In her exhibition ‘The Playground Talk’, closing her residency at Officina Neukölln, Romana Ruban creates the echo of a dialogue between kids that she overheard during a trip to Odesa. The playground chitchat consists of dreams about the neighbor’s car and is carved into a zine with simple but lighthearted illustrations. The linocut prints appeal to both the inner child and the responsible adult. With these kids’ quotes, the artist wishes to show not only a playful childhood and the joy of simple things, but she also wants to bring up a few questions. Are we dreaming in the right direction? What do we stand for in the end?
The idea for a zine came up in 2021, right after the trip, but was on hold. Officina’s residency for artists in exile gave new layers and meanings to the imprint of the peaceful past, as Romana fled Ukraine to Germany after the full-scale invasion of Russia.
‘Critical Designers’ produced by an increasing number of design schools are prompted to address social, political and environmental issues through their practices. Yet, who can afford to continue such effort after graduation?
In a dynamic style holding multiple voices, “Who Can Afford To Be Critical?” discusses the limits that affordability, class and labour impose upon the educational promise of holding a ‘critical’ practice. Why do we tend to ignore the material and socioeconomic constraints that bind us as designers, claiming instead that we can be powerful agents of change? In fact, where does our agency lie?
Instead of focusing on the dream of ethical work under capitalism, could we, instead, focus first on designers’ own working conditions, targeting them as one immediate site for collective action? And can we engage politically with the world not necessarily as designers, but as workers, as activists, as citizens?
With contributions by Silvio Lorusso, J. Dakota Brown, Marianela D’Aprile, Evening Class, Somnath Batt, Danielle Aubert, Jack Henrie Fisher, Alan Smart, Greg Mihalko and DAE students 2021/2022.
Kink Gong (aka Laurent Jeanneau) was born in France in 1965.
He started making electronic music around 1995 in NYC, and in 1999 went to live with the Hadzas in Tanzania to record their music, since then he started to record the music of mostly endangered minorities in many different places, mostly in Southeast Asia. He lived in Indonesia, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, and many other places. He also composes electronic music that includes and transforms those recordings. With a huge catalog of his work, he released music from the label such as Sublime Frequencies, Akuphone, Discrepant, and more.
This album is to celebrate the music I was involved in while living in Dali, Yunnan, China between 2006 and 2012. As usual with Kink Gong compositions, they contain all kinds of field recordings, mostly in Southern China, Laos, and Cambodia; local instruments that I play and electronic to melt them together, resulting in experimental soundscapes. Each element of the composition relates to this period with people (the dramatic voices of Hani or Yao singers) and spaces (park, jungle) and the long hours of creative enjoyment in our house by the Ear lake (Erhai) to put those elements together, using my neighbour (Li Daiguo)’s skill on pipa or new electronic toys I got around that time.
Our son was born in Dali in 2008 and this LP is called Ji Sang (literally translated as Lucky Mulberry Tree) after his name.
Side A – Fishermen Boats of Erhai Lake Electronic, Dali China 2010 + Punoy Mouthorgan, Laos 2010 + Khmu Man Voice, Phongsaly Laos 2010 + Metallic Boats on Erhai Lake, Dali China 2010 + Electronic, Dali China 2012 + Dong Niutuiqin + Woman’s Voice, Guizhou China 2012 + Electronic, Dali China 2011 + Hani Vocal Polyphony, Yunnan China 2011 + Chinese Pop Singer, Shanghai 2001 + 2 Yao Women’s Voices, + Frogs, Yunnan China 2011
Side B – Morsing Bimo Morsing Indian Mouthharp, Chennai India 1997 + Nuosu Yi Bimo, Sichuan China 2010 + Electronic, Paris 2000 + Santur Persian Dulcimer, Berlin 2017 + Nuosu Koxian Multiblades Mouthharp, Sichuan China 2010
– Pon Dao Flute Siem Reap, Cambodia 2003 + Electronic, Dali China 2008 + Mum 1 Stringed Bowed Instrument, Krung Ratanakiri Cambodia 2004
– Chengdu Park Electronic, Dali China 2008 + Park in Chengdu, Sichuan China 2008 + Pipa by Li Daiguo, Dali China 2011 + Nyaheun Mouthorgan + Voice, Champasak Laos 2006 + Lisu Chibeu Guitar, Yunnan China 2012
released December 2, 2022
All music recorded & recomposed by Kink Gong 1997 – 2012 Kink Gong plays Mouthharp, Mouthorgan, and Lisu Chibeu Mastered by Thomas Stadnicki Layout by 若潭 Ruò Tán
“I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad” is an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of a performance artist who lands a part-time job as an Embedded Artistic Researcher in an art institution. Invested in queer theory and institutional critique, she sets out to perform the artist “differently” through a process of negation and passivity, inadvertently causing her relationship with the institution’s curator to grow increasingly speculative and paranoid. Louwerens’ labor as tour guide, security guard, artist, hostess and researcher at different institutions begins to overlap and blend under the name of “performance.” “I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad” is a fragmented story of paranoid and reparative reading, script and utterance, exposure and vulnerability.
Pia Louwerens is a performance artist and researcher from the Netherlands, living in Brussels. Her research revolves around the becoming of the artistic subject, the I who writes, speaks and makes, in relation to the (institutional) context. From 2019 – 2020 Louwerens was working as embedded artistic researcher at a big research project, for which she was embedded in an art institution. Through this research she attempted to perform or practice the artist, and thereby the institution, differently. Her work usually takes the shape of a performance in which she speaks, switching between registers of the actual, the possible, the professional and the anxious artist.
For December 2022 Music Mix we hosted Broshuda on a two-day residence at Motto’s store. The artist created a mix featuring music from our latest arrivals.
Hands reaching and feeling, noses sniffing, eyes scrolling: the magic at book shops and at book fairs is also very much a tactile one.
But what exactly is the tactile, in a world in which a rising technocracy exploits the designed environment we feel? Who authorizes and who writes, what tradition do we stand in and how can we touch base? This reader explores how our interaction with printed matter affects us through theory, thoughts, and practices in the field of graphic design, materiality, philosophy, science and art.
Although the core of this book rests upon theory and thoughts, with eight writings from scientists and philosophers to a paper-specialist and art writers, this book also compiles practice-based experiments by six international artists and includes animated introductions of printing techniques in the form of fictionalized characters.
Published in 1979-1980 Hand bound, untrimmed edition 2022 from the original print run
Japanese writing and translation by Yoshio Shirakawa
Swiss-American graphic designer, musician, photographer and performance artist Mike Hentz ranks among the pioneers of new media art. He co-founded the legendary performance group Minus Delta t and the artist groups Frigo, Radio Bellevue and the European Media Art Lab. In the 1990s he realized the project Piazza Virtuale with Van Gogh TV and a great many interactive cable and satellite television shows with University TV. Hentz also taught at art schools in Germany, Switzerland and various Eastern European countries.
Coll.#01 is the first comprehensive catalogue of Displaay’s current typeface collection. It is a guide to twenty typeface families as well as an insight into upcoming typefaces and custom projects. For bookworms, it can serve as a tour guide through the labyrinth of wikipedia topics that occupy our minds. Available with three different coloured edges, red, green and blue.
Displaay is an independent type foundry established in 2014 and based in Prague, Czech Republic.
