The State Vol III: The Social Olfactory. Rahel Aima, Ahmad Makia (Eds.). The State.

THE STATE is a publishing practice based out of Dubai, U.A.E. It investigates South-South reorientations, alternative futurisms, transgressive cultural criticism, the transition from analogue to digital, and the sensuous architecture of this “printernet.”

FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE:

Khairani Barokka—Can the Subaltern Smell: The Olfactory Other
Transnational olfactory stereotypes in Indonesia, India, South Africa, and the USA

Ali Boggs—The Corpse
A dead girl in Madagascar, an old pastis-soaked Belgian, and the loose skin of overripe peaches

Suzanne Fischer—Smell H-I-S-T-O-R-Y: A Guided Tour of the Smell Exhibition
In the coming age of olfactory archaeology, a speculative tour of the museum of tomorrow

Adam Flynn—Under the Iron Snout: a First Take on Olfactory Imperialism
Drug-sniffing dogs, fermented fish and mosquito repellent in Vietnam, the Stasi’s smell archives, People Sniffing, and strategies to survive smellveillance

Mary-Jo Gillian—Heap
A residency in a rural Irish landfill, the filamentine heat of rotting matter, the intimacy of olfactory community

Pavel Godfrey—Sensation, Memory, and Place in Delray, Detroit
Post-industrial detritus in Little Budapest, a carbonaceous cocktail of respiratory illnesses and mnemocide, exploding the neoliberal myth of recycling

Barbara Herman—An Ode To Bodies: Peau d’Espagne
The gendering of leather perfumes, and the hidden, abject animal body at its origin

Anne Elizabeth Moore—Fake Snake Oil
Smell, trickery, and xenophobia in Marfa, Texas

Kristine Ong Muslim—The Proustian Phenomenon
A missing dog, the assertive scratchiness of lemongrass, the stench of river water, the frowning fustiness of mothballs

Charles Reid—Nietzsche and the Electric Nose
The laziness of Nature, synaesthesia, and building an electric nose

Erika Renedo Illarregi—Smell Portraits
How might a smell be archived like a polaroid or instagram?

Adam Rothstein—The Olfactographic Capacities of the Human Brain
Smelling the traces of architecture and mapping odourous urban geographies

Francisco Salas Pérez—Impeccable Tenderness
Papayas in Xalapa, the displaced remembrances of diaspora, and escaping the Proustian straitjacket

Manuel Schwab—Petroleum, Frankincense, and Myrrh
A souk in Nyala, Sudan, a lake of petroleum, and the carnivorousness of the development-industrial complex

Mark West—The Smell of OCD
The insidiousness of burning toast, and the creeping doubt of OCD

Language: English
Cover available in one of four colors.
Printed in Dubai.

Price: €22.00

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Our Group Wourk, Ziga Testen, Peter Rauch, Cornelia Durka.

‘Work’, how does one spell it even? There is only one way to describe what we did during that time, which is ‘to make things ours’, to be upfront about the collectivity, about the conditions of our output. 

It was our group, and hence what we announced to be presented in the exhibition at SKC in 1979 on that poster became part of our wourk. If you wish to argue that there is no meaning to be ascribed to that lapsus, so be it. But I was there, I saw our group wourk.

“Our Group Wourk” is an attempt to NOT write a biography of Yugoslavian graphic designer Dragan Stojanovski. Stojanovski was the in-house graphic designer at SKC Belgrade (student cultural centre), a state-funded cultural institution established after the 1968 student uprisings to contain, pacify and institutionalize student culture as an “organized alternative”. At the same time, it was a place of avant-garde experimentation and new forms of political activism and self-organization. Dunja Blazevic, a director of the visual arts department at the SKC in the 1970s refers to Stojanovski as Yugoslavia’s first conceptual designer.

