Entangled – Technology and the Transformation of Performance

A short text and image piece by artist Kira O'Reilly, accompanied by a photo of O'Reilly's "Menopause Gym."

In a cyclical feat of endurance and precision, Blood Show is a raw, euphoric choreography between 3 figures and 75 litres of fake blood. A call to action to put what’s inside on the outside and defend against a violent gaze, Blood Show questions rebirth and how we all carry our ghosts with us.

Making performance works for four decades, British experimental theatre collective Forced Entertainment has become globally renowned for its singular aesthetic and audacious events, melding narrative fragments with strange acts, broken poetry, audience provocations, and comcial failure. With its low-fi theatre, intimate text-based works, and epic durational spectacles, the group has profoundly influenced the international performance scene, evoking and testing the politics of contemporary life.

Based on The Search for Power lecture-performance, this book contains the performance script, designed archival documents, and reflections by the collaborating artist and historian.

Sabrina Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals–where fat bodies were once praised–showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority.
Fearing the Black Body argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. An important and original work, it reveals that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

Accompanying a major exhibition opening in spring 2017, this stunning volume offers an unprecedented glimpse across five centuries of historic costume and glamorous fashions worn by members of the Cavendish family, from the eighteenth-century fashion leader Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, to the twenty-first-century supermodel Stella Tennant.

Chatsworth has been home to the Cavendish family and the hereditary dukes of Devonshire since the original Elizabethan house was built on the site purchased by Sir William Cavendish in 1549. A famous historic house in England, Chatsworth is renowned as much for its fashionable history as its majestic dresses and tiaras, its magnificent lace and splendid uniforms as its unrivalled collection of art, its palatial gardens, and its celebrated family dynasty. House Style: Five Centuries of Fashion at Chatsworth takes the reader through images of show-stopping ensembles by the most celebrated designers of the day, from the Victorian era’s Jean Philippe Worth to Alexander McQueen, and also features historic examples of ceremonial, military, court costume, fancy dress, and estate liveries, as well as clothing worn by members of the family to ride, hunt, shoot, and fish. New images of the rare surviving garments and gorgeous contemporary photographs are accompanied by new essays from leading historians and fashion critics. An exclusive invitation into the glamorous world of Chatsworth, this book is a true collectible for Anglophiles, fashion-history aficionados, and those fascinated by aristocratic style.

This book is in Spanish.

Spanish title: GAM: Diez años de transformación cultural

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.

The trilogy of novels by Samuel Beckett is his best known work outside the theatre, dating from the same period as Waiting for Godot, and as such is central to the main body of his work. This new edition has been corrected from the errors that appeared in some previous editions. Many people believe it to be the most important volume of prose in the English language after Joyce’s Ulysses, although written originally in French, a language that the author adopted to escape from the richness of Irish speech rhythms.

Most critics today consider the trilogy to be Beckett’s major achievement, more controlled than the brilliant early work, more easily readable than the complex How It Is and the later plays and texts. Malloy has two parts, the parallel narratives of the old Molloy, passing time by telling himself stories and remembering his past journeys, and of the waspish Moran, a private detective sent to find him, whose deterioration during his quest bears a strange similarity to Molloy’s. Malone Dies appears to be a continuation of Molloy’s narrative, only this time the speaker knows that the end is almost at hand. The additional poignancy of the stories he tells himself is largely related to the sense of time running our, and the prose seems heightened from the earlier book. In the third novel The Unnamable, the narrator, again under a different name or names, is aware of the approaching silence and tries to keep it at bay with thoughts, reveries, stories and inventions. The prose undergoes a complete change as we find ourselves listening to the sounds of panic, written in a punctuation of the human breath that the narrator has ever greater difficulty in drawing into his lungs, while the mind races giddily ever faster. The end is terrifying, bu t finishes, strangely, on a note of hope. Molloy has been translated by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author, the rest of the trilogy by Mr Beckett himself.

In this pocket publication Flanders Arts Institute examines new ways of working internationally in the arts. Joris Janssens collects insights and light bulb moments from the research & development trajectory (Re)framing the International.

Still, this house is better than me. It’s going to be torn down and each piece scattered, but it will become something else. The wood will become desks, tables… Now it’s time to empty this house. – Snow in March

If you want to find yourself, there is only one way. Kill anyone who reminds you of you even if just a little. Someone who reminds you of your past, present, and future, all of them are your enemies! They will confuse you, ruin you, take away your freedom, estrange you from this world, and in the end, bury you alive. – The Master Has Come

The baby is my scar. A symbol of my hopeless future. But I don’t consider my scar or my bleak future a bad thing. I don’t regret anything. Though I chose a different path, at least I chose it. It was my choice. I don’t care how things turn out. Even if the end of that destructive path is death, I’ll accept it. Because I chose it. – Red Bus