Almanac is a fully trans-led press based in Helsinki, Finland. The first issue of this journal of trans poetics responds to the theme of light/heat, in time for the Summer Solstice. The work includes long form essays, prose and poetry dealing with love, sex, illness, hormones, and other sticky things.
Featuring the work of 15 trans writers: Adam Azzaro, Daphne DiFazio, Mino Buonincontri, Clay A.D, Jenevieve Ting, Saoirse Wall, El Reid-Buckley, Nadine Rodriquez, Iona Roisin, Teddy Binot, Maya Simkin, Fiadh Hoskin, Simon Hauwaerts, D Mortimer and River Ellen MacAskill.
This book is the first essay in French devoted to David Hammons, a major artist on the international scene.
On a winter’s day in 1983, David Hammons set up shop in the street to sell snowballs of various sizes. He set them up in rows according to their size and spent the day playing the role of a friendly salesman. He places this event – which he later calls Bliz-aard Ball Sale – in a body of work that, from the late 1960s to the present, uses a lexicon of discrete actions and materials considered typically “black” to construct a critique of the nature of the artwork, the art world and racism in the United States.
Although Bliz-aard Ball Sale is often mentioned and the work’s reputation is increasingly influential, it has long been known only through meagre descriptions and a few photographs. In this fascinating study, Elena Filipovic shares the vast history of this ephemeral work, which she has gathered through oral testimonies, the discovery of images and rarely shown documents, giving us some insights into an essential artist who has made an art of making himself elusive.
This book is the first essay in French devoted to this major artist of the international scene.
Since 2014, Elena Filipovic has been the director and curator of the Kunsthalle Basel, where she has organised more than fifty exhibitions. She was curator of WIELS (Brussels) and co-curator with Adam Szymczyk of the fifth edition of the Berlin Biennale in 2008. She has published texts in numerous exhibition catalogues and journals and edited several collections, the most recent of which are The Artist as Curator: An Anthology (Milan, Mousse Publications, 2017) and Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects Without Specific Form (London, König Books, 2017). She is also the author of The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2016).
“The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?” ― Fred Moten
Please join us this Saturday, September 10, for an evening of outdoors readings/performances to mark the closing of Dark Advances: ‘Affect Aliens’ & Revolutionary Despair—an installation featuring works by Spiros Kokkonis, Candice Nembhard (okcandice), Kari Rosenfeld, Lou Lou Sainsbury and Kwamé Sorrell.
Dark Advances: ‘Affect Aliens’ and Revolutionary Despair tunes into the hum, tremble, or murmur by which everything now rises to the surface. Not a human song, but the perlocutionary utterance of what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten speak of when they write of the movement of the earth against the world—an underground, black rhythm, chant or riot, that one “can’t join from the outside.” What does it want? Nothing, except perhaps to unground the ground—to reveal “the hole in the ontological project,” as R.A. Judy has it—by unearthing the bones that fire our great toxic machinery.
Dark Advances devotes its breath to this cosmic piece of anti-music, and to practices aimed at its amplification. To those ‘affect aliens’ who, faced with the ways of the world, promote neither the promise of utopia, nor despondent resignation, but the world’s collapsing: ‘unworlding’, or what one might describe as the ambivalent third way of revolutionary despair.
Please note: Lou Lou Sainsbury’s new video work descending notes and sound piece The Law of Desire is Fascist made with Kari Rosenfeld and commissioned by Gasworks London will be showing on the day. Visit the basement between 6-9 pm.
Motto Berlin Salitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof) 10997 Berlin
Lou Lou Sainsbury, descending notes, 2022. With Raffia Li and Ada M. Patterson. HD Video, 17:45 min.
*** Spiros Kokkonis was born in Athens, Greece, where he currently lives and works. He’s co-founder of the artist-run space Grace/ Athens. Operating in a very specific context—politically, socially, and culturally—the artist creates images both influenced by and dealing with aspects of contemporary life. Spiros’ work has been exhibited at Athens Conservatoire, Parko Eleftherias, Art Space Pythagoreion, Saigon Athens, SHED London, Grace / Athens and Onassis Cultural Centre.
okcandice (one word, all lowercase) is a writer, artist-curator, poet and musician based between Birmingham, England and Berlin, Germany. Their multi-disciplinary practice is explained as «i’m working on it», dealing with grief, love, queer identities, oration in Black cultures and archival materials. okcandice is a co-founding member of the collective poet & prophetess and founder of the queer film series ALL FRUITS RIPE. They host the experimental broadcast Bedtime Stories on Cashmere radio and work as a freelance curator, (song)writer and creative producer.
