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Arts

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

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

contemporary art
body
motherhood
poetry
gender
mother figure

Fiction

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

Me?

This tongue between four gums,
this meat between two knees,
this piece of hole
for madmen.

literature
psychiatry
avant-garde
poetry

Discourse

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

The key to survival will lay in female hands.

feminism
performance
body
colonialism
ritual
Africa
ceremony
spiritism

Humanities

Haifa’s architectural modernism

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

Middle East
Israel
history of architecture
memory

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.

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

Magazine Online

News + Events

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

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

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New releases

Maaza Mengiste: Of Interest to the General Public

Jürgen Brokoff (ed.), Karin Gludovatz (ed.), ...: Intervenierende Künste

Eva Backhaus (ed.), Grit Dommes (ed.), ...: Dynamics of the Intransitive

Beate Söntgen (ed.), Katharina Tchelidze (ed.), ...: Scenes of the Avant-Garde

Naomi Boyce (ed.), Matthias Grotkopp (ed.), ...: Digital Interventions

Autofiction—Metafiction

Monograph

“Obsessed with buffering”

In this essay, based on a talk he gave in Zurich, award-winning British novelist Tom McCarthy ("Remainder", "C", "Satin Island")... ABO

Tom McCarthy

Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer

Article

Why this past? Why is this past mine? A past which I did not even know? 

Born too late to see the war, too soon to forget it. Rocked by events which I didn’t experience.

Reiner Schürmann

How I Learned to Clench My Fists

Monograph

»Ich bin nicht gut im Vergessen. Ich kann es überhaupt nicht«

Ein junger Deutscher in den sechziger Jahren schreibt hier, heimgesucht von einer übergroßen Sensibilität für die Allgegenwart der Vergangenheit. Geradezu körperlich trägt er in seiner eigenen Person die Unfähigkeit aus, zu vergessen, was er selbst nicht bewusst erlebt hat: Krieg und Vernichtung. Die stark autobiographisch geprägte Erzählung folgt den zahlreichen...

Reiner Schürmann

Ursprünge

Monograph

Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

Das Fotobuch »Kracauer. Fotoarchiv« zeigt bisher unbekannte fotografische Materialien aus dem Nachlass des Soziologen, Feuilletonisten und Filmtheoretikers Siegfried Kracauer: Portraits,...

Maria Zinfert (ed.)

Kracauer. Fotoarchiv

To lay a hand on the shoulder of future victims…

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

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Current Texts

Punk’s raptures are mystical.

Iggy showed the error of human existence, the breathless nearness of death, and the lure of fun and action. He was like a much better-looking version of Schopenhauer.

ABO

Current Texts

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

Stephen Barber

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. OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
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Artur Zmijewski

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.” OPEN
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Arts

The Architecture of Disaster

Before & After

How can the gap between images become a site of critical counter-reading rather than a symbol of erasure?

History is increasingly presented as a series of catastrophes. The most common mode of this presentation is the before-and-after image—a juxtaposition of two photographs of the same place, at different times, before and after an event has taken its toll. Buildings seen intact in a “before” photograph have been destroyed in the one “after.” Neighborhoods bustling with activity in one image are in ruins or under a layer of foulwater in the next. Deforestations, contaminations, melting icebergs and drying rivers...

photographic images
photography
History of photography
war
forensic science

Arts

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream OPEN
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Ornamentation is the body of our thought

Elena Vogman

With Bely, a continuum is continuously produced between visceral organic states, political states of society and meteorological states of the world. OPEN
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Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

“I don’t believe in progress, no.” OPEN
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Eric Baudelaire

We cannot assume that all government/terrorist interactions will take the form of a two-person zero-sum game. OPEN
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Arts

Donatien Grau, James Spooner

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

“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.’”

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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?

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Authors

Books

Wolfgang Brückle (ed.), Fred Truniger (ed.): Display, Distribute, Disrupt

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

Wiktoria Furrer, Carla Gabrí, ...: How to Teach Art?

Donatien Grau, Sylvère Lotringer: I Was More American than the Americans

Sebastián Eduardo Dávila (ed.), Rebecca Hanna John (ed.), ...: On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices

Mathilde Arnoux (ed.), Maria Bremer (ed.): Westkunst, 1981

Fiction

Let’s find the stage of human affairs

Marion Muller-Colard, Clémence Pollet

Hannah Arendt's Little Theater

“A story worth telling is a story with spectators to judge it.”

