Please join us for the presentation of Simulacrum Magazine’s thirtieth anniversary issue het Reflectienummer with editors Mirna Vrdoljak and Kenneth Geurts.

14 October 2022
from 6.30pm

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68
10997 Berlin

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Simulacrum is an arts and culture magazine based in Amsterdam. Since thirty years, it functions as an accessible and high-quality platform for students and experts from various fields to publish together. Simulacrum is a quarterly thematic publishing project that aims at fostering transdisciplinary connections among contributions that explore both historical and contemporary perspectives of the European cultural landscape. 

On 14 October, Simulacrum is coming to Motto Berlin to celebrate the magazine’s thirtieth anniversary issue titled het Reflectienummer. For this issue the editors delved into the full archive and asked contributors to reflect on their submissions. These reflections offer insight into how art, culture, and historiography have changed over the course of thirty years. However, the eleven reflections bundled together do not only refer to the past. Reflection is an exercise with an eye to the future; it is a moment of standing still and thinking about how it was, how it is, and how it could be.

Editors Mirna Vrdoljak and Kenneth Geurts will hold a discussion on the blurring of boundaries across disciplines in the humanities, and the magazine’s role in adequately responding to the reciprocal influence between academic and artistic spheres. Bearing in mind the magazine’s primary focus on art historical research thirty years ago, we will speak from our own experiences with the diverging range of submissions, as well as the questions that arise with the use of new media platforms and digital modes of archiving. There will also be a moment to introduce Simulacrum’s freshly printed autumnal newspaper on documenta fifteen, The documenta Issue.

Browse Simulacrum here

From a bridge to blockchain, Amazonian urbanism to artificial intelligence, Log 55 recognizes the vast concerns of architecture today. This 176-page open issue, which includes a 16-page color insert, compiles essays, building and exhibition reviews, and remarks by 25 architects, theorists, and artists from around the world. In Berlin, Tim Altenhof critiques the newly rebuilt Humboldt Forum; in Los Angeles, Victor J. Jones reviews Michael Maltzan’s Ribbon of Light Viaduct; in New York, Cynthia Davidson visits the late Virgil Abloh’s “social sculpture,” and Thomas de Monchaux views “Anthony Ames Fifty Paintings”; in Quito, Ana María Durán Calisto and Sanford Kwinter draw inspiration from Indigenous territorial intelligence; in Rotterdam, Christophe Van Gerrewey reflects on MVRDV’s Boijmans Depot; in Taipei, Kwang-Yu King compares two new cultural venues by OMA and RUR; and in Tokyo, Jan Vranoský pens a postmortem for Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower. Matthew Allen looks to computer science for a way out of the theory-practice divide; Simone Brott considers the ways NFTs will change architectural practice; Karel Klein draws parallels between memory and AI; and Marija Marič warns against digitized real estate fractions.

In addition, a special section guest edited by Francesco Marullo is devoted to Notes on the Desert. The section, which raises issues of climate change and the extraction economy, includes essays by architect Nathan Friedman on the US-Mexico border, artist Kim Stringfellow on jackrabbit homesteads, feminist scholar Traci Brynne Voyles on the 49ers, and architect Lydia Xynogala speaking for a desert toad; photo essays by the Center for Land Use Interpretation on nuclear tombs and by photographer Susan Lipper on desert utopia; as well as an interview with photographer Richard Misrach on his Cantos series.

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I couldn’t stop thinking that people initially started to use names for convenience only but they morphed into something more significant. A destiny can be attached to a name: some parents carefully check the meaning of a name and wish their child will live up to that. But a name can’t define a person life as well as you will never know if a person grew up liking its own name, the meaning or the set of expectations that comes with that specific name. Then which name becomes the perfect name for someone or something?

