Edited by Miya Yoshida in collaboration with Christiane M-Schwarz & Kerstin Flasche with special
contributions by Hongjohn Lin, Marucia Bjørnerud, Jimmie Durham & Akio Suzuki. 

How can we reserve time for imagination in the age of digital culture? The publication, Listening to the Stones/ Den Steinen zuhören deals with the contemporary ecology with a metaphor of stones in multi-disciplines. The book, which exists both in a printed and a digital version, consists of images, sounds, silence, and text in three chapters: 1) Time, Planet, Technology, 2) Territory and Politics 3) Body and Performativity. 

It presents two newly commissioned theoretical texts by Hongjohn Lin, art theorist, Prof. Taipei National University of the Arts and Marucia Bjørnerud, geoscientist, Prof. Lawrence University, two special text contributions by Jimmie Durham &

and twenty-two art works from Europe and the Southeast Asia.

The book includes the access to different sound files that excerpt from art works. This invites the reader to initiate the act of listening and attempts to open up an imaginative time-space that s/he can form and reform through their own imaginative power. Utilising “stone” as a pivotal point, the book addresses the significance of aesthetics and politics of time and imaginary in the age of digital culture. 

The publication is based on the synonymous title of the exhibition that held at the Kunsthaus Dresden from Nov. 20, 2021-March 6, 2022, curated by Miya Yoshida in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Dresden (Christiane Mennicke Schwarz & Kerstin Flasche).

Order here

Dear friends,

We are happy to invite you to Cults and Culture on Thursday, July 13th from 7:00 PM, a talk by Alex Head in which the author will discuss his book Ricochet – Cultural Epigenetics and the Philosophy of Change (Ljå Forlag, Oslo, 2021).

Reflecting on discoveries and debates that have occurred in the two years since its publication, artist Alex Head will read from current works in progress to highlight specific aspects within his ambitious book 
Ricochet to discuss the architecture of power.

It is now well documented that cults have been used to disseminate disinformation. For example the extremist cults of MAGA, The Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who’s recruitment pipeline has been funded by Big Oil and crypto libertarians in an attempt to overthrow the United States and 
crash their and the world’s economy.

But what about the arts more widely, is there a form of culture that is transparent about its ideology, particularly in today’s hyper-accelerate media vortex? Are all cultural institutions not also in some way cultish? The cult of patriarchy being just one obvious example that transcends both religious and cultural institutions.

Focussing on specific evidence of how cults have been used to spread disinformation and other historical data the artist will discuss the central motif to his work Ricochet, – the Sacred Date Palm Tree – as a expression of the anti-rhizome. Are we, the unwitting public being continuously gaslit by Sacred Date Palm tree’s in the form of neoclassical architecture? And if so, what can we do to review and 
refocus personal and political objectives as users navigate the web architecture of the app?

Join us at Motto Berlin on Thursday, 13th of July for an insightful talk where we will explore the profound themes of Ricochet and run across topics like January 6th, Classical Architecture, White Supremacy, BND Building Berlin, Mental Health, Libertarianism, Bitcoin, Gold Standard, Going Offline, Art, Publishing, Design, Cultural Epigenetics, Memory, Witnessing and Social Media.

–

Alex Head

Ljå Forlag

Dear Friends,

We are happy you invite you to an open-air summer evening with lectures, readings, and a music performance to launch our newest Norient Book Politics of Curatorship on June 29 at Motto Books Berlin from 19:00 onwards.

In essays, academic texts, photo essays, poems, and short comments by 32 writers, artists, journalists, and scholars from all over the world, this volume attempts to encourage different approaches to increase diversity and equality in curatorship within the cultural industry.  

For our Berlin release party, we have invited the Berlin-based curator and book contributor Andrea Goetzke & the activist and DJ Ari Robey-Lawrence for a panel discussion, the musician Tatiana Heuman aka Qeei to play an exclusive music performance, and the sound artist Lendl Barcelos and Norient founder Thomas Burkhalter (both contributors) for remote readings in the lovely courtyard of Motto Books Berlin. Moderated by Carla J. Maier and Philipp Rhensius.

Expect an engaging evening with critical questions, challenging sounds and refreshing drinks. Co-moderated by Norient Books editor and Sound Studies researcher Carla J. Maier and Norient editor and writer/musician Philipp Rhensius.

