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The best new writing, photography, art, and reportage from and about Berlin—in the series that’s “like a literary vacation” (Publishers Weekly). In 1990s Berlin, the scars of a century of war were still visible everywhere: coal stoves, crumbling buildings, desolate minimarts, not a working buzzer or elevator. To visit the city then was a hallucinatory experience, a simultaneous journey into the past and into the future. The abandoned ruins, the hidden gems found at the flea market, the illegal basement raves are a thing of the past. The era of Berlin as a site of urban archeology is over. Almost all the damaged buildings have been repaired, squatters have been removed, the shops sell...
The best new writing, photography, art, and reportage from and about Paris—in the “rich and engrossing” series for literary travelers (Times Literary Supplement). Paris’s postcard image has suffered multiple blows in recent years: the November 2015 terrorist attacks, the demonstrations of the yellow vests, the riots in the suburbs, Notre-Dame in flames, record heatwaves and the coronavirus. Meanwhile, soaring living costs are forcing many Parisians to leave the city. Yet these are not just a series of unfortunate events. They are phenomena—from increasing population density to climate change, from immigration to the repercussions of globalization and geopolitics—that all metropol...
Konrad Smolenski works with sound, and for the Polish Pavilion he has created a symphonic installation in which the hum of bronze bells mixes with sounds from full-range speakers and other devices that emit noise, and the appearance of an orchestra is as important as the music it plays. With this complicated installation the artist and curators pose questions about the finiteness of time and historical values.
"Subversive" may be the best description for this little volume pointing out that commercial art galleries are schizophrenic; they explicitly present things with an intellectual and aesthetic value, while on the other hand the experience most definitely has a price tag attached. Rob Hamelijnck presents a selection of photographs he took - mostly without permission - of the pristine front desks and messy back rooms of galleries around the world, and reveals the hidden side of the art machine. Essays by French architect Thibaut de Ruyter and Dutch sociologist Olav Velthuis address provocative questions such as, "Why do all galleries have the same mid-century chairs?" and "Why doesn't the high-heeled young woman at the door ever say hello?" The book is the second of the limited editions produced in the Fucking Good Art series.
Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation. Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the...
Micro Bionic is an exciting survey of electronic music and sound art from cultural critic and mixed-media artist Thomas Bey William Bailey. This superior revised edition includes all of the original supplements neglected by the publishers of the first edition, including a full index, bibliography, additional notes / commentary and an updated discography. As the title suggests, the unifying theme of the book is that of musicians and sound artists taking bold leaps forward in spite of (or sometimes because of) their financial, technological, and social restrictions. Some symptoms of this condition include the gigantic discography amassed by the one-man project Merzbow, the drama of silence ena...
Can sound be perceived independently of its social dimension? Or is it always embedded in a discursive network? »Postcolonial Repercussions« explores these questions in form of a collective conversation. The contributors have collected sound stories and sound knowledge from Brazil to Morocco, listened to resonances from the Underground and the Pacific Ocean, from Popular Music and speech recognition. The anthology gathers heterogeneous approaches to emancipatory forms of ontological listening as well as pleas for critical fabulation and a practice of care. It tells us about opportunities, perspectives and the (im)possibility of decolonised listening.
Volume 7, Fanzine digital de Rainier Lericolais, rassemble plus de 300 documents autour de l’année 2015. L'ebook présente notamment des pièces d’atelier, collages, photographies, sculptures, dessins, estampes, vues d’expositions, musiques, enregistrements live, émissions de radio, publications, lectures, textes. « Artiste et musicien, Rainier Lericolais a développé depuis le début des années 90 un travail de peinture, sculpture, dessin et photographie, traversé par une préoccupation constante envers l’empreinte, le transfert, la trace et le fantomatique, tout en explorant les liens entre musique et arts visuels » écrit Christine Macel, conservatrice au Centre Pompidou et commissaire de la prochaine Biennale de Venise. Avec Volume 7, Rainier Lericolais nous invite à un parcours plus introspectif que rétrospectif sur son travail récent, celui de l’année écoulée.