and a time to see less

Posted in Motto Books on February 21st, 2024
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Here live the near-blind. In their eyes the city dwells like aureoles on suckling lips. Here they apprehend the city with knowledge viscous and immediate. And here they also live uneasily, for tranquillity is found only in pictures they are disinclined to make.

In essays, letters and aphorisms, this book makes near-blindness tangible as one condition of living in. protracted war.

Author: Walid Sadek

Published and distributed by Motto Books Co-published by Agial Art Gallery
Text editing: Mika Hayashi Ebbese

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Presentation of Panya Routes, hosted by the African Centre for Cities and Stokvel Gallery with guest Mokena Makeka @ Stokvel Gallery, Johannesburg

Posted in Events, Motto Books on October 22nd, 2022
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Motto Books is pleased to invite you to the presentation of Panya Routes, hosted by the African Centre for Cities and Stokvel Gallery with guest Mokena Makeka.

22 October 2022
from 12pm


Stokvel Gallery
*NEW ADDRESS*
27 Boxes
4th Ave, Melville
Johannesburg, South Africa

Panya Routes: Independent art spaces in Africa
Kim Gurney

Independent art spaces on the African continent have flourished, particularly over the past twenty years in tandem with a youthful population in fast-urbanising cities. This book takes the reader on a journey to discover their DIY-DIT working principles: horizontality, second chance, elasticity, performativity and convergence. The itinerary begins at an empty plinth in Cape Town to closely track the performative and artistic afterlife of a colonialist statue whose toppling turned public space into common space. Next stop: Nairobi, Accra, Cairo, Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam — all rapidly changing cities of flux. The author visits five non-profit platforms that build narratives in public space by stitching together art and everyday life. They create their own panya routes, or backroad infrastructures of divergent kinds, in response to prevailing uncertainty. Working largely in collaborative economies and solidarity networks through refusal and reimagination, these “off-spaces” demonstrate institution building as artistic practice. By thinking and dreaming beyond the status quo, they fast-forward to creatively inhabit city futures that have already arrived in the global South. The key platforms featured in the book’s research are: The GoDown Arts Centre, ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, Townhouse Gallery, Zoma Museum and Nafasi Art Space.

Edited by Mika Hayashi Ebbesen
Graphic design by Márcia Novais
Published by Motto Books, 2022

An Elaborate Gesture of Pastness: Three Films by Dani Gal. Motto Books; Blood Mountain Projects

Posted in Motto Books on April 10th, 2021
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The publication delves into Dani Gal’s trilogy produced between 2011 and 2018. Each film approaches the complexities of historical accounts between ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ in the context of German, Jewish and Arab histories from a different ‘blind spot’ in historical knowledge. Cinematic tools are applied to illuminate and stage these undocumented aspects of real historical events.

Contributions from Sabeth Buchmann, Burcu Dogramaci, Noit Banai and Sa’ed Atshan are accompanied by visual and literary material and references from Gal’s extensive research practice.

Night and Fog (2011) is a re-enactment of the night of 31 May 1962, based on an interview Gal made with Michael Goldman-Gilad, a Holocaust survivor and Israeli police officer, who had undertaken the secret mission of scattering the ashes of Adolf Eichmann into the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea after he was captured in Argentina and brought to trial and executed in Israel.

As from Afar (2013) is a fictionalised account of a meeting between Simon Wiesenthal, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to bring Nazi criminals to justice, and Albert Speer, the chief architect of the Third Reich, using the letters they exchanged throughout the 1970s as a basis for the dialogue.

White City (2018) revolves around the complex character of Arthur Ruppin, a German Jew and one of the founders of the Zionist Settlement who promoted co-existence with the Palestinians before the establishment of the State of Israel; the film traces his visit to the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, and his 1933 meeting with Hans F. K. Günther, the leading German eugenicist of the time who became a major influence on National Socialist race theory.

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