This publication was prompted by conversations and encounters with Sasa Stojanovski, Biljana Tomic, Sklavko Timotijevic, Ljubinka Gavran, Milica Tomic, Slobodan Jovanovic and Dunja Blazevic with Ziga Testen, Peter Rauch and Cornelia Durka in Belgrade in April 2013.

Published by Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design.

If it wasn’t for the support of CuratorLab – Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, this publication would not have been possible.

Softcover, 80 pages.

Price: D €8

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Notes From a Revolution: Com/Co, The Diggers & The Haight. David Hollander & Kristine McKenna. Foggy Notion Books & Fulton Ryder, Inc.

The social upheaval of the sixties gave rise to many fascinating coalitions and communes, but the Diggers, a little-known and short-lived group, stand apart from them all. Formed in Haight-Ashbury in 1966 by members of R. G. Davis’s subversive theater company, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Diggers took their name from the English Diggers, a seventeenth century agrarian collective devoted to creating a utopian society free of ownership and commerce.

The San Francisco Diggers – under the leadership of Peter Berg, Emmett Grogan, Peter Coyote, and Billy Murcott – were true anarchists, with roots in the Theater of the Absurd, Existentialism, and strategies of direct action. They coined slogans designed to prod people into participating and staged art happenings, public interventions, and street theater infused with wicked humor. The Diggers also provided free food, clothing, medical care and lodging to anyone in need as part of their effort to create a unified and mutually supportive community.

A critically important part of their methodology were the hundreds of broadsides that they regularly produced and distributed throughout the Haight, printed by the Communication Company, a maverick, short-lived publishing outfit founded by Chester Anderson and Claude Hayward. A selection of these graphically inventive, lacerating and sometimes funny broadsides are gathered together for the first time in Notes From a Revolution, which offers a fascinating and oddly moving record of the counterculture in its early bloom.

Edited by David Hollander
& Kristine McKenna
Introduction by Peter Coyote
Essay by Naomi Wolf
Conversation with Claude Hayward
by Kristine McKenna
Flexi-bound / 8 1/2 x 11″
/ 176 pages / 150 color images
ISBN 978-0-9835870-3-3

Published by Foggy Notion Books
in partnership with Fulton Ryder, Inc.

Price: €42.50

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Fabian Reimann uses the „Whole Earth Catalog“, first published in 1968 as a concise reference of tools for the improvement of the world and the self, as the starting point for the final issue of his own, visual-essay style Egozine „freeman’s journal“, now in its tenth year. His „Another Earth Catalog“, only interrupted once by a personal essay, consists of a continuous stream of images: reproductions of the Utopian visions of the late 1960s — including not only material published in the „Whole Earth Catalog“, but also of other visionary projects from the Cold War period and the dawn of Postmodernism. Fabian Reimann loosely maintains the five categories of the „Catalog“ (Understanding Whole Systems, Shelter and Land Use, Industry and Craft, Communications, Community, Nomadics and Learning) and connects the visions of the late 1960s with current images that show developments which can be traced back to the fantasies of these earlier times.

Author: Fabian Reimann
Publisher: Spector Books
Language: English
Pages: 192
Size: 15 x 10.5 cm
Binding: Softcover

Price: €12.00
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Yesterday’s Sun. Uri Gershuni. Sternthal Books.

Yesterday’s Sun is a book by photographer Uri Gershuni that returns to the origins of photography in order to meditate upon its future. Gershuni traveled to the home of photography’s inventor, William Henri Fox Talbot, in Lacock, England, where he photographed Talbot’s home and its environs. Gershuni used a digital pin-hole camera that he made by replacing the lens with a tiny hole. The long exposures that resulted re-capture a materiality eluded by the ‘reproducibility’ of digital photography. Gershuni’s frames capture elements of surprise – stains of light – amongst other motifs, that resemble the remains of some invisible ghost. Interspersed amongst these grainy epitaphs are a series of nude photographs featuring a young man posing in a stark room.