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This book is an anomalous and layered object. It is split into chapters, following the way the Matrice exhibition was developed and completed over many months of work. Some key phases in the construction of the project in fact took place in the period prior to its opening, in a form that straddles the private dimension of an artist’s work and the public dimension of the exhibition. As also discussed in the critical text, Jacopo moved his studio to the spaces of the Fondazione Carispezia in the months preceding its opening. Here, within a triangular, uterine structure, the physical ‘matrix’ of the exhibition to be precise, he produced most of the works that would then be exhibited. And indeed many things took place inside it. The catalogue thus attempts to account for all of this. The colour photographs were taken by photographer Andrea Rossetti to document the two moments in which the project came into being. The first is made up of the so-called ‘invisible exhibition’: in order to understand the genesis of Matrice, we in fact need to understand how the exhibition is the final result of the ‘real’ exhibition that no one but the artist and very few others had the pleasure of seeing. All the works in this closed space, built in the very heart of the Foundation space, were in fact displayed on the walls, yet destined never to be seen by any visitor and then to be brutally dismembered. As the photos show, the works displayed are covered with a series of sheets to prevent them from being seen during Jacopo’s performance a few days prior to the opening. Only the photographs installed horizontally above the sculptures are partially visible. In the centre of the room, on the other hand, we can still see the tools used in the creation of the works, and the musical instruments that would later be played during the performance. The second moment taken by Rossetti consists of the actual Matrice exhibition itself, which the public could then view during its opening months. Andrea is one of the world’s leading exponents of that fine art which is the documentation of artworks and especially of contemporary art exhibitions. It is indeed an approach that requires great sensitivity and critical outlook. It is a translation process in which a – fruitful – betrayal of the material to be translated is and always will be necessary. A loving and respectful betrayal which was indeed requested by Benassi when he brought Rossetti on board for this task. The two sections of the catalogue must therefore be seen as a true collaboration between the two, in the wake of the many already developed by Jacopo with other artists in the fields of performance and sound research. The black-and-white photographs in the book were instead all taken by Jacopo Benassi or devised, prepared and coordinated by him. They recount the most performative and moving moments of the exhibition and its making, and are very much integrated with Andrea Rossetti’s work, adopting the same brutality with which Jacopo intervened in the Foundation exhibition space.

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When Eye Touches Cloud is the first monograph dedicated to the manifold oeuvre of Romanian artist Constantin Flondor (born 1936, in Czernowitz), the leading protagonist of the art groups 111, Sigma and Prolog. This richly illustrated publication takes a closer look on the influential body of work he had produced in painting, kinetic & Op art, land art, action, experimental film & photography from the 1960s until today. It surveys the various steps of his practice: from the lyricism of the first pictorial constructs to the optical and kinetic art of the Group 111, from the study of form and land art characteristic of the Sigma Group, defined as the effort to connect within a single equation visual research and experiment, to the Prolog Group’s spirit of communion and conviviality.

The book offers a comprehensive overview of the principles that shape Constantin Flondor’s art, of reflecting and theorising starting from the inventory of terms, themes, and concepts that have guided him as an artist over seventy years of uninterrupted work and of restoring them to the international context of art through the contributions of invited authors, Dieter Roelstraete & Abigail Winograd, Rainer Fuchs, and Katarzyna Cytlak. Besides the commissioned essays, the book includes a selection from the artist writings and several archival materials which enlarge our view on artist’s singular mode of thinking.

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P+4 Publications is an independent publishing programme dedicated to the promotion of Romanian contemporary art, photography and architecture, exploring the book medium as a point of encounter between theoretical research, graphic design experiment and artists’ ideas and subjects present in their practice. Presently, the programme brings together the Artist Book Series and the Architecture Book Series, supported between 2013–2021 by the PEPLUSPATRU Association, and Parkour and Exhibition-Dossier series, developed by the Institute of the Present since 2017. Starting from 2021, P+4 Publications is coordinated by the Institute of the Present.

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Experiments in architectural education in the post–World War II era that challenged and transformed architectural discourse and practice.

In the decades after World War II, new forms of learning transformed architectural education. These radical experiments sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture as much as they challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice. Although many of the experimental programs were subsequently abandoned, terminated, or assimilated, they nevertheless helped shape and in some sense define architectural discourse and practice. This book explores and documents these radical pedagogies and efforts to defy architecture’s status quo.

The experiments include the adaptation of Bauhaus pedagogy as a means of “unlearning” under the conditions of decolonization in Africa; a movement to design for “every body,” including the disabled, by architecture students and faculty at the University of California, Berkeley; the founding of a support network for women interested in the built environment, regardless of their academic backgrounds; and a design studio in the USSR that offered an alternative to the widespread functionalist approach in Soviet design. Viewed through their dissolution and afterlife as well as through their founding stories, these projects from the last century raise provocative questions about architecture’s role in the new century.

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Please join us for the presentation of Escenas Catalanas: errancias antropológico-sexuales (Catalan Scenes: anthropologic-sexual wanderings) by Frau Diamanda / Héctor Acuña.

The evening will be moderated by Sergio Zevallos and Jana Nestler and it will be comprised of a performative reading by author Frau Diamanda / Héctor Acuña.

Thursday 6 October 2022
6.30–8.30pm

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof)
10997 Berlin

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Frau Diamanda / Héctor Acuña is a transvestite audiovisual artist of Peruvian origin living in Barcelona since 2016. She is a translator, writer, independent curator, cultural agent, dj, and actress, specializing in transgender art and multimedia performance. She completed the PEI Independent Studies Program of MACBA in 2018, and has for some years been developing a writing practice and neobaroque aesthetics from their position as a migrant sudaca transvestite.

