Antarctic Resolution. Giulia Foscari, UNLESS (Eds.). Lars Müller Publishers

Posted in geography, photography, research, science, writing on June 5th, 2022
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Accounting for approximately 10 % of the land mass of Planet Earth, the Antarctic is a Global Commons we collectively neglect. Far from being a pristine natural landscape, the continent is a contested territory which conceals resources that might prove irresistible in a world with an ever-increasing population. The 26 quadrillion tons of ice accumulated on its bedrock, equivalent to around 70 % of the fresh water on our planet, represent the most significant repository of scientific data available. It provides crucial information for future environmental policies, and, at the same time, is the greatest possible menace to global coastal settlements when sea levels rise because of global warming.

On the 200th anniversary of the discovery of Antarctica, Antarctic Resolution offers a high-resolution image of this hyper-surveilled yet neglected continent. In contrast to the fragmented view offered by Big Data companies, the book is a holistic study of the continent’s unique geography, unparalleled scientific potential, contemporary geopolitical significance, experimental governance system, and extreme inhabitation model. A transnational network of multidisciplinary polar experts – represented in the form of authored texts, photographic essays, and data-based visual portfolios – reveals the intricate web of growing economic and strategic interests, tensions, and international rivalries, which are normally enveloped in darkness, as is the continent for six months of the year.

With contributions by Doaa Abdel-Motaal, Conrad Anker, Ryan Ashworth, Francesco Bandarin, Carlo Barbante, James N. Barnes, Thomas Barningham, Carlo Baroni, Susan Barr, Elisa Bergami, Marcelo Bernal, Anne-Marie Brady, Ralf Brauner, Cassandra M. Brooks, Shaun T. Brooks, Hugh Broughton, Bert Bücking, David Burrows, Sol Camacho, Sanjay Chaturverdi, Swadheet Chaturvedi, Christy Collis, Peter Convey, Geoff Cooper, Gabriele Coppi, Ilaria Corsi, Lino Dainese, Klaus Dodds, Julian Dowdeswell, Juan Du, Graeme Eagles, Tess Egan, Alexey Ekaykin, Fausto Ferraccioli, Joe Ferraro, James Rodger Fleming, Adrian Fox, William Fox, Bob Frame, Peter Fretwell, Jacopo Gabrielli, Hartwig Gernandt, Andrew Gerrard, Neil Gilbert, Karsten Gohl, Francis Halzen, Kael Hanson, Ursula Harris, Judith Hauck, Robert Headland, Beth Healey, Alan D. Hemmings, Adrian Howkins, Kevin A. Hughes, Andrew T. Hynous, Julia Jabour, Stéphanie Jenouvrier, Solan Jensen, Andrea Kavanaugh, Daniel Kiss, Georg Kleinschmidt, Alexander Klepikov, Peter Landschützer, Louis John Lanzerotti, Elizabeth Leane, Sang-Lem Lee, Inti Ligabue, Daniela Liggett, Bryan Lintott, Vladimir Y. Lipenkov, Cornelia Lüdecke, Arturo Lyon, James Madsen, Craig McCormack, Tony McGlory, Hans-Jürgen Meyer, Christel Misund-Domaas, Nicholas de Monchaux, Chiara Montanari, Michael Morrison, Teasel Muir-Harmony, John Nelson, Camilla Nichol, Miranda Nieboer, Anne Noble, Dirk Notz, Shaun O’Boyle, Madeleine O’Keefe, Nouschka Očenášek, Lawrence A. Palinkas, Scott Parazynski, Carolina Passos, Michael Pearson, Francesco Pellegrino, Rick Petersen, Katherina Petrou, Andrea Piñones, Jean-Yves Pirlot, Ceisha Poirot, Jean de Pomereu, Alexandre Ponomarev, Brian Rauch, Ron Roberts, Donald R. Rothwell, Juan Francisco Salazar, Jean-Baptiste Sallée, Sir Philippe Samyn, Bojan Šavrič, Mirko Scheinert, Didier Schmitt, Thomas Schramm, Daniel Schubert, Karen Nadine Scott, Cara Seitchek, Maria Ximena Senatore, Jonathan Shanklin, Yuri Shibaev, Tim Stephens, Pavel G. Talalay, Steve Theno, Paul Thur, Philip Trathan, David Vaughan, Emerson Vidigal, Claudio Willams, Gary Wilson and Angela Wright.