Kari Rosenfeld (b. Houston, TX) is an artist currently based in Berlin, Germany. Kari’s work is focused on ontology, political and social affect, religious and mythological narratives, image, genre, and attachment. They have degrees in American Studies and Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin and graduated from Dutch Art Institute Masters of Art Praxis in 2021. They were a co-founder and Artist in Residence at the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Science—Alexandria where they facilitated courses in theory and visual media.
Lou Lou Sainsbury is a trans artist based in Margate, UK & Rotterdam, NL, working in live performance, video, writing, installation and textiles. She identifies as a time traveller, making things that unwrite histories of living beings into mythopoeic dreamscapes, informed by queer and ecological activisms.Recent performances and group exhibitions include: Whitstable Biennale (2022), Centre for Contemporary Arts Prague (2021); Yaby and La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Nottingham Contemporary; Tate Modern, London; Yaby, Madrid (all 2019); and Flat Time House, London (2018).
Kwamé Sorrell (b. 1990) is an artist, poet, researcher and writer. Kwamé is co-founder of BlackMass Publishing, an independent press focusing on re/de/contextualizing black and African social vernacular through image and text. He lives and works under the sun. His work is rooted in language and form, as a way to explore the gap between art and tradition, music and sound, space and time; constantly in transition. (this bio is subject to change)
Please join us for the presentation of Tables | Factories with author and artist Ho Rui An in conversation with Nut Srisuwan
Wednesday 7 September from 6.30pm
Motto Berlin Salitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof) 10997 Berlin
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Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working at the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. Working primarily across the mediums of lecture, essay and film, he probes into the ways by which images are produced, circulate and disappear within contexts of globalism and governance. He has presented projects at the Bangkok Art Biennale; Asian Art Biennial; Gwangju Biennale; Jakarta Biennale; Sharjah Biennial; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Kunsthalle Wien; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; and Para Site, Hong Kong. In 2019, he was awarded the International Film Critics’ (FIPRESCI) Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. In 2018, he was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
Nut Srisuwan is an independent researcher and curator based in Bangkok and Leipzig. His research examines the interrelations between subjects in transnational contexts, such as national identities, politics and migratory movements. As a co-founder of the artistic and curatorial collective “Charoen Contemporaries”, he also works together with other practitioners in finding new models for the art ecosystem in Thailand.
The process of preparing this book began with looking at photographs of large meeting tables around which Chinese and Singaporean public officials gathered during the many Chinese government study missions to Singapore throughout the 1990s. While such images might seem unremarkable today, the appearance of former revolutionaries of the Maoist era as sedentary technocrats marks the historic emergence of a distinct political imaginary in a time when “the economy” was displacing class struggle as the primary subject of governance in China.
It was at the table that these technocrats, having extricated themselves from the masses, devised the concept of the socialist market economy to frame the economic reforms that were launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. As they insisted on the compatibility of the market economy with the prevailing socialist social contract, the reformers articulated their turn towards the market as a decision informed not by the “invisible” manner through which the market allocates its resources, but by the assumed transparency of its information flows, which they believed would make visible what the party-state had been previously unable to see.
Yet, to the extent that this process of “seeking truth from facts”, as the reformers put it, is founded upon a set of separations—the party-state from the masses, information from ideology, the economic from the political—what ultimately underwrites the total visibility apparently provided by the table is the concealment of that which must not be allowed to appear as information in order for the logic of the market to obtain: the exploitation of labour.
It is on this basis that the factory can be construed as the table’s forgotten origin and impenetrable interior, and the gate that circumscribes the compound the limit of the market’s capacity for making things visible. Designed to spatially contain industrial labour and hide their exploitation from the public sphere, the factory gate is as close as the technocrat would get, as seen during the factory’s opening ceremony, to the world of labour under a capitalist mode of production. In thus proposing a convergence between tables and factories and examining their respective regimes of (in)visibility across the contexts of Singapore and Reform-era China, this collection of images and texts seeks to understand how the seemingly disparate worlds centred around these two objects in fact call forth each other to produce our deeply unsettled contemporary condition—one where the recognition that accrues to visibility has replaced freedom from exploitation as the most that the people can ever demand after the revolution’s untimely end.
