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Arts

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

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

body
gender
contemporary art
poetry
motherhood
mother figure

Fiction

Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

1930s
History of photography
portrait
archive
biography
photography
autobiography
1950s
memory
Paris
Siegfried Kracauer

Discourse

Haifa’s architectural modernism

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

Middle East
history of architecture
memory
Israel

Humanities

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.

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
father figure
feminism
aesthetics
contemporary art
body
queer theory
motherhood
gender

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

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

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New releases

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

Naomi Boyce (ed.), Matthias Grotkopp (ed.), ...: Digital Interventions

Observing the Spectator

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

The Invented Beholder: Allegorical Powers of Persuasion as Visual Strategy

It is not just the painting that needs a beholder. The allegorical literature at the end of the Middle Ages is addressed to listeners as well as to spectators: the elaborated tableaux developed at the mind’s eye implicitly address a large audience. The prototypic description of paintings on the gardenwalls...

Cornelia Logemann

The Invented Audience

Article

The Relentlessness of Perspective. A Look at the Bystanders in 15th-Century Italian Painting

In the center of this article stands Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ. The enigmatic painting has been the object of innumerable interpretations; while for the most part, research has focused on the identification of the three prominent figures in the foreground, this article suggests that it is not the...

Urte Krass

Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit

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

»This is not my blood.«

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

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performance art
human–animal communication
Video art
identity

Current Texts

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream

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Current Texts

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

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

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

Around a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti

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

The Cube and the Face

Does this buried or lost face have a name?

The Cube, as we can see, isn’t one. It is an irregular polyhedron which catalogues describe as having twelve sides — that nice figure, twelve, a destinal figure if ever there was one, which willfully evokes Mallarmé’s throw of the dice, at the very moment that the clock strikes twelve at midnight, in the dark house of Igitur. One can imagine that Giacometti wanted to give a unique volume to the twelve facets — six and six — of two cubes added together: a unique architecture...

Alberto Giacometti
abstract art
art history
face
art theory

Arts

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

Artur Zmijewski

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.” OPEN
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Slavs and Tatars

To what extent can a revolution of the inner world impact the external, material world surrounding us? OPEN
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»Three hundred people left The House that Jack Built. I think that’s very good, and it wasn’t Cannes.« ABO DE

Arts

Clémentine Deliss

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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contemporary art
Africa
sculpture
colonialism
museum
colonial history

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
body
ceremony
ritual
spiritism
feminism
colonialism

Authors

Books

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

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

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

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Artaud the Mômo

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

Sara Alonso Gómez (ed.), Isabel J. Piniella Grillet (ed.), ...: NO Rhetoric(s)

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...

France
community
contemporary art
photography
revolution

Fiction

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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I.V. Nuss

The seahorse is the chosen metaphor for pregnant trans men ABO 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

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

Like no other journal, Tel Quel was an outstanding arena of literary innovation and intellectual revolution. In this conversation its founder and publisher, Philippe Sollers, provides intimate insight and polemical hindsight into some of the most important milestones of its still-resonating era. ABO DE

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.

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war
war experience

Fiction

Kim Gordon

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear?

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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...

OPEN
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Discourse

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

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

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
ACCESS

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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Michele Pedrazzi

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

Ute Holl

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

“Communism will be when we understand something of love.”

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Karl Marx
monotheism
film
communism
exile

Discourse

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

Hurrah!

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

ABO

Authors

Books

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Artaud 1937 Apocalypse

Liliana Gómez (ed.), Fabienne Liptay (ed.): Eco-operations

Liza Mattutat (ed.), Roberto Nigro (ed.), ...: What’s Legit?

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

Humanities

“Aboard ship! ye philosophers!”

Wu Yi

The Sea as Mirror

“I’ve heard the silent cries that filled the air, the reticence of the sirens when Odysseus, mast-bound, sailed past. Hark!”

A genealogy of philosophy in the form of a geology of the diluvial, so to speak. I’ve asked: how does the ocean, as a physical presence, a dynamic relationship, and an unsettling imaginary, challenge and reinvent philosophy as it understands itself to be and defines itself against? The method I’ve hitherto practiced is one simple and well-suited to the purpose: to de-sublimate and re-sublimate the variously over-sublimated layer of sense in philosophy with one’s own being, flesh and blood, and...

history of philosophy
literary studies
the sea

Humanities

Jean-Luc Nancy

Ζένοι και Zah και Zuh

αποξενωμένοι αποκλίνοντες από ποιο αόρατο οικείο; OPEN
ACCESS FR FA DE

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

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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Felix Stalder

Subjectivation and Authenticity

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

Humanities

Nothing is at home

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

ABO

aesthetics
art theory
art
Modernism
phenomenology

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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Authors