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Arts

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

This issue explores practices of human and non-human substitution.

gender
contemporary art
poetry
mother figure
body
motherhood

Fiction

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

When it all burns you’ll know – a writer was there at the first…

Discourse

Haifa’s architectural modernism

Ines Weizman synchronises different narratives that have been swept away by the chaotic hurricanes of time.

history of architecture
Israel
Middle East
memory

Humanities

Muriel Fischer (ed.), Sandra Frimmel (ed.), ...

The Power of Narratives in Propaganda

Narratives are the enduring stars of propaganda and disinformation.

Russia
analytics of power
propaganda
intelligence sercive

Magazine

Surrogacies

Myths and visions of motherhood and fathering, brings together artistic and theoretical positions on reproduction and communication, gender and genus, addressing and conception.

feminism
mother figure
queer theory
father figure
aesthetics
contemporary art
motherhood
gender
body

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ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:<br>Art, Magazine, Books

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

New releases

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (ed.): Deberlinization

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (ed.): Deberlinisierung

Giuseppe Di Salvatore (ed.), Fabienne Liptay (ed.): The Sirenic: Follow the Water, Follow the Sound

Eliana Hernández-Pachón: Suspended Waters

Cristina Rivera Garza: De-Blading the Knife

Kevin B. Lee (ed.), Marine de Dardel (ed.), ...: The Future of Reality

Observing the Spectator

Article

The Eye and the Gaze: The phenomenon of viewership in Archaic and Classical Greek painting

The contribution focusses on how images from the 8th to the 5th century address the issue of looking and watching. The phenomenon of the specific representation of the viewer (and viewers) in the image is related to the following aspects: (1) the modes of impression of figurative elements and the...

Annette Haug

Das Auge und der Blick

Article

The Meaning of the Inner-pictorial Viewer. Reflections on Audience, Witness, and Spectator

Spectators and audience are constructions of the past. They are present at historical events, witness history and even verify records of the past. The eyewitness has already seen and carries his testimony into present or future. But within the motive of the Fifteen Signs before Doomsday the circumstances are inverse:...

Daniela Wagner

Gegenwart und Zukunft

Article

Condolence. Mourning Companions on Burgundian and other Sepulchers

Starting out from the two famous sepulchral monuments of the Dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold (d. 1404) and John the Fearless (d. 1419) in Dijon, this article examines the function of the anonymous companions of the funeral procession immortalized in stone, who are standing around the tomb, the so...

Henrike Haug

Anteilnahme

Article

The Moving Spectator in Medieval Italian Art

This essay traces the importance of monumental art in Erwin Panofsky’s evolution of perspectival space by critically analyzing his concept of a Raumkasten (»space-box«). In Panofsky’s 1920s work, the teleological development between bodies and space from the 11th to the 14th centuries plays a crucial role in the history of...

Christopher Lakey

From Place to Space

Nothing is at home

Philosophy is found wanting. It is considered anachronistic, some say dead. The tradition is in ruins.

ABO

Modernism
phenomenology
art
art theory
aesthetics

Current Texts

From xenolinguistics to cephalopods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable?

OPEN
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linguistics
communication
semiotics and semiology
science fiction
utopia
communication media

Current Texts

Symbolical transplants are necessary

Strangeness is everywhere, but strangers are only where we define them. ABO DE FR

“Fuck that thing.” That’s all punk needs.

Donatien Grau, James Spooner

“The thing about punk is that you’re allowed to talk about anything. Kids can talk about whatever they want. There’s nobody saying, ‘No, you can’t do that, it’s not punk.’” OPEN
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So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them… OPEN
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To lay a hand on the shoulder of future victims…

Donatien Grau, Pierre Guyotat

»By using voices I have rediscovered what we call humanity.« OPEN
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Arts

Reality, No More?

Marine de Dardel (ed.), Kevin B. Lee (ed.), ...

The Future of Reality

“Reality is all we have to love. There is nothing else.” John Berger

Everyday life without audiovisual technologies is no longer imaginable. How do we experience reality in the age of generative AI, algorithmic media, and the omnipresence of digital platforms? How does cinema—and all audiovisual media— construct, challenge and reimagine reality in times of ecological, political, and technological transformation?

sound
film
art
contemporary art

Arts

Tyler Coburn

However convincingly space agencies justify the enormous budgets, there’s one gratuitous expense: training astronauts for free fall. ABO

Artur Zmijewski

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.” OPEN
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When life’s hard, time’s a motherfucker going slow

Soham Gupta

In his photographs and texts, Calcutta-based Soham Gupta forces the tension that arises between fiction and real-life conditions in as yet unseen ways. ABO DE FR

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
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Arts

Clémentine Deliss

A coffin to bury the statues of the ancestors

I was initially slightly sceptical of the ramifications and undertones of Renzo Martens’ project in central Congo…

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sculpture
colonial history
Africa
museum
contemporary art
colonialism

Arts

Slavs and Tatars

Why the Backwards Smile?

To what extent can a revolution of the inner world impact the external, material world surrounding us?

