Mang Mang Magazine Vol. 1 is a Chinese-language independent magazine called “莽莽 Mang Mang” (meaning wild grass). The magazine includes articles, interviews, photos, and well-researched infographics documenting the recent wave of protests in China and in Chinese communities throughout the world that has led to the ending of the draconian Zero-Covid policy in China. Mang Mang Magazine Vol. 1 also deals with broader political and social issues (feminism, LGBTQ) and supports protests in Iran and Hong Kong, just to name a few.

Order here

Urban Kitsch, originally written in 1996, explores the forms of vernacular visual culture that emerged in the city of Baroda following the liberalization of the Indian economy. Plastic toys, celebrity mud flaps, and postmodern architecture collide into a new formal category—both celebrated and derided—as Praneet Soi traverses the city on his trusted Yamaha RX 100.

Published for the first time by Reliable Copy and Sharjah Art Foundation, Urban Kitsch was written as part of Praneet Soi’s Master’s in Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. The complete facsimile of this dissertation is accompanied by a recent interview with the artist by Nihaal Faizal and Sarasija Subramanian.

Order here

This edition of ZIGG is interested in exploring sex as an evolutionary psychology. It brings together contributions from a network of friends, peers, colleagues who have engaged or encountered the makers of ZIGG through intellectual, psychosexual vibrations. It includes text messages, illustrations, drawings, poetry, code, conversation, rants, and essays. 

Contributors: Hala Bint, Alex Cecchetti, Common Accounts, Kelly Fliedner, Chitra Ganesh, Drew Gordon, Margaret Haines, Raja’a Khalid and Ahmad Makia, Amanda Lee Koe, and Deepak Unnikrishnan.

ZIGG is a publishing association engaged in critical thinking from Dubai. It circulates amorphous aesthetics, printed matters, and promotes the disciplinary blurring between sex, media, earth matter, magic, and politics.

Edition of 300

Order here

Blerta Hoçia reflects on the consequences of the pandemic in Albania, from the quarantine of the population to the state of siege, where as a result basic human rights were significantly reduced. Her adultery tells the story of one night, that of May 17, 2020, the demolition of the National Theater and police violence against citizens, artists and activists.

Order here

Korazon #1
a sensual and political magazine

With KORAZON, we want to dive into topics previously discussed by Amauta’s writers within the current context of cultural activities no longer being subsidized by the government, but rather turned into for-profit projects. In this mag, we want to show how crucial identity and collective culture are to a country and how important it is to invest in us as a multicultural territory. This platform’s aim is to bring attention to issues that affect us as Peruvians, especially those that we hardly emphasize and pinpoint as oppressive or holding us back as a community.

Order here

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.

Order here

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.

Order here

In July 2019 Pablo Allison was detained and imprisoned in an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention centre in the USA where he spent almost 1 month. During his time in prison, he was able to document the lives of migrants in detention through observational sketches made by him, alongside, texts and interviews from other fellow detainees.

The Detainee Handbook aims to offer a small view into the lives of people stuck and locked into the detention/prison system of the United States of America, an industry that has profited vastly from this human tragedy, off the backs of millions of people trying to find better life expectations in the USA.

Signed and stamped.

Order here

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 neighbourhood 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 standing up against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which was designed to strip the Constitution of India of its right to religious equality. This peaceful sit-in began in December 2019 until the pandemic sent India into lockdown, and 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, and 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.

Soft bound in undyed, hand-spun Kora cotton by Womenweave, Maheshwar

Edition of 800

Order here

The process of preparing this book began with looking at photographs of large meeting tables around which Chinese and Singaporean public officials gathered during the many Chinese government study missions to Singapore throughout the 1990s. While such images might seem unremarkable today, the appearance of former revolutionaries of the Maoist era as sedentary technocrats marks the historic emergence of a distinct political imaginary in a time when “the economy” was displacing class struggle as the primary subject of governance in China.

It was at the table that these technocrats, having extricated themselves from the masses, devised the concept of the socialist market economy to frame the economic reforms that were launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. As they insisted on the compatibility of the market economy with the prevailing socialist social contract, the reformers articulated their turn towards the market as a decision informed not by the “invisible” manner through which the market allocates its resources, but by the assumed transparency of its information flows, which they believed would make visible what the party-state had been previously unable to see.

Yet, to the extent that this process of “seeking truth from facts”, as the reformers put it, is founded upon a set of separations—the party-state from the masses, information from ideology, the economic from the political—what ultimately underwrites the total visibility apparently provided by the table is the concealment of that which must not be allowed to appear as information in order for the logic of the market to obtain: the exploitation of labour.

It is on this basis that the factory can be construed as the table’s forgotten origin and impenetrable interior, and the gate that circumscribes the compound the limit of the market’s capacity for making things visible. Designed to spatially contain industrial labour and hide their exploitation from the public sphere, the factory gate is as close as the technocrat would get, as seen during the factory’s opening ceremony, to the world of labour under a capitalist mode of production. In thus proposing a convergence between tables and factories and examining their respective regimes of (in)visibility across the contexts of Singapore and Reform-era China, this collection of images and texts seeks to understand how the seemingly disparate worlds centred around these two objects in fact call forth each other to produce our deeply unsettled contemporary condition—one where the recognition that accrues to visibility has replaced freedom from exploitation as the most that the people can ever demand after the revolution’s untimely end.

Order here