Eva and Franco Mattes

“When Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil invited Célio Turino to develop a programme to democratise access to culture, no one could have imagined the extraordinary initiatives that today cross Brazil from one extreme to the other: from semi-arid sertão to the sea, from Amazônia to the fertile lowlands of the South. The Ponto de Cultura programme has provided instruments for the multiple voices of a diverse nation to find expression in music, literature, petry… Turino’s book is a map of living Brazilian Popular Culture, disseminated to every corner of a nation that is finally seeking to be a country for everyone.” -Emir Sader

Documents the work of fourteen performance artists who marked the personal and political resonances of the new Millennium in a series of site-specific actions. Contrasting with the epic, populist and homogenising nature of the official celebrations, these works focused on forgotten and ephemeral experiences, enacting small but significant interventions in the public sphere.

“A love letter to artistic research, Seita’s writing celebrates the desire, disorientation, and discovery to be found in feminist practices of reading. A potent reminder of generative passin thatwe can only wish motivated all critical inquiry.” -Gordon Hall

Yoko Ono is an artist who has made an indelible mark on contemporary culture and political activism through her radical and innovative practice. This remarkable and essential publication, developed n collaboration with Yoko Ono and her studio, traces in full the evolution of an artist whose visionary spirit has transcended boundaries and challenged conventions. In Music of the Mind, explore the world of Yoko Ono and discover the profound impact of her art on the collective consciousness of our time.

Before we begin to practice self-design, we find ourselves already designed by the gaze of others. That is why the practice of self-design mostly takes a critical and confrontational turn. We want to bring others to see us in the way we want to be seen – not only during our earthly life but also after our death. This is a complicated struggle, and the aim of this book is to describe and analyze it.

This book proposes a provocative interpretation of the relationship between the normative imagination defined as a cognitive mode characteristic of the era of affective capitalism. Porta analyzes gender, fashion, artistic creation, and surveillance from the perspective of a regulatory drive, a continuously renovated and imperative push for normalcy that now comes not from the state or mass media, but from citizens themselves. These, united in a spontaneous popular court, armed with smartphones, and driven by a juridical compulsion, become the axes of societies of control. In this way, the distinctive pathology of our times gives rise to a globalized game: normopathy for all.

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.

This Workbook is the result of RESHAPE – REflect, SHAre, Practice, Experiment, a bottom-up, collaborative research and development project that brought together artists, art workers, and organisations from Europe and the southern Mediterranean to create alternative ways of working towards a fairer arts ecosystem. The project was a response to the challenges of the art sector, infusing its practices with fairness, solidarity, and sustainability and aligning them with with society and its evolutions. The authors – including artists, scholars, and critical thinkers – analyse and contextualise current challenges, thus outlining the spirit of our times that informs and inspires the prototypes.

What position does America occupy in the recent history of western philosophy?

At a time when the syntagm “America” has come to crystallize a certain understanding of the world order, interrogating the place that it occupies in our intellectual and haunted tradition is also a way to engage critically with the violence attached to it. America’s self-understanding involves violence, but this violence may well be different from what we imagined.

This book is a philosophical essay on the sun. It draws on Georges Bataille’s theories of the solar economy and solar violence and demonstrates their relevance to a world affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.

Taking a step from solar economy to solar politics, Timofeeva locates the grounds for it in solidarity with nature, treated neither as a master nor as a slave, but as a comrade.

The book will appeal to students, academics, artists, and other readers interested in the philosophy of nature, ecology, social and political theory, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and the humanities generally.

From the special edition of Maska on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Contemporary Dance Association Slovenia. In Slovenian and English.

Art Review Issue 26  / October 2008

pg. 74-81

Feature on Elmgreen & Dragset : Inconvenient Truths