How lawsuits around intellectual property in Brazil and India are impacting the patentability of plants and seeds, farmers’ rights, and the public interest.

Over the past decade, legal challenges have arisen in the Global South over patents on genetically modified crops. In this ethnographic study, Karine E. Peschard explores the effects of these disputes on people’s lives, while uncovering the role of power—material, institutional, and discursive—in shaping laws and legal systems. The expansion of corporate intellectual property (IP), she shows, negatively impacts farmers’ rights and, by extension, the right to food, since small farms produce the bulk of food for domestic consumption. Peschard sees emerging a new legal common sense concerning the patentability of plant-related inventions, as well as a balance among IP, farmers’ rights, and the public interest.

Peschard examines the strengthening of IP regimes for plant varieties, the consolidation of the global biotech industry, the erosion of agrobiodiversity, and farmers’ dispossession. She shows how litigants question the legality of patents and private IP systems implemented by Monsanto for royalties on three genetically modified crop varieties, Roundup Ready soybean in Brazil and Bt cotton and Bt eggplant in India. Peschard argues that these private IP systems have rendered moot domestic legislation on plant variety protection and farmers’ rights. This unprecedented level of corporate concentration in such a vital sector raises concerns over the erosion of agricultural biodiversity, farmers’ rights and livelihoods, food security, and, ultimately, the merits of extending IP rights to higher life forms such as plants.

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Local Stickerbook is an independent magazine exhibiting works of contemporary Ukrainian artists. For each edition, around twenty artists are selected to represent their creations through the sticker format. The project was launched in February, 2021 as an initiative of Kyiv-based artists and curators. Since that time, the team successfully hosted several multi-format events uniting various local musicians, artists and enthusiasts to explore metamodernistic ideas and approaches.

The Local Stickerbook team also provides artists and their families with financial aid. The team intends to create a special financial support foundation giving a part of the profits and donations to the Ukrainian artists in need. Together we make a difference!

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Since the 2010s, the line between public and private, online and offline have increasingly become blurred by digitalization and social media. In contemporary art, digitality has assumed a new type of presence—no longer only as a virtual sphere of sociality, but increasingly as a technological interface that structures our embodied experiences. What is presented in an “exhibition“? And how should we write about the new types of post-digital images we are seeing (in them)? In Passing Images: Art in the Post-Digital Age, Marie-France Rafael provides an attempt to write with art, rather than just about it. Rafael aims to retrace the living spirit of art and the procedural-performative experience of art in her writing.

Marie-France Rafael is a tenure-track professur at the Zurich University of the Arts. She studied art history and film studies in Berlin and Paris, and holds a PhD in art history. From 2011 to 2015, she was a research associate at the Free University of Berlin and until 2019 taught at the Muthesius University Kiel, Department of Spatial Strategies/Curatorial Spaces. Her interview book with French artist Brice Dellsperger, On Gender Performance, was published with Floating Opera Press in 2019.

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Dear friends,

Motto is very excited to announce that Mizna Publications are now available as part of our catalogue. 

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Mission

Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production, centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists. For more than twenty years, we have been creating a decolonized cultural space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art.

Named City Page’s Nonprofit of the Year in 2020 and a Regional Cultural Treasure in 2021, we publish Mizna, an award-winning SWANA lit and art journal; produce the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, the largest and longest running Arab film fest in the Midwest; and offer classes, readings, performances, public art, and community events, having featured over 400 local and global writers, filmmakers, and artists.

Vision

Mizna seeks to be a local, national, and international leader in providing excellent artistic platforms for emerging and established SWANA artists, connecting their work to engaged and thoughtful audiences.

Through Mizna, audiences have the opportunity to engage in the work of Arab and Muslim artists on its own terms. And our community has a critical opportunity to see some facet of their own experience reflected on the page or the screen.

History

Mizna was co-founded as a grassroots organization by Kathryn Haddad and Saleh Abudayyeh who identified a need for an artistic space dedicated to Arab and Muslim writers to narrate their own stories and make work on their own terms. Along with a small group of other Arab and Muslim writers, artists, and scholars, Kathy and Saleh established Mizna during vibrant time in the ‘90s when Asian and black Twin Cities artists and activists were creating collectives and working together to imagine a more socially just and representative arts scene.

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A unique fusion of comics culture and philosophical cogitation takes readers on a ride through time, space, and thought.

Approaching the comic medium as a supercollider for achieving maximum abstraction, in Chronosis artist Keith Tilford and philosopher Reza Negarestani create a graphically stunning and conceptually explosive universe in which the worlds of pop culture, modern art, philosophy, science fiction, and theoretical physics crash into one another.

Taking place after the catastrophic advent of the birth of time, Chronosis narrates the story of a sprawling multiverse at the center of which monazzeins, the monks of an esoteric time-cult, attempt to build bridges between the many fragmented tribes and histories of multiple possible worlds. Across a series of dizzying overlapping stories we glimpse worlds where time flows backward, where the universe can be recreated every five minutes, or where rigid facts are washed away by the tides of an infinite ocean of possibility.

A unique fusion of comics culture and philosophical cogitation, this conceptually and visually mind-expanding tale takes the reader on a dizzying rollercoaster ride through time, space, and thought.

This volume contains the entire Chronosis series in full color, along with additional background materials including early sketches, script notes, and alternative covers.

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Headdresses and head coverings are among the most powerful vehicles of cultural identity, referring variously to nationality, subculture, gender, ethnicity, religion, and profession. Yet cultural identity is also continuously evolving. Hybrid Heads is a project by Daniela Dossi and the open collective studio Manoeuvre, a multidisciplinary, artist-run space in Ghent. Her long-term residency resulted in an open design method, a textile research project based on a visual and textual archive of head coverings from around the world, and a preliminary collection of hybrid headdresses. The project is an exhibition, an interactive installation, a web platform, and a design-educational programme.

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An antidecuplet with positive strangeness.

Debut album in a limited edition of 157 copies with handmade textile sleeve and screen printed insert, labels.

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Blown Derivatives (2009–2014) was an international collaborative project instigated simultaneously with Blueprints. Collaging papers that blew out of the WTC, it focused on post 9/11 financial crises, attitudes and borders. Artists were invited to participate in ephemeral exhibitions that reflected on politics, economics, and customs of their countries of destination. Pieces were hung outside until they were destroyed or decayed. Couriers and local citizens were also invited into the project, which took place in Antarctica, Iceland, China, Tibet, Iraq, and Pakistan. Blown Derivatives complies the four-year project’s processes, outcomes, and blind spots. With writings and work by: Sanjin Cosabic, Margaret Coughlin, Jonathan Field, Fatin Al Jumaily, Daniel Kaniess, Janet Lobberecht, Abraham Renko, Anna-Marie Shogren, Sean Smuda, Ping Wang.

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Anton Maurer’s Endeavour is a series visualising the impacts of capitalism and colonisation on Aotearoa, New Zealand. Made from 2012–2017 the works challenge viewers to question their perception of this land and the narratives most commonly associated with it.

Edition of 100

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