Veils

Ten shots of the sky, each ten minutes long. That’s all it takes to describe James Benning’s film from 2004. And yet, this simplicity conceals a rich and absorbing drama, one of the great works of the American avant-garde. Scholar and critic Erika Balsom unfolds its hidden intricacies of meaning, extending its lessons with crystalline prose, a comparable sense of depths, and an exhilarating, maximalist intimation of what criticism can do and become. She brings you from the film itself into the mind of the artist, through philosophical musings and art historical scholarship. The book is part of a Decadent Editions series of 10 books about 10 films.

The acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' Love Song to the Nation, All About Love is a revelation about what causes a polarized society and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces.

"The word 'love' is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb," writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness—not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society's failure to provide a model for learning to love.

As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question "What is love?" her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the "100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life." All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better.

Third edition featuring afterword by Alessandro Sbordoni & several appendices, including a new translation & edit of “Taylor Swift Does Not Exist”. 

This is a monumental and extensive work from someone who is arguably the most well-versed scholar of Baudrillard, Deleuze & Laruelle in the German-speaking world, Achim Szepanski, the original founder of Mille Plateaux, Force Inc Music Works and NON. This book is dedicated to Jean Baudrillard, who would be described by Achim as the most radical and advanced stimmung in Philosophy. Through this comprehensive and devouring analysis of Baudrillard’s work, the author presents a gripping account of their own philosophy; alongside his magnum opus Die Ekstasie der Spekulation, this book, In the Delirium of the Simulation, provides the strongest case for what might be called, in light of his passing, Szepanskism or Szepanskian Economics. 

From Finance, to non-philosophy and radical experimental music, Szepanski is an anomalous and unique theoretician with one hell of a history. 

CONTENTS:

• Metabox of Terms: Simulation, Code, Hyperreality, Fractal, Seduction and Implosion 
• Baudrillard's Maximisation Hypothesis: the System and the Other
• Baudrillard & Marxism: Signs, Production and Money
• Distinguishing the Consumer System (or Shopping Mall) from the Landfill
• Baudrillard & the Financial Simulacrum
• Excursus on Jonathan Beller's World Computer 
• Hyperreality & Artificial Intelligence
• Baudrillard & Quantum Theory
• Afterword: Hyperculture by Alessandro Sbordoni
• Appendix 1: Taylor Swift Does Not Exist
• Appendix 2: Baudrillard: After the Orgy
• Appendix 3: Imagination & Reality: Psychoanalysis vs Baudrillard

To Navigate Backward: Resonating with Zapatismo a book-within-a-book, the first of three mouvements (as in a musical composition) is a collection of essays titled When the Roots Start Moving: Chto Delat and Free Home University—investigating predicaments of rootedness and rootlessness and notions of belonging and of displacement across different geographical and epistemological coordinates.

Zapatismo—the insurgent movement of Indigenous peoples from Mexico—emerges as a form of belonging, a home (or a homecoming) for our hopes and political imaginaries, providing a praxis to learn from and with. The contributors of this book, without romanticizing or objectifying the Zapatista struggle toward Autonomy, offer their understanding of the Zapatistas' movement, of their poetics and politics within an Indigenous cosmovision and cosmopolitics, but also in relation with the current global ecological and social crises.

The book extend the research and practice of artistic collective Chto Delat, long since adopting Zapatismo as a lens to self-reflect and emblematically reminding of how the Zapatista imaginary continues to inspire those who are looking for emancipatory tools: through art, language, radical pedagogy and conviviality, as a practice of commoning and collectively reimagining an otherwise.

To Navigate Backward: Resonating with Zapatismo is a small act of reciprocity—in preparation for the Zapatistas' visit to the European continent, a gesture of solidarity with those who, with fierce care, leave their homes to reverse imposed trajectories, to look in the same direction and share a common horizon.

The conversation hosted in this book by Free Home University will continue in the following two mouvements—Between Displacement and Belonging and Motherlands/Mother Earth.

The collective Chto Delat (What is to be done?) was founded in early 2003 in St. Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism. Chto Delat sees itself as an artistic cell and also as a community organizer for a variety of cultural activities intent on politicizing "knowledge production". The activity of collective takes responsibility for a postsocialist condition and actualization of forgetten and repressed potentiality of Soviet past and often works as a politics of commemoration. From its inception, the collective has been publishing an English-Russian newspaper focused on the urgent issues of Russian cultural politics, in dialogue with the international context. In 2013, Chto Delat initiated an educational platform—School of Engaged Art in Petersburg and also provides resources for a space called Rosa's House of Culture.

Free Home University exists at the crossroad of engaged art, experimental pedagogy, and political commitment since 2014. Based in Lecce (Italy), FHU has been carrying out artistic investigations and processes of convivial research, engaging with communities of struggle and practice. Artists, farmers, activists, asylum seekers, scholars, thinkers and doers collectively inform learning spaces, through living, studying, and creating together.

The continuation and culmination of a vast project, articulated between an exhibition and a symposium, imagined by South African curator Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi), inviting 17 artists from Africa and its diaspora and a group of researchers to evoke black aesthetics and propose an alternative vision of a world without borders.

In Zulu, imbizo means "gathering" which is called by the elders when there are communal problems so that everyone listens to each other to see how solutions can evolve. The book Globalisto. A philosophy in flux. Acts of an Imbizo is intended as a hybrid between a catalogue of the exhibition held at MAMC+ from 25 June to 16 October 2022 and the publication of the proceedings of the symposium held on 6 and 7 October 2022. The book is therefore in two parts.

The first part reports on Imbizo part 1: the opening, and on the exhibition curated by Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi) and Aurélie Voltz, director of MAMC+, which brought together artworks by seventeen artists: Sammy Baloji, Raphaël Barontini, Marie Aimée Fattouche, Sam Gilliam, Porky Hefer, Lubaina Himid, Arthur Jafa, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Samson Kambalu, Moshekwa Langa, Myriam Mihindu, Wilfried Nakeu, Otobong Nkanga, Josèfa Ntjam, Sara Sadik, Dread Scott and Gerard Sekoto. A 32-page glossy booklet follows the exhibition line-up, showing at least one reproduction of each artist's work. The playlist that was available to listen to in the first exhibition room has found its place in the book in the same way as a list of works—a flashcode link refers the person who wishes to read the book while listening to music.

The second part of the book, which is its main body, publishes a written transcription of the contributions of the speakers at Imbizo part 2: the symposium on "Art and (de)colonisation". You will find lectures by academics (Norman Ajari, Amal Alhaag, Christine Eyene, Elvan Zabunyan) as well as more visual essays, conceived as transpositions of performances (Jamika Ajalon, Elsa M'Bala) and a more oral proposition, a transcription of a podcast by the Piment collective that took place live in the MAMC+ auditorium. Three interviews introduce the proceedings. The first, with the curator Mo Laudi, is taken from a special issue of Le 1 Hebdo devoted to the "Globalisto" exhibition. The second is a continuation of the first, conducted by Aurélie Voltz, director of the MAMC+, who asks the curator about the follow-up to his project. The last is also a second publication, originally published in Le 1 Hebdo, in which journalists Iman Amhed, Laurent Greilsamer and Maxence Collin interview philosopher Achille Mbembé.

Contributions by Aurélie Voltz, Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi), Iman Ahmed, Maxence Collin, Achille Mbembe, Norman Ajari, Christine Eyene, Elvan Zabunyan, Jamika Ajalon, Amal Alhaag, Elsa M'Bala.