RUMSTICK ROAD

I Love You Too is a project from a visual artist focused on the writing of letters, shifting the focus from how a community uses a library to how it creates one – a library, in this case, of love. The stories in this book were told during the COVID-19 pandemic by more than 100 people from across Manchester. Through in-person and online interviews with 11 writers, their testimonies were transformed into this collection of love letters. To ensure all those involved felt safe and supported while sharing their deeply personal stories, well-being managers were on hand at every stage of the process. By way of thanks, each participant was gifted a portrait created at the time of their interview. Thank you to the people of Manchester for sharing these beautiful and personal stories with us.

South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere spent MIF19 in residence in Manchester’s network of libraries – and two years on, published I Love You Too, a beautiful book inspired by the time he spent in the city.

At the start of 2021, Wa Lehulere invited more than 100 people from across Manchester to share with us their love stories: to people, to places, even to possessions. Through a series of online and in-person meetings, a group of 11 Manchester writers put their words on to the page. The result is I Love You Too, a personal, powerful and inspiring 232-page hardback book of love letters rooted in our city – and the first in an international series.

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.

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.

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.

This lavishly illustrated magical volume acts a potent talisman connecting the two worlds of Tate – the seen public collection and the unseen secrets lurking in the archive. The pages of this book explore the hidden artworks and ephemera left behind by artists for the first time idea and will shed new light on our understanding of the art historical canon. This book explores the symbiotic relationship between art and the occult and how both can act as a form of resistance to challenging environments. This book will change perceptions forever and illuminate the surprising breadth and extraordinary ways in which artists interpret not just the physical world around them but also the supernatural, and in doing so make the unseen, seen. If you think you know Tate artists, it’s time to think again.

2024 marks the 40th anniversary of The Cholmondeleys dance company, founded in 1984 by Lea Anderson, Teresa Montano, and Gaynor Coward. Inspired by the DIY culture of post-punk UK, they wanted to create something that resonated with their friends, blending dance with the energy of fashion, music, and club culture of the 1980s.

They named themselves The Cholmondeleys, like a band. Emerging from this vibrant time, their performances featured collaborations with British artists, including choreographer Lea Anderson, costume designers Sandy Powell, Emma Fryer, Simon Vincenzi, composers Drostan Madden & Steve Blake, and lighting designer Simon Corder. Together with their sister company, The Featherstonehaughs (founded in 1988), they produced over 87 works, both live and on film, performing in the UK and internationally. This rich creative legacy is captured in an archive of images by photographers such as Chris Nash, Pau Ros, and Matilda Temperley, now presented together for the first time in this celebration of The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs.

Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology-fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity. Plying this rich material with characteristic virtuosity, Derrida constructs a synergistic reading of archives and archiving, both provocative and compelling.

The function of the critic and the function of the artist have been traditionally divided; the artist’s concern was the production of the work and the critic’s was its evaluation and interpretation. During the past several years a group of young artists evolved the idiom of Conceptual Art, which eliminated this division. Conceptual artists take over the role of the critic in terms of framing their own propositions, ideas, and concepts.

An essential aspect of Conceptual Art is its self-reference; often the artists define the intentions of their work as part of their art. Thus, many Conceptual artists advance propositions or investigations. It is in keeping, then, with Conceptual Art that it is best explained through itself, i.e., through the examination of Conceptual Art, rather than through any assumptions outside of itself. In this sense, this book is not a “critical anthology” but a documentation of Conceptual Art and Statements.

Dinner with America is the second in a trilogy of performance installations addressing the complexities of cultural identity in the 21st Century. Where the first piece in the trilogy, Mr Quiver (Nuffield Autumn 07), explored Indian and English stereotypes, this piece questions what America means to us.

As the performance space shifts and transforms around the audience, it gently uncovers themes of consumerism, rights, ownership, voices, hopes, harvest and division in a visually compelling and unusual piece of work.

This booklet was published in November 2008 to accompany the touring production of Dinner with America by Rajni Shah Theatre. All images, films and texts were made during and as part of the creative process. They are designed to illuminate both the core and outlying ideas that inhabited the artists’ thinking at the time of making the show, between February 2007 and November 2008.

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.

Documentation from a deep dive into La Pocha Nostra’s archive held at LADA’s Study Room on 5th July 2024, led by artist Ansuman Biswas who has been collaborating with La Pocha Nostra and its founder Guillermo Gómez-Peña since 2002.

This is a video file. For a version with closed captions please visit our vimeo channel. 

Video documentation of an online conversation with artist Keith Khan, in June 2020. This conversation followed an online screening of Khan’s film ‘Z’ as part of our LADA Screens programme. Joseph Morgan Schofield (LADA) caught up with Keith remotely for a discussion considering ideas of faith, devotion, eroticism and ecstasy in relation to Z.