ISBN: 978-0-9864835-8-5

40€

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Warsaw Modern by Czeslaw Olszewski, published by Fundacja Raster

This album of photographs by Czesław Olszewski is a unique cultural testament to the decade just prior to the outbreak of World War II. It is a fascinating voyage to the “Warsaw of the future” via the city’s modernist architecture.
The album is an attempt to revive the integrity of the Warsaw Architecture School of the interwar period. Yet it is also a narrative of the visionary modernist perspective, of how architecture creates a new spatial and aesthetic order, and how photography invokes an awareness of this order within us.
The album presents close to 300 archive photographs of selected architectural structures in Warsaw, including public buildings, residential estates and villas, as well as the modernised highways of the 1930s. These photographs were scanned from the original, glass negatives. When possible, the photographer’s original frames were restored on the basis of existing notes.
The album is preceded by an essay by Professor Marta Leśniakowska and Piotr Jamski, specialists at the Art Institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). The text casts a closer look at the life and works of photographer Czesław Olszewski, and also explores the significance and specific character of architectural photography as a historical document.

Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Pages: 348

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Khhhhhhh. Slavs and Tatars. Mousse Publishing / The Moravian Gallery.

A reconsideration of pedagogy, progress, and the sacred role of language via the perspective of a single pesky phoneme, [kh]. Khhhhhhh explores the thorny issues of knowledge versus wisdom and the immediacy of the oral versus the remoteness of the written word thru a fireside chat around sacred hospitality and Velimir Khlebnikov.

English and Czech
64 pages
23 x 31 cm

D 18€

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Surfing the Black: Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema… and its Transgressive Moments. Jan van Eyck Academie.

The Yugoslav black wave cinema of the sixties and the seventies is one of the grand, though hidden, chapters of cinema history. Talented young authors, working under the sign of individual expression and aesthetic experimentation, pushed and explored the limits of the constraints of a socialist state. Their efforts lead to a new path of visual expression, so outstanding by its social and political engagement, its formal invention and its courage. 



This book is the result of a multi-disciplinary research attempting to cross over politics, philosophy, design, art, architecture, and some speculative thinking. Starting from archival work, interviews, seminars, screenings and a conference, Surfing the Black has found its (temporary) conclusion in a publication consisting of six theoretical essays and three fanzines that open up the black wave film experience to current affairs. This is Yugoslavia, and modern cinema, at its blackest and brightest.

With six theoretical essays (by Boris Buden, Pavle Levi and Owen Hatherly, among others) and fanzines comprising an interview with one of the most important Yugoslav filmmakers, Želimir Žilnik, and a comprehensive glossary of terms that belong to the period and field of Yugoslav culture and politics, this is the first book on the subject in the English-speaking world.

Edition of 300

216 Pages
Text in English

D 22€

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Mazdaznan – Health & Breath Culture (first six exercises) by Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha’nish. M.D. Open Editions & Stanley Picker Gallery (Kingston University)

This book explores the intimate relationship between Mazdaznan, Johannes Itten and the Vorkurs (Preliminary or Foundation Course) at the Bauhaus, Weimar. It is a practical guide to performing the exercises that Itten taught at the Bauhaus and a celebration of a moment of mysticism at the heart of Modernism.

Illustrated and appended by Ian Whittlesea
Pages: 67
Size: 19 x 13 cm

D 20 €

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Curwen Sans type specimen, Harold Curwen, An Endless Supply 2011

Curwen Sans was first drawn by Harold Curwen at the Curwen Press in 1911. Curwen died in 1949 and the Press went out of business in the 1980s, and his sans serif—pre-emptive of Johnston, Gill Sans, Kabel—has never been digitised. An Endless Supply have re-drawn the font from prints sourced at Cambridge University, and the specimen includes a critical history of the typeface as well as new writing about the processes of revival. The jacket design is a re-print of wallpaper printed by Curwen Press in 1927.

Produced as part of The Department of Overlooked Histories at Wysing Arts Centre.

D 20.50 €

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