Women Between Buildings focuses on Wermers’ practice of the past 15 years, and includes essays by Sabeth Buchmann, David Bussel and Kerstin Stakemeier. Designed by Daly & Lyon, published by Kunstverein in Hamburg, Compagnia and Motto Books.

Women Between Buildings was published in conjunction with Wermer’s solo exhibition at Kunstverein in Hamburg.

Harvard Design Magazine 45 – Into the Woods | Spring/summer 2018

To go “into the woods” is to enter both nightmare and wonderment, chaos and serenity. The woods are the threatening realm of wolves and witches, yet also a space of peace and introspection. They confound and illuminate, disorient and clarify, endanger and protect. The woods are where we “come to our senses,” and where we embrace our wilder selves. They are a space of complex life forms and ecological destruction; of growth and decay; of fantasy and ritual; of secrets and control; of hiding and? the hidden.

The woods are often framed as a nonurban place; an entity separate from, and opposed to, the city—even the world; an eternal refuge that can smoothly be entered and exited, gone into and back out of. But how much of our woods still remains to go into—and on what terms?

As designers, we encounter the woods as building site, as obstacle, and as resource—territory to be cleared, but also to be preserved, cultivated, tamed, or simulated. Wood itself—along with its products like lumber, wood pulp, silvichemicals, and charcoal—fuel the building industry and feed architecture. In a period of accelerated climate change, the planet’s woods are disappearing, burning up, threatening and threatened by human existence. How can we holistically address the woods and its ecosystems, and the life and life-giving power they contain?

This issue of Harvard Design Magazine treks into the woods to come to terms with its precarious status as habitat and resource, and to challenge assumptions about wood as material. We won’t be “out of the woods”—this looping conundrum—any time soon, even if the woods as we once knew it, and might still imagine it, has ceased to exist. At the intersection of wilderness, urbanization, and myth, “Into the Woods” embraces contradiction, challenges destruction, and revisits our roots, biological and architectural alike.

“Into the Woods” combines contributions by noted critics and theorists including Milica Topalovic, Lawrence Buell, T. J. Demos, Rosetta Elkin, Jack Halberstam, and Maria Tatar; practitioners Dogma, Alexander Brodsky, Dilip Da Cunha, Eelco Hooftman, and Paulo Tavares; as well as artists Tang Chang, Maria Thereza Alves, Janet Cardiff, and Bas Princen; anthropologists Anna Tsing and Eduardo Kohn; and philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

Harvard Design Magazine 45 is edited by Jennifer Sigler and Leah Whitman-Salkin, and published by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD).

For those who would seek to influence others, the dissemination of ideas is
paramount. Similarly, for those holding ambition to secrete knowledge for reasons of
authority, or to protect the fruits of intellectual labour for reasons of profit or ethical
concern, distribution is key. Certainly before, but more importantly since the
Gutenberg Bible, the predicament of the power of knowledge has lain not with its
generation but with the control of its dispersion.

This new volume in the critically acclaimed Occasional Table series of books
published by Open Editions focuses attention on the act of distribution as a subject
for serious creative consideration and one of great social and economic importance.
Contributors from a variety of backgrounds paint a big picture that embraces the
actions of the individual alongside the workings of global markets. From the
attention-seeking impulse of the poseur, to the democratisation of art and knowledge
in the form of books, pop music, digital networks, self-organised libraries, and the
question of what can be known, and by whom, the urge to disseminate is explored
here as an elemental phenomenon of our time.

Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) remains one of the most important landscape architects in the history of the field. His distinctive and widely acclaimed work has been featured and referenced in numerous sources, yet few of Burle Marx’s own words have been published.

This collection of a dozen of Burle Marx’s lectures, most of which have never before been available in English, fills that void. Delivered on international speaking tours, they address topics such as Concepts in Landscape Composition, Gardens and Ecology and The Problem of Garden Lighting. Their publication sheds light on Burle Marx’s distinctive ethic and aesthetic of landscape, as “the real art in living.”

“By their very nature secret practices, being secret, are generally hard to comment on. Still, we can imagine that the institution of secret marriage must be at least as old as that of the public one, possibly older, in fact, if one is to imagine the birth of ‘coupledom’ as taking place between two people alone under the cover of night. Secret marriage today remains an incalculable part of the institution – and perhaps one of its most romantic forms. […]

As though to compensate, we celebrate the secret ceremony – gay, straight or non-binary – not with equal but greater fervour. Just as a stolen glance is more arousing, a forbidden tryst more urgent, so too is the secret marriage more alive, more keen. Marry in secret in solidarity, in lust, out of an exhaustive need. Marry in secret and do with the heart what the gun cannot: melt the frozen conflicts, be they in Abkhazia or in Glendale.”

Excerpt from the publication

Offset print, 26 × 20 cm, 16 pages, stitched binding, mimeograph print
Edition of 35

support (at) mottodistribution.com

Nicole Wermers Women Between Buildings
Book Launch 26.04.2018
7-10 PM

Please join us on the 26th of April for the launch of Nicole Wermers’ new monograph, Women Between Buildings, published to coincide with her solo exhibition at Kunstverein in Hamburg.

The publication focuses on Wermers’ practice of the past 15 years, and includes essays by Sabeth Buchmann, David Bussel and Kerstin Stakemeier. Designed by Daly & Lyon, published by Compagnia, Motto Books and Kunstverein in Hamburg.

Eigenmischung, a new installation by Nicole Wermers for the Motto vitrines, will be presented on the same evening.

A libretto of daily polemics, reflections, and musings on the very defeatist approach to time so dear to S&T, A Thirteenth Month Against Time runs thirty-two days (or pages) in length and acts as an addendum to one’s everyday calendar or diary.

2008, mimeograph print, offset print, hand-pasted colour stickers, stitched binding, in black case with white embossed foil

Edition of 100, numbered

support (at) mottodistribution.com

Bilingual edition of 50 (Portuguese and English)

Offeset digital print Munken Pure paper.

Interview series by Ana João Romana in 29 chapters.
Artists, editors, librarians, collectors, and curators.

Esta conversa acompanha a mostra bibliográfica com o mesmo título presente na vitrine do átrio e na Biblioteca de Arte.

Com
Ana João Romana, que orienta a conversa com André Cepeda (artista e fundador da Inc. – Livros e Edições de Autor), David Guéniot (Editor – Ghost Editions), Luiza Teixeira de Freitas (curadora e colecionadora), Pedro Barateiro (artista) e Ana Barata (bibliotecária – Biblioteca de Arte e Arquivos Gulbenkian).

Série de entrevistas a intervenientes ligados ao livro de artista (artistas, editores, livreiros, colecionadores, curadores e bibliotecárias), no âmbito do doutoramento de Ana João Romana. Publicar a estória/história do livro de artista em Portugal.