Dingo – A Treatment Towards a New Communionism

Is violent self-defense ethical? In the history of colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, there has long been a dividing line between bodies “worthy of defending” and those who who have been disarmed and rendered defenseless. That those subject to the most violence-the enslaved, the colonized, the oppressed-have been forcibly made defenseless raises, for any movement of liberation, a question: Can violence be used in the interests of self-defense?

Philosopher Elsa Dorlin looks across the global history of the left to trace the politics, philosophy, and ethics of self-defense. With a historical gaze that captures slave revolts, British suffragists’ training in jujitsu, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the Black Panther Party, queer neighborhood patrols, and Black Lives Matter, Dorlin discovers a “martial ethics of the self”: a practice in which violent self-defense is the only means for the oppressed to ensure survival and to build a livable future.

Translated from the French by Kieran Aarons.

In this short book, the leading German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen puts forward a fresh and original account of pop music. He argues that pop music is not so much a form of music as a constellation of different media channels, social spaces and behavioural systems, of which music is only a part. Its own logic of attraction is based less on compositions and the expression of subjectivity and more on indexicality, real or psuedo-involunatary effects as recorded by sound technologies, and on studio discipline and staging, and hence on performance.

By elaborating his innovative account of pop music as a constellation, Diederichsen develops a theory that distinguishes itself from sociology, cultural studies, media studies and ethnography, while at the same time drawing on and encompassing them all.

Performance making is a mode of enquiring about culture and a strategy to respond to societal emergencies. Collective acts of thought and expression are an existential urgency as they broaden our understanding of who we are. As the world grappled with lockdowns, fear has permeated our very beings. Notes from Isolation embodies an investigative journey wherein Andrea Pagnes —who, with Verena Stenke, forms the artist duo VestAndPage— explores the essence of existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then shares his notes in distant encounters with artists, poets and philosophers friends who navigate the non-linear realms: Marilyn Arsem, Lois Keidan, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Franko B, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stelarc, Timothy Morton, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, and eventually Ron Athey revisiting a conversation they had a while ago. At last, performance matters: politics and science to dissect, recurring patterns of suffering and pain to surpass, religion, colonialism, and gender fluidity found a voice within the societal crises that COVID-19 accentuated. Multiple remote visions and divergent creative thinking are pooled to inspect reality while caring for humanity, as to perhaps find a way out.

‘They close the glass door behind me and say I cannot leave this area. They gave me a blue protective mask and said I must wear it whenever I exit the room or someone enters it. The mask I have to wear closes my mouth but not my eyes. The border is a transparent glass door. We can look to the other side but not cross over. I let go a quiet steeping in being. Time makes me the process.’ — Verena Stenke.

Captured during a weekend-long workshop held in Glasgow as part of DIY16.

Part of the Library of Performing Rights (P3041)

Zine of the project documenting and tracing the Ambedkarite movement in the 1970s.

. An introduction to performance in the territory of art: far from proposing a linear history, the volume offers a series of thematic and transversal approaches to performance.

In Spanish.

15 writers explore the experimental, interdisciplinary and radically transgressive field of contemporary live art in South Africa.

Part of the Library of Performing Rights (P3041).

Reaffirms the central position of the body in various artistic practices through in-depth conversations with choreographers, composers, visual artists, hip hop artists, dramaturges, a light designer and a puppeteer.

The 7th issue of the newspaper is the first one to focus on a region; it commits to reconsidering Americas colonial stories and their marks on its present global condition. In multiple languages.

Part of the Library of Performing Rights (P3041)

A comprehensive study of queer identities and communities across Asia, re-envisioning the queer through Asian perspectives.

Part of Library of Performing Rights (P3041).

How do artists respond to the question of collective survival in the face of crisis? Can writing articulate, subvert and test the ever-present question of the future in modes that are nonlinear, affective and even choreographic? What are our hopes, fears and desires?

Part of Library of Performing Rights (P3041).

Catalogue which accompanies  films exploring the social, political and psychological dimensions of women's experience in contemporary Islamic societies.

Part of Library of Performing Rights (P3041)