Winner of the DAM Architectural Book Award 2021

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The Funambulist #41 – Decentering the U.S. Léopold Lambert (Ed.). The Funambulist

Posted in Editions, magazines, politic, politics, writing on May 30th, 2022
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The question that motivates this issue is simple: how come so many of us outside the settler colony called the United States of America, are so deeply influenced by and interpret our own contexts through the political ‘software’ created by U.S.-based academics and activists? The goal here is less to disqualify this U.S. political framework, than to demonstrate that the successful ways through which it analyzes its own context may not be as useful when analyzing other situations. Throughout the issue, we aim to reflect on U.S. exceptionalism, including in its own anti-imperialist critique (Zoé Samudzi), on what Blackness misses when it is mostly centered on African American espitemologies (Cases Rebelles), on transfused U.S.-forged concepts of “brownness” or “BIPOC” (Sinthujan Varatharajah), on illusory attempts to translate struggles into (U.S.) English (Bekriah Mawasi), on the complete blind spot casteism constitutes in this U.S. ‘software’ (Shaista Aziz Patel & Vijeta Kumar), on the need for a pluriversal approach of queerness (Rahul Rao)… Even within the U.S., the political framework that categorizes all people (from Indigenous people to white settlers) coming from the south of its border as “Latinx” needs to be problematized as settler colonial creations (Floridalma Boj Lopez). With this issue, we aim at doing just that: not letting go of the precious epistemologies U.S.-based thinkers have brought us, but simply decentering them to favor the pluriversality of our influences.

The cover was created for us by Michael DeForge and the News from the Fronts section brings us reflections on Taiwan (Szu-Han Ho & Meng-Yao Chuang), Cameroon (Ethel-Ruth Tawe), the Ainu (Kanako Uzawa) and Fusako Shigenobu’s political legacy, a few weeks before her release from prison in Japan (May Shigenobu).

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Fantasies of the Library. Anna-Sophie Springer, Etienne Turpin (Eds.). The MIT Press

Posted in writing on May 21st, 2022
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A book that acts both as library and exhibition space, selecting, arranging, and housing texts and images, aligning itself with printed matter in the process.

Fantasies of the Library lets readers experience the library anew. The book imagines, and enacts, the library as both keeper of books and curator of ideas—as a platform of the future. One essay occupies the right-hand page of a two-page spread while interviews scrolls independently on the left. Bibliophilic artworks intersect both throughout the book-as-exhibition. A photo essay, “Reading Rooms Reading Machines” further interrupts the book in order to display images of libraries (old and new, real and imagined), and readers (human and machine) and features work by artists including Kader Atta, Wafaa Bilal, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, and others.

The book includes an essay on the institutional ordering principles of book collections; a conversation with the proprietors of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of cultural memory and the archive; and a dialogue with a new media theorist about experiments at the intersection of curatorial practice and open source ebooks. The reader emerges from this book-as-exhibition with the growing conviction that the library is not only a curatorial space but a bibliological imaginary, ripe for the exploration of consequential paginated affairs. The physicality of the book—and this book—“resists the digital,” argues coeditor Etienne Turpin, “but not in a nostalgic way.”

Contributors: Erin Kissane, Hammad Nasar, Megan Shaw Prelinger, Rick Prelinger, Anna-Sophie Springer, Charles Stankievech, Katharina Tauer, Etienne Turpin, Andrew Norman Wilson, Joanna Zylinska.

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Feminazies. Paul B. Preciado. Gato Negro Ediciones

Posted in writing on May 20th, 2022
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Ever since, or so they say, “language was liberated”—as if we women had always been strange animals unequipped with the faculty of speech and then we’d suddenly learned to talk; who knows why— the representatives of the old sexual regime have been nervous, so nervous that they’re the ones who are now being left at a loss for words. Perhaps that’s why the lords of the colonial patriarchy have turned to their book of necropolitical history for the insult they always have most readily at hand—what a curious proximity—so they can hurl it into our faces:

Nazi!”

