Published to accompany an exhibition at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), 27 September – 26 November 2000
The work of French artist Philippe Thomas revolves around the ideas of reality and fiction. As such, there is an aesthetic ambiguity at its core: all the physical elements involved in the creation, exhibition and circulation of an artwork (the work itself, the artist, the audience, galleries and museums, etc.) oscillate between values of reality and fiction. In keeping with this, Thomas registered the trademark les ready-made appartinnent à tout le monde® and used it to fictionalise his own identity. The catalogue includes pieces created by Thomas from the seventies until his death in 1995 along with essays by writers such as Corinne Diserens, Patricia Falguières, Daniel Soutif and Bernard Blistène.
Design by Ramon Prat, Montse Sagarra and David Lorente (Actar). 2000
Centered around the themes of latent knowledges, earth uprisings and beyond borders, this second volume in the Radical Rituals series is the result of a research residency by the collaborative studio forty five degrees in the summer of 2022 across France, from 45°N 1°W to 45°N 7°E.
More just spatial practices are found in the diversity and nuances of space-making paradigms that tackle local challenges while providing concrete responses and actions to global issues. In Radical Rituals, spatial protocols are collected, following an imaginary line, the 45°N parallel, across Europe, from the Atlantic Coast to the Black Sea. The practices are named rituals because they strengthen the potential for collective action to reach systemic change. They are labeled radical because they are highly transformative and point toward possible futures.
Protagonists: Cantercel Site Expérimental d’Architecture, Viel Audon, Le Collectif La Maison, 3PA association, 23 Anères, Les communes de Saint-Blaise, La Fabric Pola, Bruit du Frigo, La Ferme des Volonteux, Association La Distillerie, ArtStock, Parc Naturel Marin du Bassin d’Arcachon, Dune du Pilat, La Maraude, Les Terrasses Solidaires, and Filature de Chantemerle Longo Maï.
The book is comprised of essays by forty five degrees (Alkistis Thomidou and Berta Gutiérrez Casaos), Joanne Puzenc, and Lea Hobson, and a conversation between Elise Misao Hunchuck and Léopold Lambert.
Ivan Yakushev : Noms des eaux = experimental film generated in real-time during screening with ai visual models driven by poetic text and webcam input.
Alexandra Karelina : DVA*2 = first-ever screening twice in a row of the film investigating how reality can stack up on itself.
This post is related the upcoming film screening within the framework of the cinema club and Film Association K1NO1.
Part 1 Meeting-reflection on the theme: Pop-feminism in the film process as a form of political affect for self-sufficient capitalists.
Part 2 Practices of the “bottle” game or the flickering of random encounters (voyeurism or action) (psycho-physical training) Passive or active (one can be an observer or a participant).
Part 3 Film screening: “The Light Watching Me While I Watch the North” directed by Knjazhna and Vlada Milovskaia.
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partie 1 Rencontre-réflexion sur le thème : Le pop-féminisme dans le processus cinématographique comme forme d’affect politique pour des capitalistes autosuffisants.
Partie 2 Pratiques du jeu de « la bouteille » ou scintillement des rencontres fortuites (voyeurisme ou action) (entrainement psychophysique) Passif ou actif (on peut être observateur/observatrice ou participant/participante).
Partie 3 Projection du film : “La lumière qui me regarde tandis que je regarde le Nord” réalisé par Knjazhna et Vlada Milovskaia. Associaton / MONOCINEMA project / Motto store
This post is related the upcoming film screening within the framework of the cinema club and Film Association K1NO1.
The plot of the novel ‘The Sublimes‘ revolves around seemingly unmotivated murders committed by the main character, Fyodor Sonnov. However, Fyodor, while committing these senseless crimes, pursues a specific goal: to understand the eternal mystery of death through “empirical” means. He perceives the visible world as an illusion. Fyodor unexpectedly encounters a group of Moscow intellectuals and metaphysicians, whose existence awakens in him greater interest than the characters of his mundane life. This acquaintance shapes the plot of the novel.
The theme of ‘The Sublimes’ is murder for the sake of penetrating the mystery of the soul of the murdered, and thus into the otherworldly realm. The author reveals the depth of philosophical searches through a brutal, often painful prose that can be horrifying upon re-reading. At the same time, Mamleev’s aspirations have a positive foundation: by diving into darkness, he seeks to manifest the light of the human soul and foster its growth.
The first versions of the novel ‘The Sublimes’ appeared in samizdat in 1966. At that time, there could be no question of an official publication of the novel in the USSR, even though there was nothing “political” about it; the novel did not meet moral and ethical criteria. Later, when Yuri Mamleev presented this novel to a major New York publishing house, the response was harsh: “The world is not ready for this book.” The novel was officially published for the first time in Chicago in 1980 in a version shortened by a third, titled “The Sky Above Hell.” “The world is not ready to read this novel. And I would not want to live in a world that would be ready to read this novel,” a New York critic remarked about the abridged version of ‘The Sublimes’.
Yuri Vitalyevich Mamleev, also Mamleyev or Mamleiev (Russian: Юрий Витальевич Мамлеев, 11 December 1931 – 25 October 2015), was a prominent Russian novelist who began writing in the 1960s and won the Pushkin Prize in 2000. He is considered the founder of metaphysical realism as a literary genre. His best known work, The Sublimes (Russian: Шатуны), was a samizdat novel published in 1966 and translated into English in 2014 by Marian Schwartz.