Jana Nestler is an artist and organizer of various events on new media, film and art. Since 2017 she has been studying at the Münster Academy of Art and the Faculty of Spanish Philology, University of Münster. She lived and worked for three years in Barcelona, where she also studied art at the Facultat de Belles Arts, Universitat de Barcelona. Nestler is interested in gender issues and queerness, as well as in the sociolinguistic issues related to Catalonia. Katalanische Szenen (Escenas Catalanas) is her first translation into German.

Sergio Zevallos is a Peruvian visual artist. His work consists of drawings, collages, photographs, installations, and performances. Zevallos studied at the Escuela de Artes of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima from 1980 to 1982. He was a co-founder of Grupo Chaclacayo, active between 1982 and 1994, which belonged to the artistic underground. Since 1989, Zevallos has lived and worked in Berlin. In 2013 and 2014, the Museo de Arte de Lima and the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart exhibited his work under the title Un cuerpo ambulante / A roving body. He was a participant in documenta 14 at the Neue Galerie in 2017 and was awarded the HAP Grieshaber Prize in 2018.

Escenas Catalanas: errancias antropológico-sexuales

Author: Frau Diamanda / Héctor Acuña
Published by La Máquina, Barcelona, 2020

As a project of neobaroque transvestite writing, the work develops a form of sexual wandering and the political agency of a migrant subaltern body, whose sexual tool is the basis for an analysis and direct criticism of over-imposed heteronormativity. The editorial project presents the object in a book format, although the work has spanned many hybrid forms, such as performance, installation, video, and photography. It has also been sonically presented as a musical object with spoken word in a cassette format, including collaborations with Spanish and Peruvian sound artists under the label Nuevo Sonido Nacional Barcelona.

The book has previously been presented at the Casa Amèrica Catalunya, Biblioteca Nou Barris, LASA2021, Universidad de Barcelona, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, La Carnicería Vol. V at Proyecto AMIL Lima, Festival Zinegoak Bilbao, Traficantes de Sueños Madrid, MACBA, and Centro Cultural Albareda Barcelona.

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Mouse on Mars take over the Kunstbau of Lenbachhaus in Munich, Germany with a sound installation for which they developed a site-specific composition. Working with and responding to the exhibition space, the installation transforms the Kunstbau itself into a gigantic stereophonic acoustic instrument.

A rotatable horn loudspeaker pitchforks a sound like a pinball into the 110-yard Kunstbau, where it rebounds on the pillars, cants, splinters, is gathered back in, and dies down. One by one, additional sounds from a virtually inexhaustible repertoire are sent out into the space and modulated. Percussive devices operated by robots interject analog acoustic accents.

Sequences of different lengths are continuously rearranged so that no two of them recur in the same order. The audience experiences the orchestrated unfolding of a dynamic composition in three dimensions. The space and the sounds generated from it clash and respond to each other, resulting in an acoustic dialogue. A dedicated illumination program is coordinated with the music, seconding the sonic movements and sometimes standing in for them.

The installation intends to challenge the audience to active listening, in which only the limits of attention determine the limits of what is acoustically possible. With targeted shifts of perspective, Mouse on Mars propose to demonstrate their conviction that there is no one valid composition: each listener produces his or her own “spatial compostruction”.

Mouse on Mars have continually evolved their practice for twenty-five years, always asking new questions. The “compostruction” is part of their most recent acoustic research, inquiring both into the movement of sounds through time and space and aspects of psychoacoustic perception and the experience of sound: How can we define hearing and listening? How do we process acoustic information? How do our bodies respond to the physical movements of sound in space? How attentively can we observe the process of hearing itself? And in which other ways do we relate to our acoustic environment?

Spatial Jitter April 9, 2022 – September 18, 2022
Lenbachhaus Munich curated by Eva Huttenlauch

Composition and Production: Andi Toma & Jan St. Werner
Speaker Panels: Michael Akstaller
Rotating Speaker: Andi Toma, Jan St. Werner, Matthias Singer
Percussion Robots: Moritz Simon Geist
Lights: Matthias Singer
Sound Software: Marcin Pietruszewski, Dietrich Pank
Percussion: Dirk Rothbrust
Woodblocks: Boris Müller
Art Direction: Rupert Smyth

LP & publication with contributions by Louis Chude-Sokei, Helga de la Motte-Haber, Eva Huttenlauch, Mouse on Mars, Patricia Reed, Susanne Witzgall.

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Crass Goods i is a two-part publication, a vibrating diversion, a mad passion and a way of not taking any important thing too seriously and taking some trivial matters much too seriously.

There are many things we are obsessed with. In the first issue, we documented the renovation of a 48-year-old 4-story Taiwanese house (my late grandparents’ house).

The documentation consists of two parts, ‘Crass’ and ‘Goods’. The ‘Crass’ part is a long newspaper-like print of size 14.6 x 50 cm. It contains construction comics documented during the renovation. The ‘Goods’ part is a tiny book of size 6.5 x 11 cm. It is a catalog-like edition of over 100 household goods found in a 48-year-old, 4-story Taiwanese house.

