This Is My Body…

Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content.

'co-sensing with RADICAL TENDERNESS is a text Dani d'Emilia and Vanessa Andreotti began to write in 2018, based on thoughts expressed by the collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures [GTDF]. Initially called “An Invitation to Radical Tenderness”, this text has been shape-shifting alongside their artistic-pedagogic collaboration “Engaged Dis-identification”, which attempts to translate post-representational modes of engagement into embodied experiments that reconfigure the connections between reason, affect and relationality.'

Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness is a collaborative text written by Dani d’Emilia and Vanessa Andreotti, based on the work of the collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, of which they are a part. Initially called ‘An Invitation to Radical Tenderness’.

List of works and selected exhibitions from artist 00 Zhang. 

'co-sensing with RADICAL TENDERNESS is a text Dani d'Emilia and Vanessa Andreotti began to write in 2018, based on thoughts expressed by the collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures [GTDF]. Initially called “An Invitation to Radical Tenderness”, this text has been shape-shifting alongside their artistic-pedagogic collaboration “Engaged Dis-identification”, which attempts to translate post-representational modes of engagement into embodied experiments that reconfigure the connections between reason, affect and relationality.'

A live art work and archive book exploring fetish, female eroticism, and symbolic violence through a spatial intervention at a KTV in Chinatown.

Intended to be performed live over the phone, Sam Cottington’s Phone Plays invite readers and audience members alike to engage with a series of unclear relationships and scenarios, invoked and mediated by contemporary communication technology.

"TransMission: Sissy TV" is an exploration of the idea of trans archives. And auto-archive of the artist's body, work, costumes, props, hopes, dreams and memories accumulated over nearly three decades of creating queer work.

Sonia Boyce (b.1962) is a groundbreaking artist whose practice is founded on taking creative risks. Unafraid to play against set expectations about how art should behave, her collaborative interactions between audience and performer enable spontaneous and intimate social encounters, resulting in the creation of work that is simultaneously self-aware, visceral and open-ended.

This book is a much-anticipated introduction to the life and work of this extraordinary artist. Touching on her engagement with the work of other feminist artists and her time as a leading figure in the 1980s Black British Art movement, it contextualizes Boyce’s journey from her early pastel drawings and collages to her pivotal shift to film, sound, and performance art. Highlighting her artistic innovation as she experiments with medium to explore and question culture, identity and the boundaries between the public and private spheres in unexpected ways, it celebrates the visionary practice of a truly uncompromising artist.

The global crisis of our time involves a complex of ecological, economic, technological and migratory challenges that no state is able to control. The result is a provincialisation of our democracies with respect to the new planetary powers confronting humanity. It is from this that our increasingly impotent and rabid politics stems.  Paradoxical as it may seem, it is precisely the decline of the nation-state that is the source of the great nationalist uprising of our time.

We need a new planetary vision that is able to reclaim and liberate our world, starting today and engaging each of us. This is the task of philosophy as much as it is of politics, of theory as it is of activism. Connecting with a new generation taking to the streets across the globe, this book tells the story of the ever-closer union of our world, from the age of empire to the climate crisis, and presents a plea and a roadmap to step beyond the mental and material boundaries of our nations.

This book argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. Unlike denialism and negation, disavowal functions by fully acknowledging what we disavow. Zupancic contends that disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the knowledge of the opposite, is becoming a predominant feature of our social and political life. She also shows how the libidinal economy of disavowal is a key element of capitalist economy.

The concept of fetishistic disavowal already exposes the objectified side of the mechanism of the disavowal, which follows the general formula: I know well, but all the same, the object-fetish allows me to disregard this knowledge. Zupancic adds another twist by showing how, in the prevailing structure of disavowal today, the mere act of declaring that we know becomes itself an object-fetish by which we intercept the reality of that very knowledge. This perverse deployment of knowledge deprives it of any reality.

This structure of disavowal can be found not only in the more extreme and dramatic cases of conspiracy theories and re-emerging magical thinking, but even more so in the supposedly sober continuation of business as usual, combined with the call to adapt to the new reality. To disrupt this social embedding of disavowal, it is not enough to change the way we think: things need to change, and hence the way they think for us.

This book is a sampler of Quarantine’s work since we started in November 1998. Every word and image is from our archive. Some of the material originated with us, the rest was written or spoken with us, the rest was written or spoken by others. The pages may seem disparate, contradictory even; they are fragments of over 20 years, more projects, many voices.

We’ve realised over the years that our work is a form of portraiture. This sampler is a kind of self-portrait of Quarantine.