Miau ediciones is an editorial Spin-off of Gato Negro Ediciones, an independent feminist publishing project that will work mainly with women and non-binary artists, writers, illustrators, editors and creators. This project will be focused on various spectra such as theory, political and social situation, graphics, photography and artist’s books, among others. We believe it is urgent to fight for equality and the eradication of violence against women, trans people, genderqueer and non-binary identities.

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Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole: How to Escape Yourself Without Even Trying. Evelyn Wh-ell. Sticky Fingers Publishing

Posted in writing on May 8th, 2022
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Who’s this shadowy figure? An appendage in a trench coat, cat’s eye lenses, a hat atop a strangely curling wig… in this two-faced publication, Evelyn Wh-ell presents Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole: How to Escape Yourself Without Even Trying, a science fiction dick tip diptych.

A diptych is any object with two flat plates which form a pair, often attached by a hinge. The diptych hinges on an image, or, maybe more accurately, becomes unhinged through an image, and in its unhinging cleaves open a wormhole; a fall between two surfaces; the surface of the pages of a magazine; of sunglasses; of a glistening dildo that is pointing right at you.

An ontological gender-fuck of comedies, Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole calls on the queer feminist possibility of science fiction with camp audacity. With an absurdist style which speaks to the punk brutality of the likes of Kathy Acker and John Waters, Wh-ell twists mundane activities such as going to a greasy spoon or watching television into sites for dismembering gender, penetration, iconography and worship.

As readers, we are led through the church, the image-as-hole, down the high street and to confession, where we sit in hallowed pews resplendent in fake tan. Our Narrator plays games with us, we paint ourselves in Her image, which is only ever a hole to fall through – and again, flipped over.

With two stories horizontally placed, neither takes precedence over the other but skews an image and replicates it. Circulating the penetrator and the penetrated, Wh-ell shows us how to escape yourself without even trying, resulting in a convergence. We follow Wh-ell’s paranoiac dioramas like the upward curve of our pinkish rod, to the centrefold wormhole.

Evelyn Wh-ell is a writer, artist and critical theorist interested in queer/trans aesthetics. Their writing has been published by Another Gaze, Cambridge Literary Review, permeable barrier, b l u s h lit, and Sticky Fingers Publishing’s Dead Lovers series. They are also a 2021-2023 Research Associate at CCA Derry~Londonderry.

Sticky Fingers is an intra-dependant feminist publisher based in London. It consists of designers and writers Kaiya Waerea (she/her) & Sophie Paul (she/her).

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Being Together: A Manual For Living. Grace Ndiritu. KRIEG

Posted in politics, writing on April 23rd, 2022
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Contributors: Philippe Van Cauteren, Pieter Vermeulen, Grace Ndiritu, Rafaela Lopez, Roberto dell’Orco, Jana Haeckel, Katleen Vermeir & Ronny Heiremans, Nathalie Boobis, Shayla Perreault, Edward Ball, Guadalupe Martinez, Stacy Suy, Ezra Fieremans.

Being Together: A Manual For Living falls in the lineage of publications such as The Journal of the Society for Education Through Art, which throughout the 1960s provided British art schools a window into experimental education. By contrast, Grace Ndiritu’s experience in creating radical pedagogies arose from a connected, yet unorthodox system of ‘self education’. In 2012, she decided to spend time living in cities only when necessary. She thus lived in rural, alternative and often spiritual communities, while expanding her research into nomadic lifestyles and training in esoteric studies, which she began after graduating art school. This research led her to visit Thai and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, permaculture communities in New Zealand, forest tree dwellers in Argentina, neo-tribal festivals such as Burning Man in Nevada, a Scottish Hare Krishna ashram, and the Findhorn Spiritual Community in Scotland. Such lifestyles forever transformed her ideas of education and have proven critical for her art, whether conducting teaching experiments with students, peers and the general public; some of whose voices appear in this publication. Ndiritu posits, “What does (art) education mean today?” and specifically, “What does an embodied (art) education mean in a time of pandemics and social unrest?”. Being Together: A Manual For Living attempts to answer these complex questions.