Log 57 – Black is . . . an’ Black ain’t . . .
Anyone Corporation,

USA, 
Architecture, 
Magazine, 
“Calls for more Blackness in architecture schools can be simplistic,” writes architect Darell Wayne Fields, guest editor of Log 57. Well-meaning equity and inclusion programs often simply “associate the mere presence of Black bodies with institutional change.” In Log 57, a 208-page thematic issue titled Black is . . . an’ Black ain’t . . ., 29 authors explore the complexities of Blackness as it relates to aesthetics and architectural pedagogy. As Fields notes, “In calling for more Blackness, I, for one, am calling for more Black methodology. An inherent characteristic of [which] is a measurement of difference.”
To that end, Log 57 gathers essays and reflections on architectural pedagogies, both in academia and in practice, by Sean Canty, Michelle JaJa Chang, Ajay Manthripragada, and Mónica Ponce de León, among others. Projects by young designers for whom methodological concepts of Black Signification and bricolage are central are presented in a four-color section, and built works and a preservation effort channel difference as a generative force in real-world communities. “This work demonstrates what is possible when methodological change is real,” writes Fields. “Real change, like Blackness, makes us nervous. Black difference, however, is revolutionary.”

Contents

Chelsea Jno Baptiste, Savannah Cheung & Sahil Mohan, “VERSatile Method”

Tamara Birghoffer, “House for a House”

Kenneth Brabham Jr., “A Room for Jacob Lawrence”

Alex Cabana, “Fuller’s Spine”

Barrington Calvert, “Speakeasy for the Revolution”

Barrington Calvert & Nick Meehan, “Preservation Operations: A Guided Tour of American Legion Post 218”

Sean Canty, “All the Things You Are: Latency as an Aesthetic Practice”

Brian Cavanaugh & Darell Wayne Fields, “University of Oregon Black Cultural Center”

Michelle JaJa Chang, “Shadows and Other Things”

Eunice Chung, “Bigness and Blackness”

Matt Conway, “Drunk Datums”

Melinda Denn, “A House for Rosie Lee Tompkins”

Nitzan Farfel, “A House Is a Brothel”

Darell Wayne Fields, “Prologue to a Black Pedagogy”

Rachel Ghindea, “House for the Dead”

Mitzy González, “Nepantla: An Altar for Gloria E. Anzaldúa”

Bernardo Guerra Jr., “Asylum–Proximity”

Kaleb Houston & Hannah Terry, “Black Architecture 101”

Reese Lewis, “The Speculative Devaluation of 270 Park Avenue”

Ajay Manthripragada, “A Double Untying”

Sydney Rose Maubert, “the gate: the erotics of Black worship”

Nick Meehan, “House for No One”

Christina Moushoul, “A House for Sitcoms”

Rudabeh Pakravan, “Building Fronts”

Mónica Ponce de León, “Modest Ambitions”

Elizabeth Grace Siqueira, “House for Friars”

Eunice Takahaye Slanwa, “A House for Mary and Ayak”

Order here

Repertoire zeigt eine Sammlung von Zeichnungen und Fotografien gewöhnlicher Situationen und Elemente der gebauten Umwelt und mag zur selbstverständlichen Erweiterung des entwerferischen Repertoires anregen.

– 

“Repertoire” shows a collection of drawings and photographs of common situations and elements of the built environment and may inspire the natural expansion of the design repertoire.

Repertoire 1 – GESTALT Häuser / FORM Houses
Repertoire 2 – STRUKTUR Oberflächen / STRUCTURE Surfaces
Repertoire 3 – STANDARD Badezimmer / STANDARD Bathrooms
Repertoire 4 – AUSSTATTUNG Mobiliar / EQUIPMENT Furniture
Repertoire 5 – ÜBERGANG Treppen / TRANSITION Stairs
Repertoire 6 – SITUATION Konstellationen / SITUATION Constellations

“Oda Pälmke’s way of working is characterized by the methodology of appropriation, the appropriation of found material. It is a strategy that allows a fruitful examination of the real. Casual and trivial, found and invented develop new levels of meaning through their specific way of working through. If everything can once again become “starting material for transformations”, everything can again become “raw material for productions”, says Peter Sloterdijk, there is no creative creation ex nihilo and the modern phantasm of tabula rasa is overcome. The creative process then consists in finding an attitude towards what has been found and developing a story from it. ”(Anh-Linh Ngo, publisher ARCH +)

Order here

‘Critical Designers’ produced by an increasing number of design schools are prompted to address social, political and environmental issues through their practices. Yet, who can afford to continue such effort after graduation?