OPEN
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Authors

Books

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): “Here Lies” preceded by “The Indian Culture”

Liliana Gómez (ed.): Performing Human Rights

Georges Didi-Huberman, Mira Fliescher (ed.), ...: The Cube and the Face

Mario Schulze (ed.), Sarine Waltenspül (ed.): String Figures

Kieran Aarons (ed.), Reiner Schürmann, ...: The Place of the Symbolic

Fiction

The matrix for »Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats«

Pierre Guyotat

The Prison

“This text was written at the end of 1962, after my return from Algeria. For me the text is the matrix for Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats.” P.G.

Our prison was encircled by marshland where birds and sick dogs came to die. At night we could hear their cries and death rattles. We could see nothing of the town except its smoke and its dying animals. Prisoners on the second floor watched those washed-out cats and dogs die, lying down then struggling in the mud like birds caught in lime; famished cats jumped on those with gaping wounds and tore them open. From the cellar where we had been...

OPEN
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war
war experience

Fiction

Jochen Thermann

I really should not have hired him…

Waldemar—well, that was not actually his name… ABO DE FR

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

Like no other journal, Tel Quel was an outstanding arena of literary innovation and intellectual revolution. In this conversation its founder and publisher, Philippe Sollers, provides intimate insight and polemical hindsight into some of the most important milestones of its still-resonating era. ABO DE

Dietmar Dath

Do you want to believe in language?

The index calculates everything. Announcements of awards, mostly false, light up then die. His dopamine balance feeds the list. Limbic structures support it. Brain means house, should have windows. OPEN
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Axel Dielmann

“Can you imagine something like that?”

The curators were probably worried that someone would stumble carelessly up the stairs while looking at the exhibits… OPEN
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Fiction

Dodie Bellamy

All that pent up terror and rage

A stupid tweet by a nobody, meant as a parody, somehow goes viral and the internet offers up death threats.

OPEN
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Fiction

Tom McCarthy

Ecstasy of inauthenticity

The ironic self-awareness of the poet can only be that of his own inauthenticity, repeated or fed back into itself at increasingly conscious levels, and ‘to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic’.

The question of authenticity and I go back some way; we’re old sparring partners – frenemies. It’s been a fraught relationship, shot through with paradox and misconstruing. My first novel, Remainder, does turn around its protagonist’s obsession with becoming ‘real’, inhabiting his era or his city, building, skin, movements and gestures in a ‘first-hand’ or ‘authentic’ way, an obsession which he carries to the point of murder. Yet the pleasure of seeing this book receiving glowing press reviews that praised it for its ‘originality’ and ‘true’-ness was tinged with an awareness of something being odd or ‘off’, since Remainder is in fact the most un-original of novels, a novel about non-originality and simulacra that’s quite blatantly composed of set tropes and constructed situations reprised and, only slightly modified, replayed from sources ranging from Ballard’s Crash and Beckett’s Godot back to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (Uncle Toby’s domestic re-stagings of battle terrains)...

ABO DE

psychoanalysis
Jacques Lacan
identity
contemporary literature

Authors

Books

Tom McCarthy: Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer

Maaza Mengiste: Of Interest to the General Public

Discourse

Digital disrupture

Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

The machine remains alien to any mechanical limitation.

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result...

OPEN
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Discourse

Black Panther is an American, not an African story

A.K. Kaiza

In another era, the mish-mash presentation of Africa would have been the focal point of criticism. But this is not the age for facts. OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
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Dan-el Padilla Peralta

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream OPEN
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Ute Holl

“Communism will be when we understand something of love.” OPEN
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Discourse

»Self-censorship is the worst.«

»Three hundred people left The House that Jack Built. I think that’s very good, and it wasn’t Cannes.«

ABO DE

Evil
film d'auteur
contemporary art
film
cinema

Discourse

Stephen Barber

An immodest proposal

J.G. Ballard’s self-declared ‘Immodest Proposal’ for a global war-alliance to exact the destruction of America demonstrates the provocatory zeal of his last fiction plans, as well as their enduring prescience. As Ballard emphasises several times in the World Versus America notebooks, he is utterly serious in his concerns and visions.
Although the Ballard estate declined permission for any images of pages from the World Versus America archival notebooks to accompany this essay, any member of the general public interested to do so can readily visit the British Library and view the notebooks in their entirety in the freely-accessible manuscripts collection there.

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Authors

Books

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Artaud 1937 Apocalypse

Erich Hörl (ed.), Nelly Y. Pinkrah (ed.), ...: Critique and the Digital

Liza Mattutat (ed.), Roberto Nigro (ed.), ...: What’s Legit?

Sigrid Adorf (ed.), Sønke Gau (ed.), ...: going public.

Philippe Despoix (ed.), Siegfried Kracauer, ...: The Past's Threshold

Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman: Before & After

Humanities

The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization

Mathias Denecke (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...

Liquidity, Flows, Circulation

Today, it has become a truism that capital circulates, that data, populations and materials flow, that money offers liquidity.

Today, it has become a truism that capital circulates, that data, populations and materials flow, that money offers liquidity. These terms appear crucial for any description of our contemporary situation, whether in economics, media studies, or contemporary art. This book asks whether the preponderance of talk of flow, liquidity, and circulation is an expression of the cultural logic of today’s environmental capitalism.