The Heart and the Chip

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.

This guide celebrates the diversity and innovation of queer individuals in London, both historically and today. Delving into the cultural history of queerness in the capital, this book guides the reader through a welcoming spectrum of bars, clubs, shops, Pride events, charities, saunas and sex shops that cater to the LGBTQ+ community.

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.

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.

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.

Video documentation of an online book launch of  A Good Love Story by Sibylle Peters on 14th February 2021. This conversation spanned  love, intimacy and isolation, the state of Pleasure Activism today,  heterasexuality and the question of what constitutes a good love story.

Sibylle Peters was joined by artist, activist and editor of German pop feminist Missy Magazine Margarita Tsomou; writer and sexual health activist Almaz Ohene; artist and activist Brian Lobel; artist and Heteraclub collaborator Ansuman Biswas; Canadian based artist and activist Cassie Thornton; and artist and A Good Love Story editor Hester Chillingworth.

Art Review Issue 26  / October 2008

pg. 74-81

Feature on Elmgreen & Dragset : Inconvenient Truths

Can Taiwan performing/performance art be an avant-garde strategy for cultural exchanging with Shanghai e-Art Festival?

-Referring to the changing face of British Live Art.

Research study by Catherine Jiang.

This title offers the gender-bending performances of Dlane Torr, creator of the Man for a Day workshops. This book documents and contextualizes the development of Torr’s internationally celebrated workshops, as well as her own ongoing experiments in performing gender-play in theaters, galleries, and clubs.

a little 46 page book of homemade lockdown porn, paired perfectly with crossbreed worlds instagram quarantine confessions series.

‘All the content in the book has been submitted by our community, it is entirely homemade. All profits from the sale of said book will be going to the charity
Refuge’

limited edition of 150 copies.

This story is a product of lockdown, of not being able to create gatherings and experiences with, and for, other people. It is an account of intensely personal histories and experiences, that usually stay behind the screens. It is also a document of the Heteraclub project and the safe space created there, in which hundreds of women shared their stories of love and pleasure.

“A truthful picture of a taboo subject in an unbiased way.”

15 mins.