Product Description
Over the past year, we have repeatedly found ourselves reaching for books and texts about violence. Perhaps with the urge to understand that which swells like waves around us, threatening to take us under in all its manifold, rising forms: economic violence, linguistic violence, nationalistic violence, environmental violence, gender and racial violence. In this fourth and final issue of the documenta 14 journal South as a State of Mind, it seemed necessary to name it, finally, as one of the structuring devices of our world. From this decision came a question: What might counter this culture of violence both in spirit and in action? What apposite force? What to generate in the face of it? Our question remains; yet in considering it anew, we realize that this is the query that has guided our editorial vision of the documenta 14 journal, and its four special issues of South, forward. Under the dark star of this question—what might we offer, and what forms might these offerings take?—this issue’s working theme is “violence and offering.” If the latter term implies both a gift and a sacrifice, it likewise describes a different kind of relationship to one’s community, society, or other. Thus the work in this issue of South—its essays, poems, letters, and images—examines how violence structures our relations in and with the world, as well as the disparate offerings (linguistic, visual, auditory) continually created as a cultural movement of opposition to it. Antonin Artaud once wrote: “There aren’t enough magazines, or if you will, all existing magazines are useless. We are appearing because we believe we are responding to something. We are real. This excuses us from being necessary. There should be as many magazines as there are valid states of mind.” In 2015, when we began editing South, we did so because we believed we were responding to something. Perhaps, as Artaud notes, this belief excused us from being necessary. But we believed then, as we feel now, that there should be as many magazines as there are states of mind, Southern and other. The documenta 14 journal has been the manifestation of one (or rather, many) of them. We thank you for reading.
With contributions by Domenick Ammirati, Antonin Artaud, James Baldwin, Cassandra Barnett, Walter Benjamin, Lorenza Böttner, Jane Bowles, Andris Brinkmanis, Jon Bywater, Banu Cennetoğlu, Yll Çitaku and Nita Deda, Yael Davids, Angela Y. Davis, Richard Fletcher, Marina Fokidis, Susan Hiller, Kim Hyesoon, Naveen Kishore, Katerina Koskina, Asja Lācis, Quinn Latimer, Robin Coste Lewis, Ulrich Loock, John Miller, Rosalind Nashashibi, Sean O’Toole, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Hila Peleg, Paul B. Preciado, Laura Preston, Gene Ray, Ben Russell, Ahlam Shibli, K. G. Subramanyan, Vivian Suter, Adam Szymczyk, and Diana Taylor
South as a State of Mind #9 [documenta 14 #4]
Fall/Winter 2017
Edited by Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk
300 × 230 mm, 280 pp., numerous color and black-and-white illustrations, English
