Four Instruments is an excerpt from the Los Angeles artist-researcher’s in-progress novel, So That My Balloon Will Take Me Downward. In this chapter, genderfreak race witch K. has a perplexing encounter with a digital camera and accidentally reawakens a demonic spirit named Madame CX. Meanwhile, her research into the work of conceptual painter R.H. Quaytman leads to a painful personal discovery about the limit of her senses.
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).
“Panoramas: everything is connected. All PANORAMAS photos were taken with iPhone 6s and 7. When I first used iPhone in 2017 I accidentally took a picture with the panorama function. Thereafter I’ve been recording panoramas of every scenery I want to remember. This book is my iPhone panorama records for the past five years. While working on this project I realized that everything was connected. Scenes and time that flow into small memories eventually connect with each others and are part of my persona.” –Lee Hyewon
In the space where the Perú-Chile border meets the Pacific coastline, lies a triangle of approximately 3.7 hectares. Known as the “Triángulo Terrestre”, this piece of land has been causing diplomatic disputes between the two nations since the middle of the 20th century. Despite its relatively small size (equivalent to Parque Kennedy in Lima or Madison Square Park in New York) and having no agricultural, commercial or strategic value the Triángulo Terrestre has been in dispute since the signing of the 1929 treaty between Perú and Chile. The disputed land has acquired a symbolic value employed at different times by the governments of each country for political purposes.
In April 2017, HAWAPI, in partnership with Galería Metropolitana (Chile) took a group of 13 artists (5 Peruvians, 5 Chileans, 1 Bolivian, 1 Israeli and 1 North American) to camp in Santa Rosa—the closest village to the “Triángulo Terrestre”. During four days camping on site, the group generated a series of artistic interventions and actions to contemplate in situ the social, political, economic and physical impact created by this dispute; before moving to Tacna where they staged an exhibition of their work in the independent cultural centre, Laramamango.
Pingo is published by Kinder Buenos in cooperation with tom is jerry books.
Pingo Hors d’oeuvre posting works of ÁRON KÓS LADÁNYI, William Eggleston, JEFF WALL, Carl Barks, ROBIN THOMAS, Getúlio Abelha, annabel laura huisman, Moebius, MICHELANGELO, Rosso Fiorentino, Charles Mengin, George Chambers Senior, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, DEVIN BLAIR, Luca Hillen, Rens Spanjaard, KATHLEEN VANESSA DANIEL, Floris Claesz van Dyck, Rudolf Koivu, Klana Callaghan, SOPHIE PETERS, Serena Ferrario, Alexandre Cabanel Phédre, RhoAnna Endicott, Ben Wittick, Yasumori Koide, Steven Shore, Rogier Houwen, John William Waterhouse, VILHELM HANSEN, Andrea Hillen, György Ladányi.
On February 9, 2020 in Mexico City, a 25-year-old woman named Ingrid E.V was murdered by her companion. Grisly photographs of this femicide committed by Erik Francisco Robledo Rosas, taken at the scene of the crime by the authorities, were avidly circulated by Mexican tabloids, which had no qualms in plastering the young woman’s dismembered body across their front pages. This opportunistic move by the gutter press, and the complicity of the police in making it possible, sparked a wave of protests. Spurred by a tweet to do their part in ridding the internet of these gruesome images, social media users around the world posted numerous photos of peaceful lakes, sunsets, fields of flowers and other scenes of natural beauty under the hashtag #IngridEscamillaVargas. Moved by this collaborative effort, Zoé Aubry, who has been working on the systemic and structural phenomenon of femicides and the issues raised by their media coverage since 2017, has produced a book that pays homage to the memory of Ingrid Escamilla Vargas, denounces violence against women, and assails the voyeurism of a certain segment of the press.
Da Grau is an iconographic research on the practice of rearing. The collection of images taken from the internet traces of representations of the gesture in the equestrian portrait to the young riders in rural and suburban areas. Samir thwarts Google algorithms to find representations of women on horseback or on motorcycles and non-western men, for this he searches these images by entering the word rearing in different languages such as the term «da grau» in Brazilian.
Samir Laghouati-Rashwan, born in 1992 in Arles and currently based in Marseille, is a French artist who graduated from the École supérieure d’art & de design Marseille-Méditerranée. In his practice, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan seizes upon small objects masquerading as mundane, quotidian, contemporary and above all apolitical. A tonic bottle or a tracksuit rolled up at the ankle. Shopping trolleys and caravan car windows. The work that he develops around these objects however undermines their claim to be anodyne; they become bearers of colonial histories and geopolitical complexes.
Samir Laghouati-Rashwan has recently shown his work in the exhibition “Hijack City” at the Scep gallery (2021, Marseille), the festival “Les Chichas de la pensée” at Magasins généraux (2021, Pantin), « Sur pierres brûlantes » at Friche de la Belle de Mai (2020, Marseille) or in « Diaspora at home » in Fondation Kadist (2022, Paris).
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Born in 1992 in Arles, lives and works in Marseille.
The book presents three work groups by Katja Eydel all derived from online research on commercial or promotional photography. Appointed is based on announcements for contemporary art exhibitions and projects, Habitus investigates liturgical clothing and props for Christian priests and monks and Set consists of rephotographed portraits of children that were used in packaging.
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.
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.
