The Funambulist #41 – Decentering the U.S. Léopold Lambert (Ed.). The Funambulist

Posted in critique, editions, magazines, politic, politics, writing on May 30th, 2022
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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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Giselle Salon in Marseille | 18 & 19 December | 12-8PM

Posted in events, fairs on December 17th, 2021
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Motto giselle salon

Dear friends,

We are very excited to participate to the very first edition of Giselle Salon in Marseille!

Giselle’s Books Library
28 Rue de Convalescents
Marseille

Saturday 18th and Sunday 19th of December
from 12 to 8pm

If you happen to be in Marseille please don’t lose the opportunity to partecipate to the event too! It will be an occasion to discover various practices, each representing their own approach to knowledge transmission through publishing and distribution.

Drawing conclusions on the book fair format, Giselle Salon seeks to engage with both the public and the guest participants on a more intimate scale. During Giselle Salon, all the books will be for sale and all the proceeds will go towards their organizations.

Looking forward to see you there!

*

Participants:

Apogee Graphics (Los Angeles, USA) 
Apogee Graphics is a design and publishing company founded by artists Laura Owens and Asha Schechter. From their office in the yellow tower of the Westin Bonaventure hotel in downtown Los Angeles they design material and virtual objects with writers, artists, chefs, organizers and others. Apogee approaches each project as content driven design.

BHKM (New York, USA – Hong Kong, HK)
BHKM is a conceptual publishing house run by Ho King Man.
“Outside my windows, there is a four-unlikeness: unlike loneliness, unlike crowdedness, unlike nostalgia, unlike to-be-ness, they are perhaps now-beings, or refer to the colored mirror in hearts, my imaginations.
Inside everyone, have been hidden: unaware, fermented substances. Everyone fails to know, only by every little bit, to touch, to feel.”

Circadian (Berlin, DE)
Circadian is a non-profit publishing house that call its readers to action through handbooks, poetical protocols, manuals, games, experiments and performances. It was founded in Berlin by Diego Agulló and Dmitry Paranyushkin.

Gufo with HOOT (Marseille, FR)
HOOT is a printed conversation, a transcribed verbal relationship with an art worker, a collective around the notion of work as activity, method, environment, field, symbol and necessity. Each month, between the 1st and the 31st, whether it is a Wednesday or a Sunday, HOOT offers to its readers a discussion that we hope will be passionate and open. Each issue will be transcribed according to the language used and shared in the conversation.

Isolarii (Alicudi, IT)
ISOLARII is a series of books by the global avant-garde to provide orientation and meaning in a deteriorating world. A new work is released every two months via subscription and mailed to a community of readers in 32 countries. ISOLARII takes its name from the Renaissance genre of ‘island books,’ which proposed that poems, stories, letters, and illustrations could be singular islands of thought, together forming an archipelago.

Motto (Berlin, DE)
Motto Distribution partners with a wide range of institutions with the aim of contextualising, enriching and diagraming art environments through the means of printed formats. Bridging international distribution, exhibitions and publishing, Motto continues to generate models and experimentation of circulation for visual and textual materials in the context of contemporary art. Recent developments are trying to focus on finding viable solutions to circulate books outside of identified distribution channels. Swaps with other independent stores enable books to be traded cover against cover price within a system that allows their collaborators to transform their books into currency.

Really Simple Syndication Press (Copenhagen, DK)
Really Simple Syndication Press focuses on publishing artistic and curatorial research as a project or part of an extended practice, by both emerging artists and curators and their established counterparts. The press is about developing new readerships in this post-social networked world through a ‘syndication’ model that makes room to support peers in the arts and publishing. To this end, it looks to represent fresh new literature, which reflects the research interests of writers, curators, and artists who are broadening the aesthetic, historical, political, and artistic concerns of our new century. The various active voices invited by RSS into its syndication model will find a new culture of intellectual hospitality that critically fosters their participation into the future.

The Funambulist (Paris, FR)
The Funambulist is a platform that engages with the politics of space and bodies. Their hope is to provide a useful platform where activist/academic/practitioner voices can meet and build solidarities across geographical scales. Through essays, interviews, artworks, and design projects, they assemble an ongoing archive for anticolonial, antiracist, queer, and feminist struggles. The print and online magazine is published every two months and operates in parallel with an open-access podcast and a blog.

Wendy’s Subway (Bushwick, Brooklyn, USA)
Wendy’s Subway is a reading room, writing space, and independent publisher in Bushwick, Brooklyn. They support emerging artists and writers in making experimental, urgent work and create alternative modes for learning and thinking in community. Wendy’s Subway is dedicated to encouraging creative, critical, and discursive engagement with arts and literature. Their interdisciplinary program includes free readings, talks, performances, and reading groups, as well as sliding-scale writing workshops and intensives. The non-circulating library holds a collection of over 3,000 titles, ranging from poetry and fiction, to criticism and art books.

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The Funambulist #36 (July-Aug. 2021). Léopold Lambert (Ed.). The Funambulist

Posted in art, magazines, politics, writing on August 21st, 2021
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They Have Clocks, We Have Time

An issue to challenge the colonial standardization of time, its measurement, its retrospective reading as “history,” its practice, its memorial production in U.S. sundown towns, Ireland & Palestine, Warsaw & Paris, the Indian Subcontinent, the Horn of Africa, the Sahara, in dictatorial and bordering regimes, and more.

Welcome to the 36th issue of The Funambulist. With it, we conclude our sixth year of publishing, thanks to the continuous support of our subscribers! They Have Clocks, We Have Time is an issue to challenge the colonial standardization of time, its measurement, its retrospective reading as “history” (WAI Architecture Think Tank), its practice, its memorial production, and its representation (Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye) in U.S. sundown towns (Rasheedah Phillips), Ireland & Palestine (Emily Jacir), Warsaw & Paris (Michael Rothberg), the Indian Subcontinent (Syma Tariq), the Horn of Africa (Nasra Abdullahi & Miriam Hillawi Abraham), the Sahara (Meryem-Bahia Arfaoui), in dictatorial and bordering regimes (Shahram Khosravi), and more. “They Have Clocks, We Have Time” is an expression we heard a few times in Kanaky, where the cyclicity of the clocks may reinsure the colonial order, but its end is only… a matter of time.

The issue’s cover is an artwork by Black Quantum Futurism.

The News from the Fronts section includes a text on the Colombian uprising (Edna Martinez), a reflection on solidarity with Palestine (Sophia Azeb), as well as a presentation of the artistic project National Museum of Eelam (Jeyavishni Francis Jeyaratnam & Simon-Pierre Coftier). The issue also includes a short fiction by Shahram Khosravi.

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