Books

The story of violence against women constantly disappears even as it is continuously told, re-told. Might a Story Knife play a role in reversing such erasure?

archaeology
violence
feminism
body
gender

Discourse

Anna-Lisa Dieter (ed.), Daniel Tyradellis (ed.)

A dynamic element, rather than a passive object

Water is ubiquitous: we drink it, bathe in it, encounter it as rain, ice, or river. And yet it remains contradictory— both familiar and strange.

global ecology
exhibition
society
Limnology

Humanities

Duchamp. Messager.

L'urinoir de Duchamp annonce en fait la disparition du système des beaux-arts et l'avènement du système de « l'art en général ». Duchamp n'en est ni l'auteur ni l'agent, mais son brillant messager.

art history
art theory
Marcel Duchamp

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.

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

Magazine Online

News + Events

diaphanes_net

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

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

You are invited to enjoy the ungoing exhibition of artworks, leave through our printed magazine or read up on twenty years of publishing in almost 1000 books.

New releases

Anna-Lisa Dieter (ed.), Daniel Tyradellis (ed.): On Water

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (ed.): Deberlinization

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

Loyalty Made Visible

In 1640, after 60 years of Iberian Union under the rule of the Hispanic monarchy, Portugal re-installed her own king again: John IV from the Bragança Dynasty. This central event in Portugal’s history had to be communicated not only to the European nations but also to all the regions that...

Urte Krass

Loyalty Made Visible

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

Anthology

Involving the Beholder

The invention of depicting figures participating in an event — nameless bystanders, beholders, and onlookers — marks an important change in the ways artists addressed the beholder of the artworks themselves. This shift speaks to a significant transformation of the relationship between images and their audience. The public in the...

Beate Fricke (ed.), Urte Krass (ed.)

The Public in the Picture / Das Publikum im Bild

Article

The Installation of the Eye: Sandro Botticelli's Adorazioni and the Arrival of the Beholder in Fifteenth-Century Painting

Like only few other pictorial themes in Western art, the Adoration of the Magi, rather than presenting a mere depiction of the event, manufactures an image of the experience of seeing itself. The great number of Adorazioni painted by Sandro Botticelli bespeak the process in which this type of seeing...

Christiane Hille

Training the Eye

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

A for Anomie

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

A for Anomie

The idea that terrorism and other forms of political violence are directly related to strains caused by strongly held grievances has been one of the most common explanations to date and can be traced to a diverse set of theoretical concepts including relative deprivation, social disorganization, breakdown, tension, and anomie. Merton (1938) identifies anomie as a cultural condition of frustration, in which values regarding goals and how to achieve them conflict with limitations on the means of achievement.

Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan, “Research on Terrorism and Countering Terrorism”, Crime and Justice, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2009.

B for Block or Blocked

If terrorism in each of its expressions can be considered an indicator of the existence of a political block (of an impossibility of reacting if one wishes to react differently), this influences its real ability to modify the situation. Terrorism has been historically more successful when it was not...

OPEN
ACCESS

Current Texts

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them… OPEN
ACCESS DE

Diane Williams

How about some string?

I said “Would you like a rope? You know that haul you have is not secured properly.” ABO DE

Zoran Terzić

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
ACCESS

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?

art
sound
film
contemporary art

Arts

Tyler Coburn

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

A coffin to bury the statues of the ancestors

Clémentine Deliss

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

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

What is the problem with solutions? Blind or deaf? Which faith? What knowledge? Duchamp or Warhol? East or west? OPEN
ACCESS

Arts

»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

film d'auteur
cinema
Evil
contemporary art
film

Arts

Donatien Grau, Pierre Guyotat

To lay a hand on the shoulder of future victims…

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

OPEN
ACCESS

Authors

Books

Jens Andermann (ed.), Lisa Blackmore (ed.), ...: Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape

Anna Kipke (ed.), Iryna Kovalenko (ed.), ...: Drafts in Action

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira: Invented Skins

Marietta Kesting (ed.), Susanne Witzgall (ed.): Human after Man

Mathias Denecke (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Liquidity, Flows, Circulation

Fiction

Born too late to see the war, too soon to forget it.

