exhibition catalogue or retrospective but a cross-section of their work which includes substantial contributions from the artists themselves, in the form of writing and direct engagement with its production.

The publication also brings together important thinkers, scholars, art historians and writers from disparate fields, who know and have worked with the group, as well as those who are writing from a contemporary perspective. They include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Annie Fletcher, Anselm Franke, Shanay Jhaveri, George E. Lewis, Mahan Moalemi, Fred Moten, Grant Watson, Vivian Ziherl and the late Mark Fisher each of whom reflect on a particular aspect of the Group's practice with supplementary materials such as archival images, documented conversations, early lecture performances as well as other accompanying texts and examinations of their research sites.

This book documents an installation by Eric Baudelaire revisiting the political and personal saga of the Japanese Red Army as an anabasys—an allegory of a journey that is both a wandering into the unknown and a return back home.

“This book is not for reading but for wandering. Its lines do not roll out continuously but superimpose each other to infinity, creating not a compendium of knowledge but a web of prescience. It does not follow a logical framework but unfurls a grid with multiple entries. It does not assert a set subject or conclusive postulate. At most it invites us to probe the recesses of a mind in motion, and steeps us in the driving material that brings it to life. It reflects the works it exhibits, the documents it discloses and the commentary it generates: it aspires to ubiquity. Anabasis, the very real linking thread that stitches it together, serves not just as an archaeological enigma, but also as an allegorical force. The main author of this ocean crossing, Eric Baudelaire, is both a collector of vestiges and a sketcher of wandering lines who has surrounded himself with other meticulous voices (Pierre Zaoui, Homay King, Jean-Pierre Rehm), fellow-travellers in this library secret. Readers will be able to enjoy the gradual unfolding of the story of war and politics whose underlying intellectual and poetic adventure this book enables us to recall—that of its repetitions, ramifications and hybridisations: the story of Anabasis after Anabasis (or from Xenophon's Anabasis to that of Paul Celan by way of Alain Badiou's), from an ancient narrative to its modern reappropriation.” — Morad Montazami 

Edited by Eric Baudelaire and Anna Colin.

Texts by Morad Montazami, Pierre Zaoui, Homay King, Jean-Pierre Rehm.

What does it mean to be a curator who writes, and, more specifically, how can curators write about textiles? This publication steps outside the framework of the typical exhibition catalogue to occupy "the space between literature and criticism".

The Community of writers was set up to create time and space to retreat from these outside opinions and demands and to let curiosity and the joy of writing be the driving forces of the writing process. This book has been realised under the auspice of Interweaving Structures: Fabric as Material, Method, and Message, and specifically through collaboration between the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at the University of Bergen and the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź. The two partners have strong positions of specialisation—the museum acts as a caretaker of material textile traditions and art in Poland, and the faculty has a strong textile art tradition and offers the only education programme for curators in Norway.

Edited by Anne Szefer Karlsen.
Contributions by Andreas Hoffmann, Heather Jones, Martina Petrelli, Anne Szefer Karlsen, Lea Vene, Johanna Zanon.

Publication including the films Transformation Scenario, 70.001, and Faux Terrain, as well as a visual essay, a glossary and texts by Heike Geißler, Fanni Fetzer, and Franciska Zólyom.

“When I visited the Elias Canetti archive at the Zentralbibliothek Zurich, I was looking for manuscripts and sketches for his major work Crowds and Power (1960). I imagined that Canetti must have made drawings, as the behaviour of the various crowd types he identified was described in such detail. I hoped that these drawings would help me transfer the group behaviour he describes to virtual figures in an animated film.

The archive of manuscripts, arranged by Elias Canetti himself, was handed over to the Zurich library and contains the notes and sketches he completed during the development of Crowds and Power, a period of almost forty years. However, in this context I found no drawings—Canetti had only made graphic lists on various themes. So where did Canetti's precise descriptions of the scenes come from?”

Clemens von Wedemeyer (born 1974 in Göttingen, lives and works in Berlin) creates films, videos and media installations poised between reality and fiction, reflecting power structures in social relations, history and architecture.

Edited by Fanni Fetzer and Franciska Zólyom.
Texts by Heike Geißler, Fanni Fetzer, Franciska Zólyom.

BEAUTY KIT – AN ECO-EROGENOUS ART PROJECT by Isabel Burr Raty with contributions by Kristin Rogghe, Elke Van Campenhout, Gosie Vervloessem, Pablo Diartinez and Tim Vets, is an experimental catalog summarizing Isabel Burr Raty’s research on conceptualizing and manufacturing eco-erogenous para-pharmaceutical products. It tells the story of the BKFF, a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their orgasmic juices to produce beauty bio-products, used for treatments in the BK Spa, critically discussed in the BK Focus Group and moving forward into becoming a village, where every-body harvests each other. The catalog comes with contributing text, “Harvesting bodies – The Farm as Paradox” by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout, and other reflections on the project.

Isabel Burr Raty is a Belgian-Chilean artist, filmmaker, and Media Art History teacher in ERG (École de Recherche Graphique), living between Brussels and Amsterdam. She is currently developing her second feature film, about the colonial impact on Easter Island, and creating live art and new media installations that queer production understandings, such as the Beauty Kit Project. Her works have been shown internationally.

A bold, innovative biography that offers a new understanding of the life, work, and enduring impact of Audre Lorde.

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today.

Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde’s quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive―to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands.

In Survival Is a Promise , Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Her life and work become more than a sound bite; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on earth.

Hardscapes / Here documents and brings together two exhibition projects by artists Nina Canell and Maria Hassabi. Produced on the occasion of the exhibitions of the same name curated by Samuele Piazza at the OGR Torino, the publication consists of two graphically specular books that merge into a single volume. Essays, unpublished materials and a rich set of photographic materials form the driving force behind two visual narratives that offer new keys to understanding the research of the two artists.

Hassabi's live installation Here calls on visitors to share space and spend time with six performers portrayed in a decelerated rhythmic choreography within a sculptural environment. In constant motion, the dancers contribute to a situation of shifting presence, demonstrating the contestable nature of the "here and now." Immobility and slowing down are thus used both as techniques and as subjects of representation: the performing bodies oscillate between dance and sculpture, subject and object, living body and static image.

Canell's Hardscapes combines two works that focus on the concepts of circulation and transformation as well as on unexpected forms of coexistence. Energy Budget (2017–18), a video that alternates between two subjects: a basement in which a leopard snail crawls over an electrical panel, and the gradual shifting of the frame away from "dragon gates"—portal-like openings in huge buildings on the Hong Kong waterfront. Muscle Memory (16 Tonnes) (2020–21) is a floor sculpture, decomposed and transformed by the density of moving bodies, which literally crumbles under the soles of passing visitors.

In addition to texts by the curator, the publication includes essays by Felicia Leu and Laura Preston, along with a conversation by Maria Hassabi and Nina Canell with Lorenzo Giusti.

Published on the occasion of the epoymous exhibitions at OGR Torino in 2022.

Edited by Samuele Piazza.
Texts by Lorenzo Giusti, Felicia F. Leu, Samuele Piazza, Laura Preston.

The materials collected in the publication have been developed departing from the documentation, transcription and translation of textual, visual, sculptural and audio materials produced between March and November 2021 for STILI DRAMA. 

STILI DRAMA is an open-ended episodic para-cinematographic project, which functions as a spontaneous expression of MRZB research. STILI DRAMA XVIII-XXI and LA GIOSTRA DI LULU XLI-XLIV are the two first fragments of the work.

Language: English, Italian
Edition of 100 copies