The theme of the construction process was picked for the ‘Crass’ part of the first issue for its crude, unrefined, unprocessed nature.

I was part of a complex process that challenged how my grandparents’ house could be imagined, lived and ordered differently. I was the designer and superintendent. The position gave me the opportunity to scrutinize the passive monumentality of the house’s self-conscious spatial differences, and to oversee and document every step of the construction process, from planning to completion. The comics were illustrated during my 10-day home quarantine in Taipei.

Ranging from furniture pieces and deity figures to postal stamps and professional tools, the ‘Goods’ part of the first issue features more than one hundred pieces, paying tribute to the house owners(my late grandparents) and the house that housed many years’ worth of objects.

I closely browsed and investigated their archives, the objects that I have been familiar with since childhood for a year or so. There are precious objects and excess belongings, all taking up time and space. There are memories evoked, some vague and fleeting, some sharp and searing. I see many of them as heterogeneous mediums capable of narrating multiple stories. Every view of an object is different. The pieces I chose were mostly based on one thing, a gasp of delight. I see myself as an uninvited(self-invited) curator, curating an exhibit based on the house owners’ collection. The curation is reserved yet cordial, ubiquitous yet unique.

For Crass Goods, each issue is a new geography that reformulates and redeploys. It is also a process of accumulation, corruption, and withdrawal. We seek something missing, miss something left behind. We are dwellers without the consent of the real owners. We curate, and hopefully, our collection could be your collection.

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1. Crass Goods i (crass)

14.6 x 50 cm
12 pages
Edition of 500 (numbered)
English
2022

2. Crass Goods i (goods)

6.5 x 11 cm
144 pages (113 photographed objects, 5 illustrations)
Exposed Smyth-Sewn Hardcover
Edition of 300 (numbered)
English
2022

dig a hole (@da__h_)

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Dear friends,

Motto is pleased to invite you tothe book presentation of Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh: One Hundred Days of Resistance with author Prarthna Singh.

Saturday 1 October 2022
6.30–8.30pm

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof)
10997 Berlin

Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh: One Hundred Days of Resistance

Author: Prarthna Singh
Design: Bombay Duck Design (Sameer and Zeenat Kulavoor)

Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh* is an ode to the infinite courage and resilience of the women of Shaheen Bagh, Delhi, who sat in protest for a 100 days and nights. A book of photographs, drawings, songs, letters and other material gathered as a record of the iconic protest, marks an extraordinary moment in the political and contemporary history of India.
In December 2019, a small group of Muslim women from the working-class neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh came out of their homes and sat down in protest, occupying a stretch of one of Delhi’s busiest highways. They were protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act, which was designed to strip the Constitution of India of its right to religious equality. This peaceful sit-in continued until the pandemic sent India into lockdown; the state used this as an opportunity to destroy and dismantle all traces of the protest. This book serves as urgent and crucial evidence of a time that is systematically being erased from our collective memory.

From the women of Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter, the Dandi March and Chipko Movement, to those at the front lines of India’s non-violent protests, this book is an act of remembrance that preserves the powerful legacy of women at the forefront of historic revolutions.

*Every Evening Belongs to Shaheen Bagh

Prarthna Singh is a photographer whose work explores questions of identity and gender, especially as they intersect with the fraught politics of nationalism in contemporary India. Her images reflect on the economic and political trajectory of the country, drawing connections between feminine precariousness and vulnerability on the one hand, and radical acts of strength and solidarity on the other. Her practice negotiates how the two sides are inextricably linked. After completing her BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, Prarthna lived and worked in New York City. Currently she is based in Bombay.

Sameer Kulavoor is a visual artist living and working in Mumbai, India. His work lies at the intersection of art, graphic design and contemporary illustration, and has taken the form of paintings, murals, books, zines, prints and objects. He is interested in why things look and work the way they do; constantly noting and understanding the impact that time, culture, politics and socio-economic conditions have on our visible and invisible surroundings. In this age of visual overload, his work involves filtering, dissecting, documenting and defamiliarising commonly seen subjects through the act of drawing, painting and design – often oscillating between instinctive and conceptual methods of making.

Zeenat Kulavoor is a typographer and graphic designer based in Bombay, India. She works with multiple Indian scripts and specialises in Urdu type, lettering and calligraphy. She believes that the Urdu script has endless creative possibilities and intends to change the perception towards the use of Urdu in India, which currently is widely perceived to be limited to religious usage. Using tongue-in-cheek humour and wit, combined with the use of scale, different mediums and varied print making methods, Zeenat is working towards reinventing possibilities of how the script can be a part of regular day to day life. Apart from her typography work, she is the creative director at Bombay Duck Designs, and runs a design store called Bombay Duck Shop that sells selected books, zines, prints and objects that blur the boundaries between illustration, art and design.

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