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Arts

The Architecture of Disaster

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

photography
photographic images
History of photography
history of media
forensic science
war

Fiction

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear?

Discourse

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

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

motherhood
mother figure
contemporary art
gender
poetry
body

Humanities

The Disobedience of the Word

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

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.

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

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

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

diaphanes_net

Observing the Spectator

Article

Condolence. Mourning Companions on Burgundian and other Sepulchers

Starting out from the two famous sepulchral monuments of the Dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold (d. 1404) and John the Fearless (d. 1419) in Dijon, this article examines the function of the anonymous companions of the funeral procession immortalized in stone, who are standing around the tomb, the so...

Henrike Haug

Anteilnahme

Article

Public Space and Public Audience in the Illustrated Manuscripts of al-Hariri's »Maqâmât«

Constitutive of the 50 equally composed stories of al-Hariri’s »Maqâmât« (literally »gathering, convention«) is a multitudinous, mostly anonymous audience. Its main character is the gifted speaker Abu Said, who, more often than not, makes surreptitiously a living from his speeches and sermons to people of diverse social strata. While the...

Andrea Lermer

Öffentlicher Raum und Publikum in den Illustrationen der »Maqâmât« al-Hariris im 13. Jahrhundert

Article

Complicity in Spectatorship

The special case of lustful murdering soldiers of King Herod and the introduction of spectators on frescos by Giotto and pulpits by the Pisani are at the core of this contribution, which poses the question: How is cruelty visualized in Italy around 1300? The introduction of detached spectators in opposition...

Beate Fricke

Complicity in Spectatorship

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

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.

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war
war experience

Current Texts

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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Current Texts

»Three hundred people left The House that Jack Built. I think that’s very good, and it wasn’t Cannes.« ABO DE

Malte Fabian Rauch

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

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

Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

New releases

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Watchfiends and Rack Screams

Marie Sophie Beckmann (ed.), Petra Löffler (ed.): Sub(e)merging: Experiences, Practices and Politics from below

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

Mario Schulze (ed.), Sarine Waltenspül (ed.): String Figures

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira: Invented Skins

Arts

Artaud’s Last Unpublished Work

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

Watchfiends and Rack Screams

Antonin Artaud’s last large-scale work, published in its complete form in English for the first time. Foreword by John Zorn.

I had a dream last night, scrambled, yes indeed, for a scrambled dream it sure was scrambled. But so meaningful on the other hand, so meaningful. Jean Dequeker was dragging himself along the earth with short and truncated legs, and he said: Am I a beast, a pebble, a branch or a meat stall? But after all what is a tree? What is a tree? Madame Dequeker was behind a cage with her stomach pressed against the flange of this...

poetry
avant-garde
autobiography
Modernism
literature

Arts

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
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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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Tyler Coburn

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

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

Michele Pedrazzi

Il testo ignoto è una promessa

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

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reading
electronic music
time
media theory
music

Arts

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

The key to survival will lay in female hands.

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Africa
performance
ceremony
feminism
colonialism
spiritism
ritual
body

Books

Liliana Gómez (ed.): Performing Human Rights

Donatien Grau (ed.), Christoph Wiesner (ed.): After the Crisis

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

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Photographic Archive

Sabine Gebhardt Fink (ed.), Andrej Mircev (ed.): Revolving Documents—Narrations of Beginnings, Recent Methods and Cross-Mappings of Performance Art

Dieter Mersch: Epistemologies of Aesthetics

Fiction

Empty Diagonal

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Antoine d’Agata

Diagonale du vide

A ghostly France: Emptiness and explosiveness behind the lines.

“If there is an artist capable of making these vacuums speak, it is d’Agata. To show what is not visible, to make present what can not be represented. There is a visual 'spectralism' about Antoine. It is about recording the spasms of humanity that is committing suicide, which has access to all the information needed to know what it is doing, and yet does nothing to revert the trend. We documented this suicide during a week of shared driving, of...

community
revolution
contemporary art
France
photography

Fiction

Dodie Bellamy

A stupid tweet by a nobody, meant as a parody, somehow goes viral and the internet offers up death threats. OPEN
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Johannes Binotto

Where words are uttered, the taming is shrewed. OPEN
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Dietmar Dath

Do you want to believe in language?

The index calculates everything. Announcements of awards, mostly false, light up then die. His dopamine balance feeds the list. Limbic structures support it. Brain means house, should have windows. OPEN
ACCESS DE

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

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…

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 way —ready to cross the bridge over the river Aire and engulf us all — in this winter of discontent, just beginning at this dead-of-night instant before midnight, North-Sea ice-particles already crackling in the air and the last summer long-over, the final moment of my seventeenth birthday, so we have to go, the devil is at our heels… And now we’re running at full-tilt through the centre of the city, across the square beneath the Purbeck-marble edifice of the Queen’s Hotel, down towards the dark arches under the railway tracks, the illuminated sky shaking, the air fissured with beating cacophony,...

ABO

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

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

“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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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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Ute Holl

“Communism will be when we understand something of love.” OPEN
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Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

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

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

Hurrah!

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

ABO

Discourse

From xenolinguistics to cephalopods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable?

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communication
utopia
science fiction
semiotics and semiology
communication media
linguistics

Authors

Books

David Graeber: Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking

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

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

Tom McCarthy: Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer

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

Humanities

Black Panther is an American, not an African story

A.K. Kaiza

An Annotated History of Wakanda

In another era, the mish-mash presentation of Africa would have been the focal point of criticism. But this is not the age for facts.

The movie Black Panther, which has become the most successful superhero movie of all time, imagines Wakanda in a very specific and maybe even slightly emancipatory way. Black Panther, now the king of the concealed super-state, faces his current archenemy Killmonger, who wants to distribute arms to the Global South for an uprising against neoliberal imperialism. The scene that introduces Erik “Killmonger” Stevens, the antagonist to Ryan Coogler’s newly imagined hero, takes place in a museum. Killmonger (played by a mesmeric...

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Humanities

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

We are bodies. It makes no sense to debate this. OPEN
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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
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Helmut J. Schneider

A Phenomenology of Compassion

How to make the strange person our “neighbor”? ABO DE

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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Humanities

Each showroom has a couple of “managers”.

Do I really know the person I’ve watched every day on screen for months? I know many things, like where he is, where he comes from, what his home looks like, when he gets up and sleeps, etc. But do I really know him?

ABO DE

subjectification
digital culture
social media
identity
mass media

Humanities

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

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 more unfettered since Debord’s death.

ABO FR DE

Authors