Mamleev was also well known as the founder of the Yuzhinsky Circle, an occultist, underground literary salon based out of his shared apartment on Yuzhinsky Lane in central Moscow. The illegal literary salon attracted many non-conformist and anti-Soviet artists, writers, intellectuals, and poets, including the future philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, Yevgeny Golovin, and Geydar Dzhemal. He was deeply interested in Hindu and Buddhist doctrines and went on to lecture at Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris and Moscow State University. Following Mamleev’s immigration to the United States, Golovin took over leadership of the group.
In 1974, Mamleev left the USSR and emigrated to the United States where he taught at Cornell University until the fall of the Soviet Union. Post-dissolution, he returned to Moscow where he continued to live and write until his death in 2015.
This post is related the upcoming film screening of director Valentina Bek’s documentary, ‘News from another world,’ about Mamleevwithin the framework of the cinema club and Film Association K1NO1.
NEWS FROM THE OTHER WORLD a film by Valentina Bek about the writer Yuri Mamleyev
NEWS FROM THE OTHER WORLD a film by Valentina Bek about the writer Yuri Mamleyev
Friday Nov 15, 7pm
Screening
+conversation with Valentina Bek ____________________________________________
Motto – 38 rue du Vertbois – 75003 Paris ____________________________________________
“A family portrait of the Mamleyevs in a tight interior of a small Moscow apartment is an experiment in metaphysical documentary filmmaking. Yuri Mamleyev, the author of a great prose about Russian chthonic tradition. His wife, translator Maria Alexandrovna Mamleyeva, flips through a photo album with the pictures of Parisian and American exile. But the eerie time reverberates somewhere near these scenes of unpretentious coziness, in the editing voids and the disturbing hum of the abstract soundtrack.” – Andrey Kartashov
The event is organized within the framework of the cinema club and Film Association K1NO1 Paris.
Information about the most famous novel, ‘The Sublimes’ by Yuri Mamleyev, can be found here
Truly Blessed tells a powerful visual story about a community’s response to discrimination, both racial and religious. Chris Suspect came upon this unusual community by chance. He met Bilal Ali after a taxi hit Ali on the streets of Georgetown in Washington, DC. Suspect photographed the accident and sent him the photos for his lawyer to use. A few months later, Bilal invited Suspect to photograph a private party at a non-descript restaurant in Dupont Circle. At the time, Suspect had no idea he would be introduced that night to an empowered community of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender African Americans.
“In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where l am. You know the way to the place where I am going.” John 14:1-4
“Sometimes it is only through photographs that we can see the sacred in the secular, or the secular in the sacred. This collection, Truly Blessed, uses photography to forge a conversation between the sacred black church and secular sexual/erotic spaces, capturing sites where the body, mind, and spirit converge. Suspect’s attention to the subtlety of the performances of everyday people-engaging in rituals of their own choosing-illustrates the diverse and dynamic realities of being black and queer in America. I was fortunate to be a founding minister at The Community Church of Washington, DC (UCC), the church that is so well-defined in this text. I had left the DC metropolitan area by the time of this chronicling of sacred-secular aspects of black queer life. However, while in the ministry at the “Community Church,” I always felt conflicted to literally dance in the sanctuary, after a night of dancing and sweating in the streets. My queer peers and I were taught early the separation of the church and the street, the necessary division of the secular and the sacred. In many ways, being in a church where all were welcomed-where queer met straight, trans met bi, and men met women, we were already in a cultural world far different than what we had historically been given within larger and more mainstream black churches. Dare I say, while we may have sometimes felt a degree of shame or conflict—in mixing our sacred and seculars—we all felt the harmony between the spiritual and sexual, as both energies were charged by bodily need, passion, and improvisation. Every now and then the riffs at the DJ booth inside the Bachelor’s Mill would parallel the scratch of the drums behind the pulpit. Indeed, as Suspect shares images of folks engaged in a spiritual worship experience sometimes in the midst of giving devotion to a higher power, sitting in a pew, caring for children, hugging tightly, or speaking from the pulpit-we are offered a look into a word that may be familiar to some and foreign to others. Likewise, as we move into the clubs and homes, we are presented with bodies who speak sexuality and desire in many ways some standing and watching, some moving, some in drag, some in masturbatory bliss, some posed in a moment of intimate dance, and some ready for the camera while others are unaware of its presence. The way that these scenes of sacred-spiritual and secular-sexual expression still exude the plurality and porousness of community, allows this work to color Black queerness in all its shades.” – Jeffrey Q. McCune, Forward
Join us with King Koala Press in Berlin on Tuesday, Nov 12, from 7-9 PM for a presentation of ‘Truly Blessed’, a compelling visual narrative exploring community responses to racial and religious discrimination.
Published by King Koala Press, this book features a foreword by Jeffrey Q. McCune, PhD, and includes an extensive interview with Chris Suspect by Ibarionex Perello, host of The Candid Frame. With a testimonial from Guggenheim Fellow Maggie Steber, ‘Truly Blessed’ uses photography to bridge the sacred Black church and secular erotic spaces, highlighting the convergence of body, mind, and spirit. This work acknowledges the complexities of the “sacred” while celebrating the unapologetic existence of the sexual-secular-sacred trinity in the Black queer community.
Meet and greet, book signing and photo exhibition.