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Neology Issue 37. Christian Egger, Christian Kosmas Mayer, Yves Mettler, Magda Tóthová, Alexander Wolff (Eds.). ztscrpt

Posted in Journals, writing on April 18th, 2022
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Featuring contributions by Grossi Maglioni, Christian Egger, Michiel Huijben & Harriet Foyster, Brittany Tucker, Gong Zhang, Geoffrey Garrison, Michaela Eichwald, Eugenia Lai, Alix Eynaudi, Monika Grabuschnigg, Carina Luksik, Steven Warwick, Mirjam Thomann.



Edited and published by: Christian Egger, Christian Kosmas Mayer, Yves Mettler, Magda Tóthová, Alexander Wolff.

Chicago, Times, Plotter, Helvetica, DIN, Techno, Löhfelm, RR_02, Univers, Tiffany, Circuit, Memphis, Gringo, Zeus, The Mix, Princess Lulu, Pigiarniq, Paper, Libertine, Trixie, Déjà Vu, Auto, Rediviva, Acid, Wanda, Loraine, Hallo, Korpus, Spiegel, Zeitschrift, Fig, Museo, Lisa Fittko and Dyslexie are the 34 issues of the magazine founded in 2002 in Vienna by a group of Austrian, German and Swiss artists.

With 2 to 3 issues a year, the members of the team publish their magazine around their personal encounters and artistic interests.

Each issue present around fifteen contributions, in both texts and images. Artists, writers, scientists and specialists in all kind of fields are invited to contribute and intervene in a sober and efficient layout already acknowledged by the London Design Museum in its exhibition Best European Design 2005.

The focus of the editorial activity is organizing and assembling the contributions, including works and found footage by the editors, in order to create for each issue a strong and beguiling unity, amplified by the use of a different font for each issue. Each issue printed in black and white in an edition of 300 copies, is completed with a color centerfold poster by an internationally recognized artist (Kai Althoff, Elke Krystufek, Daniel Pflumm, Ayse Erkmen, Richard Hawkins, Amelie von Wulffen, Cameron Jamie, Renée Green, Jennifer West, Art & Language, etc…).

Apart of the publishing work, the team organizes for each issue a release party in a specific space, such as a panoramic bar, a wax museum, project spaces, other magazine’s editorial spaces, etc… inviting artists to perform or exhibit.

Broadening its network, the magazine gets invited into art spaces to which the team respond contextually: Multiple author wallpainting for a magazine fair, teamshow at Flaca in London, curated groupshow in Circuit, Lausanne, artists-in-residence in Copenhagen, lectures in galleries and workshops in universities, etc..

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The Forest and The Little One. Monika Kalinaustaite. Kornelija Zalpyte. Kirvarpa.

Posted in illustration, writing on March 28th, 2022
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The Forest and The Little One is an invitation to enjoy the complex world of the forest and its simple joys. It is meant for every child and adult looking for a walking companion and adventure in nature.

This children’s book is part of the project Neringa Forest Architecture, established at Nida Art Colony, a subdivision of Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2020.

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The Secret Book of Lichens. Kristupas Sabolius. Aistė Ambrazeviciute. Kirvarpa.

Posted in writing on March 26th, 2022
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Sometimes, if you take a closer look at a tree trunk, you may be able to see letters. This swirly script forms part of The Secret Book of Lichens, the pages of which are scattered across the entire forest. Although many plants and animals have tried to read what is written in it, none have ever managed to assemble those mysterious symbols into any kind of cohesive sentence, or even a single word for that matter.

This book is a walk through the mind and imagination of lichens spread across the forest. The short stories tell of lichen love, their mathematics, values and other important things. These compound creatures are never alone and know great ways to make friends. Perhaps that’s why, when looking at lichens, people understood what symbiosis is – knowing how to live together. Composed of allied fungus and algae, these creatures have special powers – for example, they can easily survive in space and melt rocks. And this one particularly special lichen, Graphis scripta, was even called the script of the forest.

This children’s book is part of the project Neringa Forest Architecture, established at Nida Art Colony, a subdivision of Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2020.

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Ignota Books @ Motto Berlin

Posted in writing on March 16th, 2022
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After much anticipation, Ignota Books catalogue is now available in Motto Berlin!

Take a browse through the following titles:

Atlas of Anomalous AI
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
Pharmako-AI
Altered States
The White Paper
UNKNOWN LANGUAGE
Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry
States of the Body Produced by Love