In a dynamic style holding multiple voices, “Who Can Afford To Be Critical?” discusses the limits that affordability, class and labour impose upon the educational promise of holding a ‘critical’ practice. Why do we tend to ignore the material and socioeconomic constraints that bind us as designers, claiming instead that we can be powerful agents of change? In fact, where does our agency lie?

Instead of focusing on the dream of ethical work under capitalism, could we, instead, focus first on designers’ own working conditions, targeting them as one immediate site for collective action? And can we engage politically with the world not necessarily as designers, but as workers, as activists, as citizens?

With contributions by Silvio Lorusso, J. Dakota Brown, Marianela D’Aprile, Evening Class, Somnath Batt, Danielle Aubert, Jack Henrie Fisher, Alan Smart, Greg Mihalko and DAE students 2021/2022.

Order here

“I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad” is an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of a performance artist who lands a part-time job as an Embedded Artistic Researcher in an art institution. Invested in queer theory and institutional critique, she sets out to perform the artist “differently” through a process of negation and passivity, inadvertently causing her relationship with the institution’s curator to grow increasingly speculative and paranoid. Louwerens’ labor as tour guide, security guard, artist, hostess and researcher at different institutions begins to overlap and blend under the name of “performance.” “I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad” is a fragmented story of paranoid and reparative reading, script and utterance, exposure and vulnerability.

Pia Louwerens is a performance artist and researcher from the Netherlands, living in Brussels. Her research revolves around the becoming of the artistic subject, the I who writes, speaks and makes, in relation to the (institutional) context. From 2019 – 2020 Louwerens was working as embedded artistic researcher at a big research project, for which she was embedded in an art institution. Through this research she attempted to perform or practice the artist, and thereby the institution, differently. Her work usually takes the shape of a performance in which she speaks, switching between registers of the actual, the possible, the professional and the anxious artist.

Order here

The book includes the first publication of Gidal’s text from 1978, with a new introduction. Gidal in this dense theoretical essay deals with the limits of language and representation in the practice of experimental filmmaking and writing. Considered as one of the most influential experimental filmmakers, Gidal’s lost text “The Author as Producer of Nothing”, will give a new insight into the theoretical and political context to the artistic film practices. Afterword by Sezgin Boynik. Design by Ott Kagovere.

Order here

PERFORMANCE ART FROM ROMANIA AND MOLDOVA

Interviews with: Iulia Popovici & Raluca Voinea, Dan Perjovschi, Szilard Miklos, Matei Bejenaru, Pavel Braila, Farid Fairuz, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Nicoleta Esinencu, Alexandra Pirici, Veda Popovici, Candidatura la Presedintie, Paul Dunca, Ioana Paun, Simona Dumitriu & Ramona Dima, Florin Flueras & Alina Popa.

„The diversity of performance art forms in Romania and the Republic of Moldova speaks about distinct motivations, personal and artistic, in the opinion for this language, but also about the mode in which an art gets to build its own definitions, in specific contexts. There are these definitions that we are searching, through the dialogues with artists, in the present book.”
(Iulia Popovici)

„These days we don’t find each other so much in the street; we don’t find ourselves in the political or aesthetical programme of the recent protests or we simply wait that they generate other metaphors and other concepts, for a new generation of artists (and citizens).”
(Raluca Voinea)

Order here

A rich collection of essays tracing the relationship between art and sound.

In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping, the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices in themselves leads music into a thrilling new territory: stretched time, wilderness, video monitors, singing sculptures, weather, meditations, vibration and the interior resonance of objects, interspecies communications, instructional texts, silent actions, and performance art.

Toop sought to document the originality and unfamiliarity of this work from his perspective as a practitioner and writer. The challenge was to do so without being drawn back into the domain of music while still acknowledging the vitality and hybridity of twentieth-century musics as they moved toward art galleries, museums, and site-specificity. Toop focused on practitioners, whose stories are as compelling as the theoretical and abstract implications of their works.

Inflamed Invisible collects more than four decades of David Toop’s essays, reviews, interviews, and experimental texts, drawing us into the company of artists and their concerns, not forgetting the quieter, unsung voices. The volume is an offering, an exploration of strata of sound that are the crossing points of sensory, intellectual, and philosophical preoccupations, layers through which objects, thoughts and air itself come alive as the inflamed invisible.

Order here