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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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.

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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

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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.

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Contributors: Ramon Amaro, Calum Bowden, Jaya Klara Brekke, Mitchell F. Chan, Cade Diehm, eeefff, Carina Erdmann, Primavera De Filippi, Charlotte Frost, Max Hampshire, Lucile Olympe Haute, Sara Heitlinger, Lara Houston, Cadence Kinsey, Nick Koppenhagen, Kei Kreutler, Laura Lotti, Jonas Lund, Massimiliano Mollona, MetaObjects, Rhea Myers, Omsk Social Club, Bhavisha Panchia, Legacy Russell, Tina Rivers Ryan, Nathan Schneider, Sam Skinner, Sam Spike, Hito Steyerl, Alex S. Taylor, Cassie Thornton, Suzanne Treister, Stacco Troncoso, Ann Marie Utratel, Samson Young

First publication to document the use and potential of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations in the arts that use blockchain technology and build on NFT innovations.

Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) offer unique tools for translocal peers to encode rules, relations and values into their joint ventures using blockchain technology. This new book, edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, who have been at the forefront of investigations into the relationship between DAOs and the arts, constitutes over 5 years of research with essays, interviews, exercises and prototypes from leading thinkers, artists and technologists across this emerging field.

Radical Friends is an urgent book for the 21st Century and beyond. It shows us, in the spirit of the legendary poet and artist Etel Adnan, that the technology of the future needs to be about “togetherness, not separation. Love, not suspicion. A common future, not isolation.”
–Hans Ulrich Obrist

How things are run is often more important than what is done. It may not be easy to establish alternative formats and infrastructures, but it’s certainly necessary… This collection shows that it is possible too.
–Sadie Plant

This book is about friendship, despair and hope — a beautiful, must-read for all people who are asking unanswerable questions about life, love and the end of the world.
–Franco “Bifo” Beradi

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Edition Schwimmer’s booklets, Hofter Monthly and TheSchwimmer by Sibylle Hofter are available in Motto.

Hofter Monthly and TheSchwimmer are monthly photography publications drawing from Sibylle Hofter’s work and archive.

With contributions by Wolfgang Hofter, Sophie Holz, Mania Lohrengel, Patricia Nya Njaounga, Sheney Okan, Christian Seidel, Daniel Sellek and Anna Tietz.

Sibylle Hofter is a Berlin based visual artist exploring film, text, site-specific sculpture, installation in public space, and photography, participatory and individual. She is also a curator of various projects, and co-founder with Sven Eggers, of the on-going political, media-critical semi-participatory photo project Agentur Schwimmer (Swimmer Agency), that she currently runs with Daniel Sellek. Hofter process usually includes extensive research on extra-cultural fields. Since 2011 she edits Hofter Monthly booklets and TheSchwimmer booklets on paper. She focuses on emancipatory, post-colonial, collaborative work.

The booklets are sold individually or in a special edition box set.

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The question that motivates this issue is simple: how come so many of us outside the settler colony called the United States of America, are so deeply influenced by and interpret our own contexts through the political ‘software’ created by U.S.-based academics and activists? The goal here is less to disqualify this U.S. political framework, than to demonstrate that the successful ways through which it analyzes its own context may not be as useful when analyzing other situations. Throughout the issue, we aim to reflect on U.S. exceptionalism, including in its own anti-imperialist critique (Zoé Samudzi), on what Blackness misses when it is mostly centered on African American espitemologies (Cases Rebelles), on transfused U.S.-forged concepts of “brownness” or “BIPOC” (Sinthujan Varatharajah), on illusory attempts to translate struggles into (U.S.) English (Bekriah Mawasi), on the complete blind spot casteism constitutes in this U.S. ‘software’ (Shaista Aziz Patel & Vijeta Kumar), on the need for a pluriversal approach of queerness (Rahul Rao)… Even within the U.S., the political framework that categorizes all people (from Indigenous people to white settlers) coming from the south of its border as “Latinx” needs to be problematized as settler colonial creations (Floridalma Boj Lopez). With this issue, we aim at doing just that: not letting go of the precious epistemologies U.S.-based thinkers have brought us, but simply decentering them to favor the pluriversality of our influences.

The cover was created for us by Michael DeForge and the News from the Fronts section brings us reflections on Taiwan (Szu-Han Ho & Meng-Yao Chuang), Cameroon (Ethel-Ruth Tawe), the Ainu (Kanako Uzawa) and Fusako Shigenobu’s political legacy, a few weeks before her release from prison in Japan (May Shigenobu).

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