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Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger . Venice, Lagos, and the Spaces in between . . . . . Diane Williams . Bang Bang on the Stair . . . . . Artur Zmijewski . Conversation on “Glimpse” . . . . . Stephen Barber . Futurama Nights, October 1978 . . . . . A swansong. Death in Venice, reenacted . . . . . Ann Cotten . Dialoge . . . . . Alexander García Düttmann . Kann es eine Gesellschaft ohne Feier geben oder Die kritische Frage des Theaters . . . . . Mário Gomes . Poetik der Architektur . . . . . Eric Baudelaire . Abecedarium . . . . . Bruce Bégout . L’homme de Venise . . . . . Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov . A Diary of my Encounters . . . . . Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau . Über Realismus . . . . . A Questionnaire: Tom Kummer . . . . . Bruce Bégout . The Man from Venice . . . . . Bruce Bégout . Der Mann aus Venedig . . . . . Mário Gomes . The Poetics of Architecture . . . . . Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger . Venedig, Lagos und der Raum dazwischen . . . . . Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau . On Realism . . . . . Alexander García Düttmann . Can There Be a Society Without Ceremony or the Critical Question of Theatre . . . . . Ann Cotten . Dialogs . . . . . Artur Zmijewski . Gespräch über ‚Glimpse‘ . . . . . Diane Williams . Rums Bums auf der Treppe
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Hurrah!

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

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

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 for Anomie

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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DIAPHANES No. 11
DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

Pregnancy is the weirdest condition

The seahorse is the chosen metaphor for pregnant trans men ABO DE

I.V. Nuss

The Love in the Convex, in Absolute Roundness and the Sluttification of All Men West of the Bosporus

Bang Bang Baroque

On the first gaze the works of Emma Waltraud Howes seem incongruously out of time. Visiting her studio, one enters... ABO

Emma Waltraud Howes

Questionnaire Emma Waltraud Howes

On Gestational Communism

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

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

Surrogate Abolition

DIAPHANES No. 10
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 10

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... ABO

Simon Critchley

Learning to Eat Time with One’s Ears

The Disobedience of the Word

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

Punk / Philology

The abandonment of the centrality of the subject

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

A Life in Philology

“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... OPEN
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Donatien Grau, James Spooner

Afropunk Philology

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
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Kim Gordon

The Pitch

DIAPHANES No. 8/9
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 8/9

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

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

A. L. Kennedy

What is an Author?

Ecstasy of inauthenticity

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... ABO DE

Tom McCarthy

Toke My Asymptote – or, The Ecstatic Agony of Appearance

Subjectivation and Authenticity

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

Felix Stalder

Feedback as Authenticity

Critique of generic rationality

The programs “sense” how the clients function, but not because AI is becoming more human—rather because clients now function as... OPEN
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Zoran Terzić

The Grand Generalization

Practice in collective destruction

We recklessly count on ethics coming from somewhere other than a practice only offered by party politics or activism, from which the majority population excludes itself. The panic invocation of Christian values shows the extent of the dilemma here: please come up with something, anything, that will make people behave... OPEN
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Kai van Eikels

Do in What's Doing, Democracy in!

DIAPHANES No. 6/7
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 6/7

Camouflaged with a visual language

What Reena really wanted to know was why – in a night club, for example – do we chose, always... ABO

Malte Fabian Rauch

Where the Negative Holds Court

Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem looks back and ahead in the light of the spectacle of aesthetic capitalism, which has become even... ABO FR DE

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Tomb for Guy Debord

Charlemagne Rides through Paris

Facebook’s algorithm has served up memories of my Turkish travels often enough, but now it’s taking countermeasures and suddenly presenting quite different entries from my so-called timeline. For example, this blurred photograph of an equestrian statue of Charlemagne, unfortunately barely visible, with vassals. I had noticed him a few years ago...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 6

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... ABO DE FR

Soham Gupta

Angst

Why should this be art?

I Hate the Avant-Garde. When an artist as self-ironic and self-reflective as Yuri Albert makes such a statement about art, then skepticism is called for. Like his overall series Elitist-Democratic Art, the title deliberately plays with simple affirmations and negations, and at the same time exhibits the inherent receptive dilemma... ABO DE

Sandra Frimmel

I Hate the Avant-garde

DIAPHANES NO. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 5

What does “emancipatory” mean today?

Pretending one more time that the world can still be saved and asking whether art contains an emancipatory potential can be a meaningful endeavour only if illegitimate attempts at appropriating this emancipatory potential are thwarted. Its usurpation, which amounts to its abolition, must be prevented. Critique that deserves its name... ABO DE

Alexander García Düttmann

Cold Distance

Saturnaaaaalia

The rebellion of the signifiers against their semantic taming OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

Oratio Soluta

Nothing is at home

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

Malte Fabian Rauch

Phenomena in Exile

Charlemagne Rides through Paris

Facebook’s algorithm has served up memories of my Turkish travels often enough, but now it’s taking countermeasures and suddenly presenting quite different entries from my so-called timeline. For example, this blurred photograph of an equestrian statue of Charlemagne, unfortunately barely visible, with vassals. I had noticed him a few years ago...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 6

Blood!

Thérèse ayant douleurs menstruelles could be a beginning. OPEN
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Ines Kleesattel

Art, Girls, and Aesthetic Freedom Down Below

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

Je me souviens

Une Trinité de mémoire Je me souviens de quelques lieux, de quelques parfums d’enfance. En Amérique du Sud, en Equateur, à Guayaquil, dans les années cinquante. Trois lieux, trois visions, des sensations nouvelles – celles de la découverte de la vie –, une source d’inspiration pour mon travail à venir, pour mon...

