When Technology Was Female: Histories of Construction and Deconstruction, 1917-1989

An experiment in book making, which takes up the form of the LP record as a starting point for re-configuring the haptics of the printed book. Presented as a collection of unbound pages inside a gatefold record sleeve, the publication includes a pressed record, as well as written, visual and sonic contributions from scholars, poets, artists, choreographers and DJs.

Through the logic of the detail, each contributor imaginatively (re)produces Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack as an archive of personal histories and a universe of intergenerational connections. Held together as an album, it is a performance to be made at home, which invites readers/listeners to feel art’s histories and to be in them with their bodies.

d.a. carter with contributions by Taylor Renée Aldridge; Samiya Bashir; La Marr Jurelle Bruce; DJ Lynnée Denise, Jennifer Harge, Duane Lee Holland, Jr., William H. Mosley, III, Zoé Samudzi, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Melanie Stevens and Phillip B. Williams.

Writing Out Loud is a publication that brings together the transcriptions of eight lectures by the artist Jon Mikel Euba that were live translated from Spanish to English during the course Action unites, words divide (On praxis, an unstated theory) at the DAI. The lectures were delivered across the academic year 2014 – 2015 at the invitation of If I Can’t Dance. They sit within a larger writing-centred project by the artist that he has pursued for almost a decade, through which he aims to define a form of praxis that could evolve into a technical theory.

This experimental children’s book narrates cross-species practices of survival across the Indonesian archipelago, centring the perspectives of local animals such as endangered monkeys, cosmopolitan rats, migrant sparrows and fugitive dogs. Written in the form of a play, its six episodes ground the readers in the animals’ struggles and aspirations as they go about their daily lives and face the consequences of postcolonial erasure, ecological destruction and capitalist expansion. While the stories unfold, their interconnected existences become an archive of uncertainties, where the fate of many different creatures, humans included, is inseparable from each other.

As a script for intergenerational transmission, the book thoughtfully combines dialogues, songs and drawings, with contextualising essays and extensive notations. Through these different modes of reading, children and adults alike will learn about cross-species solidarity and rebellious movements, but also about disappearing Indigenous cosmologies, and the brave women who wove cloths around the mountains in eco-political resistance.

Partly a script, partly a personal voyage into the psyche of diseducation, this book happens, has happened and will happen on the 31st of October in a place called ‘The Palace of Melancholy’. In this temporal and spatial loop, the figure of Italian actor, author, director, philosopher, and public persona Carmelo Bene is summoned to hopefully be dismissed once and for all. Bene is looked at by the author reluctantly and yet resolutely through inner voices of dissent, shame and rebellion. He is imagined in gatherings that didn’t happen and read through an epistemology of contradiction. In Giannini’s company and support, Snejanka Mihaylova, Jacopo Miliani, and Arnisa Zeqo probe the walls of the Palace, looking for an exit.

I went to the field; I became many.

Majnoon is an oil field in the global south. Majnoon is also the violence, and the state of mind that survives the violence. How can this be a field guide in any customary sense? Latitudes have been taken. Words are written in disrupted or troubled syntax. Rather, this book proceeds alongside a search for what many call emancipatory practice; to been acted in the field, where we feel most alive. The volume is divided into five parts, preceded by maps and legends. First in the sequence is a colour-coded soil map,“Majnoon and Hir Environs”, adapted from material originally published in 1960 by the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture. It was the product—relic, really—of a brief era that saw fields and farmlands redistributed among labourers and peasants. Since then, the map has changed with the shifting substance of our earthly constitution; it pivots on the example of Majnoon. Any map is appended by its legends, and I rewrite them from the perspective of dismantling. A longish colour key unfolds with the likeness of a poem pursuing return, inspite of scorch and ruin. It should be mentioned that ‘hir’ recurs multiple times throughout the book as gender-nonconforming pronoun—suggestive, ambiguous, and, in my opinion, sufficiently sound for the moment. It is essential to keep needling the problem of language.

A second, simpler map charts water flow as casualty of upstream accumulation. Dams are borders, after all, and we are lousy with them; downstream is sentenced to the whims of an architecture whose gates are mostly closed. On the map, a symbol resembling a small, numbered page locates Majnoon as point of interest. A subsequent diagram also contains this motif—not for navigation through the field, butt hrough the book itself.

Publié en 2025 dans le cadre du projet d'art public The River as Habitat installé dans le Lycée Edward Steichen, Clervaux et commandité par l'administration des bâtiments publics, Luxembourg.

sex and place is a series of workshops and publications exploring score-based and semi-anonymous writing as a tool for articulating shared concerns.

Vol. 1 ‘preliminiaries’ is written by Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen. In the midst of (learning) child care, (unlearning) performance and (experimenting with) sex, the publication interweaves three registers of writing as analogies and interruptions of each other.

The ‘sex and place’ series is part Domestic Anarchism, a project devoted to coalition-building beyond biological, chosen, or national conceptions of family. Dance serves as a set of tools and knowledge that can be applied beyond “the spectacle” to collectively study, write, and move. 

Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen are choreographers and they co-parent three-year-old Penélope Cleo. Andrea and Adriano use dance and choreography to think about the distribution of care and solidarity beyond ‘the family’, and in turn consider how such a distribution could inform their dance practice. Inevitably themes like sex, economy, gender, and class get activated. But also notions such as prefiguration, anarchism, clitoridian* thinking, zones of non-domination and coalition building. They see dance as a knowledge that can be applied to different practices. Some of these include: co-habitations, score based writing and dancing, self-organised study groups and publications, workshops and dance performances. 

Much in our life at this moment is often marked by an absence of clarity. Many have experienced a malaise and come to know its persistence. We seem to have become used to stasis and theoretical discussions, lingering in silence and hoping from time to time for something extraordinary to happen. Yet it might also have been a blessing; an opportunity to free ourselves from overarching narratives, to direct our attention to the individual, the local, and to subjects that have long been part of our own lives—a more agile, intuitive mindset.

The third issue of te magazine took shape in this context, and chose to confront experiences of “plight”—plight of the persecuted, of the artists, of the forgotten, and of those living with colonial legacies. How might we, as individuals, transmute plights in order to learn to live in this world? If each piece in this issue can be said to propose a mode of healing, the aim is not only about specific pathologies, but rather to recommend adjustments and defenses in moments of crisis. While writing on the plights of others, the authors also look inward for the roots of questions that they have long harbored about their own experiences. As introduced by Jacques Lacan, the theory of “the mirror stage” refers to children's initial awareness of their own existence. As adults, we continue to grapple with the process of self-discovery and understanding, at times feeling trapped deeply in the “mirror.”

This issue’s theme, Mirroring represents a continuous exploration of the self. On the one hand, these pieces document the processes of setbacks, negating, questioning and reconciling; on the other, delineate the self through the other, a process discernible in several jointly-authored pieces in this issue, where a special connection and sense of fellowship formed through dialogue, correspondence, and collaborative research. In Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse described how the protagonist's worldview was shaped through seeking and struggle, and we hear in it an echo of the inspiration behind this issue of te: “But now, his liberated eyes stayed on this side, he saw and became aware of the visible, sought to be at home in this world, did not search for the true essence, did not aim at a world beyond.” (Siddhartha by H. Hesse, translated by Hilda Rosner, Bantam Books,1971)

Contributors:  Guadalupe Maravilla, Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, Kader Attia, Gantala Press, Peng Jen-Yu, An Mengzhu, Chang Yuchen, Chris Zhongtian Yuan, Chu Yun, Chen Zhe, Lieko Shiga