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.
In Nazi Germany, at least 10.000 physically and mentally disabled children and adolescents, including orphans, misfits, and other ethnic groups were murdered as part of an ideology based on social Darwinism. For the first time in history physicians, nurses, and midwives killed by lethal injection, gas poisoning or starvation. It predated the genocide of European Jewry by approximately two years. A rehearsal for the planners of the final solution. NUMB is a study of the forgotten children of World War II.
French artist duo, Wolfsko, use mediums of expression such as photography, text, drawing, painting and collage. Their work is a long study in the world of unhappy childhood, exploring themes such as love, fear, and survival. Wolfsko currently live and work in Berlin.
A selection of tracks from albums included in Motto’s November 2022 music newsletter, featuring sounds from:
Mads Emil Nielsen Nile Koetting Significant Soil Raed Yassin Muslimgauze MAI MAO Alfred Panou & The Art Ensemble of Chicago Oswaldo Lares Crème de Hassan
We are happy to announce of the arrival of the second printing of Radical Friends, edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, published by Torque Editions, 2022.
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
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 neighborhood 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 protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act, which was designed to strip the Constitution of India of its right to religious equality. This peaceful sit-in continued until the pandemic sent India into lockdown; 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, to 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.
*Every Evening Belongs to Shaheen Bagh
Prarthna Singh is a photographer whose work explores questions of identity and gender, especially as they intersect with the fraught politics of nationalism in contemporary India. Her images reflect on the economic and political trajectory of the country, drawing connections between feminine precariousness and vulnerability on the one hand, and radical acts of strength and solidarity on the other. Her practice negotiates how the two sides are inextricably linked. After completing her BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, Prarthna lived and worked in New York City. Currently she is based in Bombay.
Sameer Kulavoor is a visual artist living and working in Mumbai, India. His work lies at the intersection of art, graphic design and contemporary illustration, and has taken the form of paintings, murals, books, zines, prints and objects. He is interested in why things look and work the way they do; constantly noting and understanding the impact that time, culture, politics and socio-economic conditions have on our visible and invisible surroundings. In this age of visual overload, his work involves filtering, dissecting, documenting and defamiliarising commonly seen subjects through the act of drawing, painting and design – often oscillating between instinctive and conceptual methods of making.
Zeenat Kulavoor is a typographer and graphic designer based in Bombay, India. She works with multiple Indian scripts and specialises in Urdu type, lettering and calligraphy. She believes that the Urdu script has endless creative possibilities and intends to change the perception towards the use of Urdu in India, which currently is widely perceived to be limited to religious usage. Using tongue-in-cheek humour and wit, combined with the use of scale, different mediums and varied print making methods, Zeenat is working towards reinventing possibilities of how the script can be a part of regular day to day life. Apart from her typography work, she is the creative director at Bombay Duck Designs, and runs a design store called Bombay Duck Shop that sells selected books, zines, prints and objects that blur the boundaries between illustration, art and design.
Artist and author Grace Ndiritu in conversation with art critic Pablo Larios
Tuesday 13 September 2022 6.30–8.30pm
Motto Berlin Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof) 10997 Berlin
6.30pm Gather 7.00pm Silent meditation 7.10pm Conversation and readings 7.40pm Silent meditation 7.50pm Conversation and readings 8.15pm Q&A 8.30pm End
*We ask every participant to commit to the entire duration of the event in order to not disrupt the meditation
Grace Ndiritu is a British-Kenyan artist whose artworks are concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world. Her writing has been published in her critical theory book Dissent Without Modification (Bergen Kunsthall, 2021); Documents of Contemporary Art: The Rural (Whitechapel, 2019) and Animal Shelter 4, Semiotext(e).
Pablo Larios is a writer based in Berlin. His work has appeared internationally in various publications, including Mousse, Frieze, 032c, Text zur Kunst, and Kaleidoscope. He is currently an editor-at-large at documenta fifteen.
Being Together: A Manual For Living
Edited by Grace Ndiritu, Pieter Vermeulen Copy editor: Sue Spaid Design: Vrints-Kolsteren
Contributors: Philippe Van Cauteren, Pieter Vermeulen, Grace Ndiritu, Rafaela Lopez, Roberto dell’Orco, Jana Haeckel, Katleen Vermeir & Ronny Heiremans, Nathalie Boobis, Shayla Perreault, Edward Ball, Guadalupe Martinez, Stacy Suy, Ezra Fieremans
Published by KRIEG
Being Together: A Manual For Living falls in the lineage of publications such as the Journal of the Society for Education Through Art, which throughout the 1960s provided British art schools a window into experimental education. By contrast, Grace Ndiritu’s experience in creating radical pedagogies arose from a connected, yet unorthodox system of ‘self education’. In 2012, she decided to spend time living in cities only when necessary. She thus lived in rural, alternative and often spiritual communities, while expanding her research into nomadic lifestyles and training in esoteric studies, which she began after graduating art school. This research led her to visit Thai and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, permaculture communities in New Zealand, forest tree dwellers in Argentina, neo-tribal festivals such as Burning Man in Nevada, a Scottish Hare Krishna ashram, and the Findhorn Spiritual Community in Scotland. Such lifestyles forever transformed her ideas of education and have proven critical for her art, whether conducting teaching experiments with students, peers and the general public; some of whose voices appear in this publication. Ndiritu posits, “What does (art) education mean today?” and specifically, “What does an embodied (art) education mean in a time of pandemics and social unrest?” Being Together: A Manual For Living attempts to answer these complex questions.
MOTTO BERLIN Skalitzer Str. 68, im Hinterhof 10997 Berlin
EVERYTHING LOOKS BETTER WITH LOVE
The protocol for the production of the book EVERYTHING LOOKS BETTER WITH LOVE published at Editions Salon du Salon is simple. There is a certain nonchalance, few gestures. These gestures directly question how a work is produced. The forms produced would have what Tristan Garcia calls an equal ontological dignity.
“We live in this world of things, where a cutting of acacia, a gene, a computer-generated image, a transplantable hand, a musical sample, a trademarked name, or a sexual service are comparable things”. (Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p. 1.)
It is a question of experimenting with a whole system of possible operations carried out with an unfailing form of love for things, gestures and beings.
—Michaël Sellam, Paris
SALON DU SALON is a project dedicated to contemporary art and a publishing house based in Marseille, France. Since December 2013, SALON DU SALON work with artists, authors and curators invited to develop proposals. Forms and development of collaboration are based upon the projects themselves, and have included, residencies, research, performance art, exhibition, publishing, and more.