Reiner Schürmann

Origins

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

"This is a book about the power that a past War holds over a German growing up in the 1950s and 1960s: born too late to see that war and too early to forget it. The narrative shows how painfully public events — the shadows, rather, of events gone by — intrude upon a life and shape it. The English translation appears at a moment when most of the key issues have radically changed. Germany has signed what amounts to a...

homosexuality
autobiography
memory
1968
emigration

Fiction

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
ACCESS

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

Zoran Terzić

Everything new is a pose in the alcoves of capital

In the post-avant-garde era we’re all either in the vanguard or asleep in the lap of capital. In this sense everybody is avant-garde—or nobody. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Fiction

Kim Gordon

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear?

OPEN
ACCESS

Fiction

Pierre Guyotat

The matrix for »Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats«

“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
ACCESS

war
war experience

Authors

Discourse

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

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

What claims the place of the nuclear family in the face of hybrid kinships and social freezing? What could new elective kinships be in times of chatbots and pseudonymisation? Is this the time for surrogate mother tongues and extra-human rhetorics of surrogation? Sophie Lewis claims a gestational communism and hunts our grannies. Barbara Vinken reflects on spiritual motherhood, Luciana Parisi on human automata and gendered proxies. For Zuzana Cela, language is a foreign body that can be invaginated. Werner Hamacher strolls...

motherhood
body
contemporary art
gender
mother figure

Discourse

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

“If you love your family, you want family abolition for them!” ABO DE

Michele Pedrazzi

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza? OPEN
ACCESS DE FR

Sina Dell’Anno

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
ACCESS DE

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Discourse

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

Hurrah!

We rehearsed the crowd scenes in the Winter Palace, in the Throne Room and the Armorial Hall.

ABO

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.

OPEN
ACCESS DE

Authors

Books

David Graeber: Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking

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

Humanities

The Power of Narratives in Propaganda

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

Global Narratives of Russian Disinformation

Narratives are the enduring stars of propaganda and disinformation.

From the Cold War to the present day, we can observe how (pro-)Russian narratives are regionally tailored, internationally disseminated and appropriated by various political, economic or cultural actors for their own purposes.While some narratives might originate from literary fantasy, science fiction or national myths, others draw on historical narratives and reproduce them. Russia often claims an anti-imperialist, anti-fascist or post-colonial intention in order to conceal its own imperialism and fascism. The contributions in this book document these narratives in their...

intelligence sercive
propaganda
Russia
analytics of power

Humanities

The abandonment of the centrality of the subject

Donatien Grau

Philology keeps it possible to open a space for the minority. OPEN
ACCESS FR

Alexander García Düttmann

What does “emancipatory” mean today?

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

Marcus Quent

Belief in the world is what we most lack.

Is it possible to regain a lost belief? Is it possible to do as we will with belief? OPEN
ACCESS DE

Humanities

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

We are bodies. It makes no sense to debate this.

OPEN
ACCESS DE

re-enactment
transhumanism
artistic practice
realism
art theory
postmodernism

Humanities

Jean-Luc Nancy

Ζένοι και Zah και Zuh

αποξενωμένοι αποκλίνοντες από ποιο αόρατο οικείο;

Ξένος extraneus του έξω όχι του μέσα (intraneus) όχι της οικίας unheimlich όχι του heim όχι της εστίας της άλλης πλευράς της πόρτας – fores, foreigner όχι υπερβολικά στον ρυθμό, odd όχι κανονικός όχι συνήθης σπάνιος ιδιάζων seltsam παράξενος besherat γενναίος κομψός απρόβλεπτος στραβός verschroben

λοξός αναπάντεχος εξαιρετικός εκπληκτικός

Είναι εκπληκτικό πόσες λέξεις εκφράσεις τρόπους διαφορετικούς έχουμε για να μιλήσουμε για τον παράξενο ξένο τον ausländer τον έξω από τη χώρα και όχι «pays avec nous» όπως λέγαμε κάποτε στη Γαλλία «c’est un pays à moi» για να πούμε κάποιος από το χωριό μου τη γειτονιά μου την περιοχή μου την πατρίδα μου