While about to finish her last book, the philosopher Hannah Arendt is disturbed by her stubborn alter ego, 9-year-old Little Hannah. Reluctantly, the old woman lets herself drag out onto the streets of New York and into constant conversation by the inquisitive little girl. They enter a little theatre, and together they watch mankind, society, politics, power evolve – and they also experience the role of Evil (in the person of a wolf and of numerous wooden puppets) and its...

thinking
Evil
ethics
young readers
acting

Fiction

Stephen Barber

Twenty-four hours in state of unconsciousness

Now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself… ABO

A. L. Kennedy

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

Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? OPEN
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Pierre Guyotat

“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. OPEN
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Fiction

Kim Gordon

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear?

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Fiction

Soham Gupta

When life’s hard, time’s a motherfucker going slow

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

Authors

Books

Allison Grimaldi Donahue: The History of Breathing

Yan Marchand, Vincent Sorel: Diogenes the Dog-Man

Frédéric Morlot, Anne-Margot Ramstein: Albert Einstein's Bright Ideas

Gleb J. Albert (ed.), Nikolaj Evreinov, ...: The Steps of Nemesis

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Radio Works: 1946–48

Jean Paul Mongin, François Schwoebel: Mister Descartes and his Evil Genius

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...

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Discourse

Andreas L. Hofbauer

The yoke of being, noteworthy dis-position

Anyone inclined to describe hunters and gatherers as poor, would be advised to understand them as free. OPEN
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Marcus Quent

Critical thought that amounts to nothing more than questioning given positions, in negotiating existing conflict between parties, is none. OPEN
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Alexander García Düttmann

What does “emancipatory” mean today?

Let us pretend one more time that the world can still be saved. ABO DE

Michael Heitz

The strongest current reflections on the power struggles raging beyond the pleasure principle. OPEN
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Discourse

From xenolinguistics to cephalopods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable?

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utopia
linguistics
science fiction
communication
semiotics and semiology
communication media

Discourse

Michele Pedrazzi

Il testo ignoto è una promessa

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza?

OPEN
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reading
media theory
music
time
electronic music

Authors

Books

Gertrud Koch: Breaking Bad, Breaking Out, Breaking Even

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

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

Humanities

Should we abandon the cosmopolitan idea?

Zairong Xiang (ed.)

minor cosmopolitan

minor cosmopolitan takes the “ism” out of “cosmopolitanism.”

Around the turn of the millennium, academics and politicians predicted that the world would grow together as one and that people would become less bound by national affiliations. Almost twenty years later, there is little left of this vision. This is not such a surprise when we consider that the cosmopolitan ideal (as articulated during the European Enlightenment) wholeheartedly embraced the promises of a globalising economy, yet has remained oblivious to, and even complicit with, capitalist exploitation, slavery, and colonialism....

art theory
cosmopolitics
globalization
art
politics

Humanities

Felix Stalder

Subjectivation and Authenticity

It is human selection that turns a machine selection that is meaningless because of its compilation criteria into a (potentially) meaningful narrative. ABO DE

Alexander García Düttmann

Can contemporary theatre recognize itself in the boxing ring so that its fist, the fist of the past, strikes a forceful and violent blow? ABO DE

Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem looks back and ahead in the light of the spectacle of aesthetic capitalism, which has become even more unfettered since Debord’s death. ABO FR DE

Sina Dell’Anno

The rebellion of the signifiers against their semantic taming OPEN
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Humanities

Nothing is at home

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

ABO

art theory
Modernism
aesthetics
phenomenology
art

Humanities

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them…

“So many egoists call themselves artists,” Rimbaud wrote to Paul Demeny on May 15, 1871. Even though that is not always obvious, ‘I’, the first person, is the most unknown person, a mystery that is constantly moving towards the other two, the second and third persons, a series of unfoldings and smatterings that eventually gelled as ‘Je est un autre’. That is why ‘apocryphal’ is a literarily irrelevant concept and ‘pseudo’ a symptom, the very proof that life, writing, is made up of echoes, which means that intrusions and thefts (Borges also discusses them) will always be the daily bread of those who write.

Words from others, words taken out of place and mutilated: here are the alms of time, that squanderer’s sole kindness. And so many others, mostly others who wrote, and many other pages, all of them apocryphal, all of them echoes, reflections. All this flows together into—two centuries...

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Authors