J. Adam, R. Bacourt, M. Bernard, B. Boros-Turquin, A. Bournazeau, M. Bremer, M. Dorchies, C. Farina, S. Fiorucci, V. Foucher, A. Gayet, J. Jennifer, O. Jones, C. Leconte, J. Lempert, G. Morandi, M. Ogier, B. Porcher, A.Pyvka, C. Raimondi, E. Spalletti, N. Sutter-Shudo, S. Toulouse, S. Verastegui, V. Villard
Aren’t we all familiar with the deeply personal experience of waking up alone, in anguish and despair, from the depths of a nightmare? Whether it’s disordered sleeping, sleep paralysis or the more regular frightening dream, the night and its terrors have kept us occupied since the very beginning of humanity. For this issue of Simulacrum, we – together – delve into the furthest corners of our minds to discover the dark and disorienting meaning we might find there. But a nightmare is much more than something to be fearful of. The nightmare is entangled with our histories and can lead us to our deepest selves, by bringing up feelings which we don’t dare to feel in real life. It has provided many creators with inspiration for their art of many forms. As we will discover within this issue of Simulacrum, this personal aspect of the nightmare can lead to incredibly diverse approaches and interpretations that we hope will allow you to reconsider the meaning and feeling that nightmares can bring us.
Authors: Neža Kokol, Joyce Poot, Niels Noot, Jonas van Kappel, Jérémy Bernard, Kenneth Geurts, Denise van Rooij, Kim Mulder, Frank van der Wulp, Laure Vanrijckeghem, Sanne Kabalt.
Becky posed this question in her piece, which speaks to a lot of what we’re trying to capture here in Drown, Good Drown.
In their own way, the writers expressed consciousness and subconsciousness immersed in empathy, stories with sentiment and hints of humor, sadness, and joy. These writings and drawings were made by us ArtCenter College of Design students in the summer of 2022.
Actually, Megan hates summer. As Megan says, “summer’s role is to forever choke and steal what life came after winter.”
She thinks June is okay.
Rachael gave us a downpour of thoughts, an imagistic stream of consciousness straight to our souls, and Sophia spoke in a tender melodic tone provoking a sense of coziness and the tension of intimacy.
While Ibrahim imagined life undersea as a telepathic realm of shadow twins.
Along with Constant’s honesty and vulnerability, we also got to share his quiet but bold humor reflected in his story.
We almost named the publication Esther Williams because of Natalia’s misfit mermaid tale, which inspired us to be who we really are.
My story of reminiscing leads to the end of the book leaving softhearted fragrances of nostalgia.
Me. Cringe.
Drown, Good Drown, I think, is most importantly a collaboration. We’re all so different. You’ll see. But our different perspectives are reflected in drawings and stories. We mish and mash our creative minds for a submersive experience for the reader more than any of us could accomplish on our own.
So we invite you to pour yourself a cool water on the rocks, snorkel through our creative minds, and drown in the world of our stories.
Trust me; it will be a good drown.
– The Editor
* Type+Authorship is a multi-disciplinary class taught at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. We conjure, discuss, and immediately write our way into a book of collective thematic interest and function within an aggregate studio environment where we design and produce a publication.
Futuros mejores condensa conversaciones, voces y proyectos a través de los cuales discutir e imaginar futuros espaciales más justos. Futuros que, desde las ruinas del presente, las violencias y exclusiones, imaginan alternativas capaces de vislumbrar nuevas posibilidades. Arquitecturas amables con otras especies y territorios, prácticas espaciales para la hospitalidad, mediadoras de memorias orales y microbianas, nuevos imaginarios para el aprendizaje, nuevas (y no tan nuevas) arquitecturas para el cuidado más allá de la vivienda y tecnologías domésticas al servicio del bien común para una producción espacial todavía por venir.
Autores: Husos Arquitecturas (Diego Barajas y Camilo García), Mariana Pestana, Isabel Gutiérrez Sánchez, Candela Morado, Anna Puigjaner, Superflux, Alejandro Galliano, La Escuela Nunca y los Otros Futuros, Studio Ossidiana.
