Participating in the Wrong Way?

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.

A visual diary zine of the Chines photographer SickGirl’s (@eeriesickgirl) Exile Route between 25 Dec 2023 and 16 Nov 2024.

A collection of poems and drawings self-published by political theatre maker Maya at an important period during their life and inspired much of their later work.

From the artist: This is a neurodivergently true story about neurotransgressive performance (which I call proper performance). It contains some magic green liquid and a bit of an accidental erection.

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.

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 Bolivian scholar and activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is a pre-eminent Latin American intellectual, world renowned for her work in postcolonial and subaltern studies.  She has long maintained that we must acknowledge how colonial structures of domination continue to affect indigenous identities and cultures. Even in contexts where diversity and the value of indigenous cultures have been officially recognized, “internal colonialism” operates as a structure that shapes mental categories and social practices.

This book considers this persistent colonial structure by examining artistic and popular practices of apprehending and resisting it, arguing that in Andean cultures there is a sustained practice of insubordinate image production and use. Combining this visual history with other instances of political resistance, the book offers an alternative narrative to the history of Latin American decolonisation.  This narrative challenges the common conception that mestizaje (race-mixing) and hybridity are liberatory formations, offering instead a new theorisation of the complex racial configurations produced by colonialism and its afterlives.

Given Rivera Cusicanqui’s vital contribution to critical epistemologies, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences and to everyone concerned with the key questions of critical theory today.

What do cinematic “universes,” cloud archiving, and voice cloning have in common? They’re in the business of foreverizing – the process of revitalizing things that have degraded, failed, or disappeared so that they can remain active in the present. To foreverize something is to reanimate it, to enclose and protect it from time and the elements, and to eradicate the feeling of nostalgia that accompanies loss. Foreverizing is a bulwark against instability, but it isn’t an infallible enterprise. That which is promised to last forever often does not, and that which is disposed of can sometimes last, disturbingly, forever.

In this groundbreaking book, American philosopher Grafton Tanner develops his theory of foreverism: an anti-nostalgic discourse that promises growth without change and life without loss. Engaging with pressing issues from the ecological impact of data storage to the rise of reboot culture, Tanner tracks the implications of a society averse to nostalgia and reveals the new weapons we have for eliminating it.

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.

Chronic Illness sewage: a decade of bodily decomposition

During the sewage thaw of 2015, in the underbelly of Hollow way, neo fungoid infection spread into an abandoned bookstore in London. Hidden at the back, there was an orifice of c.analisation: a rotten mouth, warty sphincter, tranSSexual organ or cannibalistic skin pore, if not biotech digestion tissue. Opening the hole of the sewage orifice, a monstrous wound created a hungry suction of corporeal implosion, collapsing humanoid bodies into fetishist origami. Mycelial shibari splices connected to the internet by generating microbial AI that mutate humanoid biomorphs away from their digital screens into the escapetrap of our slum, animated within by mouldy manhole. Decade later, the inner membranes of Chronic Illness sewage live off vital traces of hundreds body acts, subterranean floods & bdsm fermentations into posthuman immersive theatrics against the society.

Fungi Media positions performance art of bodily mutations as a form of corporeal philosophy. Examining ecologies of rot and fungal decomposition, it outlines a theory of fungosexuality beyond sexual reproduction and binary gender roles. This theoretical perspective repositions queer sexualities in the context of the original meaning of the term ‘queer’, which is ‘rot’ – and which stands for a fungi-induced process of decomposition. With this, Fungi Media explores the foundational importance of rot for both breaking down and sustaining bodies, relationships and life as such.
The project was developed in a squatted sewage space in London, adopted by the author as a laboratory for mutant performance. The space hosts Chronic Illness events, where Internet-inspired body artists enter an environment populated with fungi. The interventions of human performers are incorporated into the rotten physiology of the space, which itself becomes a live entity. This book involves those events in the analysis of connections between media technologies and primal life processes. It also offers strategies for urban dwelling which transcend normative family life.

Read more at Open Humanities Press– Fungi Media

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.