Joseph Morder

Une Trinite de la Memoire

So many egoists call themselves artists…

“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... OPEN
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Maria Filomena Molder

The Alms of Time

On Trees, Neophytes, and Druids

The beech, the opponent of the druids, should be disestablished! OPEN
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Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger

Homeland Fictions

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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Slavs and Tatars

Reverse Joy

Black Panther is an American, not an African story

In another era, the mish-mash presentation of Africa would have been the focal point of criticism. But this is not... OPEN
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A.K. Kaiza

An Annotated History of Wakanda

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

On Memory Atrophy

Externalized memory had always proceeded by contractions, summaries, reductions, selections, breaks in flow, as well as by organization, classification, boiling down. Card catalogues reduced thousands of works to a few key notions; tables of contents contracted the hundreds of pages in a given book. The sign itself was the first... OPEN
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Maël Renouard

The Twilight of Classi­fication?

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... OPEN
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Elena Vogman

Dynamography, or Andrei Bely’s Rhythmic Gesture

Belief in the world is what we most lack.

It was Gilles Deleuze who in various contexts underlined that what we most lacked was “belief in the world.” The odd remark appears, for example, in a conversation in 1990 with the Italian Marxist Antonio Negri about revolutionary emergence and the political force of minorities. In this dialogue Negri examines... OPEN
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Marcus Quent

Elapsing Time and Belief in the World

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... OPEN
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Stephen Barber

A War of Fragments: World Versus America

Digital disrupture

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,... OPEN
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Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

Twenty-four hours in state of unconsciousness

Now the dead will no longer be buried, now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself, now human bodies will expectorate fury and envision their own transformation or negation, now infinite and untold catastrophes are imminently on their... ABO

Stephen Barber

Futurama Nights, October 1978

A swansong. Death in Venice, reenacted

I have rarely left the Biennale so dissatisfied and tired as this year. No, it wasn’t the endless kilometers.

Barbara Basting

Dear Paolo Baratta

About ‘how we treat the others’

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

Artur Zmijewski

Conversation on “Glimpse”

The last philosopher. The zen-queen.

– In what way are you a communist – since we need to define this: someone who is convinced that a totally different form of organization of communal life would be good for the human race, –   – Isn’t that equally true of monarchists and leaders of sects?   – ...with a focus... OPEN
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Ann Cotten

Dialogs

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

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

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Venice, Lagos, and the Spaces in between

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

The Transversal Shelf of Printed Books in Times of Accelerated Opaque Media

Raucous time capsules, rare jewels, and indispensable bulky goods from all epochs, languages, and genres.

The Transversal Shelf of Printed Books in Times of Accelerated Opaque Media

I remember

I remember during the frozen Tokyo winter of 1997: I took long walks in the dead of night through the Shinjuku Kabuki-cho district of endless bars, subterranean clubs and abandoned cinemas with Donald Richie, the American writer and film-maker, already in Tokyo for over forty ­years at that moment and...

Johanna Went

I remember (Johanna Went)

Boutiques on the Bosporus

I’m no longer very happy with Facebook. Recently the algorithm seems to be taking the platform into total despotism. And on top of that it’s continually being altered. Just when I’ve gotten used to the comforting stream of souvenir images, Mr. Zuckerberg decides to do away with them. Or is...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 4

Who is the bait? Who is the catch?

Dire works on the bogus regime—not just of art—but endowed with wit, beauty and irresistible fetish character.

Luc Meresma

Natural Enemies

Charlemagne Rides through Paris

Facebook’s algorithm has served up memories of my Turkish travels often enough, but now it’s taking countermeasures and suddenly presenting quite different entries from my so-called timeline. For example, this blurred photograph of an equestrian statue of Charlemagne, unfortunately barely visible, with vassals. I had noticed him a few years ago...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 6

 

LISTMANIA

DIAPHANES is collecting lists: conceptually sensory bills of fare, enumerations and selections in the serenely fatal undertaking of classifying an unclassifiable present, of orienting ourselves through the stringing together of self-determined entries. The freely associated registers (including unequal and redundant items) are a call to attention or simply the excursive (as every list is potentially infinitely long or short) inventory of taste or consciousness.

BENIMMREGELN ZUR »VERBESSERTEN QUALITÄT DES CHINESISCHEN TOURISTEN« DES »ZENTRALEN ­KOMITEES FÜR DIE STEUERUNG DES AUFBAUS DER GEISTIGEN ­ZIVILISATION«

Tom Kummer, 03.07.2017

¡ Wenn sie im Flugzeug freie Plätze sehen, dann nicht darum prügeln !
¡ Auf gar keinen Fall darf...

NEUN GRÜNDE GEGEN SCHACH

Pierre Lusson, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, 03.07.2017

Es sei uns gestattet, hier einmal sämt­liche Gründe aufzuzählen, warum wir von Schach nichts halten.

1. Es ist ein...

SCHÖNE WORTE FÜR ABSCHEULICHE DINGE IN ZUFÄLLIGER REIHENFOLGE

Natascha Bub, 03.07.2017

Plörre
Smegma
Ohrwurm
Schlamassel
Kummerspeck
Weltschmerz
Gesöff
Fernweh
Lotterbett
Spelunke
Scharmützel
Donnerwetter
Schabracke
Mumpitz
Spatzenhirn
Lustmolch
Kaschemme
Spinatwachtel
Popanz

Other columns
Magazine Special
About ‘how we treat the others’

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

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

OPEN
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  • Poland
  • gift
  • political aesthetics
  • documenta
  • concentration camp
  • propaganda
  • National Socialism
  • migration
  • contemporary art
  • ethics
Magazine Special
Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

The key to survival will lay in female hands.

OPEN
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  • performance
  • colonialism
  • spiritism
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»Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRO DI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.


Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: DELINE THE MARE.


Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. BASTA! I will see if I can see.


See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.«


James Joyce

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