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Arts

Haifa’s architectural modernism

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

Israel
Middle East
memory
history of architecture

Fiction

About a Coronation Cloak from Ethiopia

“The dead will shelter the living. They will find us once we have named them one by one”.

public sphere
museum

Discourse

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

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

body
gender
motherhood
poetry
mother figure
contemporary art

Humanities

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

The Power of Narratives in Propaganda

Narratives are the enduring stars of propaganda and disinformation.

analytics of power
Russia
intelligence sercive
propaganda

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.

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

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

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

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New releases

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

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

THINK ART? THINK ART!

Article

I’m not really sure what is and what isn’t theory.

Elisabeth Bronfen Tom, our idea here was that you would give us a little insight into how you find your themes, how you use theory for your texts. T.MC. I’m not really sure what is and what isn’t theory. I don’t really know where theory stops and fiction begins. If you take someone... ABO

Tom McCarthy

“Something that is not nothing”

Monograph

One plus one equals other

For an aesthetic mode of thought beyond the “linguistic turn”

Dieter Mersch

Epistemologies of Aesthetics

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

Monograph

Around a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti

Does this buried or lost face have a name?

Georges Didi-Huberman, Mira Fliescher (ed.), Elena Vogman (ed.)

The Cube and the Face

Ornamentation is the body of our thought

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

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Current Texts

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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museum
colonial history
Africa
contemporary art
sculpture
colonialism

Current Texts

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

How about some string?

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

Simon Critchley

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

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? 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?

film
sound
contemporary art
art

Arts

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

“I don’t believe in progress, no.” 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

“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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Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

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

Tyler Coburn

The future has never looked older

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

ABO

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.«

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Authors

Books

Shusha Niederberger (ed.), Cornelia Sollfrank (ed.), ...: Aesthetics of the Commons

Sami Khatib (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Critique: The Stakes of Form

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

Daniel Berndt (ed.), Susanne Huber (ed.), ...: ambivalent work*s

Fiction

An immodest proposal

Stephen Barber

A War of Fragments: World Versus America

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...

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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

Tom McCarthy

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’. ABO DE

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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Jean-Luc Nancy

Ζένοι και Zah και Zuh

αποξενωμένοι αποκλίνοντες από ποιο αόρατο οικείο; 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.

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Fiction

A. L. Kennedy

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

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

ABO DE FR

Authors

Books

Marion Muller-Colard, Clémence Pollet: Hannah Arendt's Little Theater

Yan Marchand, Vincent Sorel: Diogenes the Dog-Man

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Last Writings of Antonin Artaud

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

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

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

Michele Pedrazzi

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza? OPEN
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Johannes Binotto

Where words are uttered, the taming is shrewed. OPEN
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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
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Discourse

Sina Dell’Anno

The Disobedience of the Word

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

OPEN
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Discourse

Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

ABO DE FR

Authors

Books

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

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

Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman: Before & After

Humanities

From xenolinguistics to cephalopods

Xenolinguistics

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable?

If ever humans should face creatures from outer space, they would surely have to find a way of dealing with the aliens and—supposing they would have such a thing: with their languages. The branch of linguistics dedicated to the study of such languages from outer space is commonly referred to as xenolinguistics. For the time being, xenolinguistics is an essentially speculative and certainly radical exercise of conceiving the diverse. We have asked a series of specialists from different fields that...

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science fiction
linguistics
semiotics and semiology
communication
communication media

Humanities

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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The abandonment of the centrality of the subject

Donatien Grau

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

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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Humanities