Archive Books

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Towards (Im)Measurability of Art and Life gathers together various stories, practices, and essays about measurement that embrace paradox, contradiction, and humour. The book creates and introduces incidents of ideas, conceptual methods, acts, and processes of measurement that dwell in a conceptual transition between science (technology) and everyday life. When measurement is viewed as a practice, it is important to recall that data processing, especially visualisation, actually necessitates many aesthetic decisions.

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To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice offers a narrative of artist Alex Martinis Roe’s research into a genealogy of feminist political practices in Europe and Australia from the seventies until today. These practices include those of the Milan Women’s Bookstore co-operative; Psychanalyse et Politique, Paris; Gender Studies (formerly Women’s Studies) at Utrecht University; a network in Sydney including people involved in the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, Feminist Film Workers, Working Papers Collective, and the Department of General Philosophy at Sydney University; and Duoda – Women’s Research Centre and Ca la Dona, a women’s documentation centre and encounter space in Barcelona.

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A conference, hosted by the International Center for the Arts José de Guimarães, borrowed its title from an unfinished film stored in an archive in Bissau. ‘Luta ca caba inda’ (The struggle is not over yet) was conceived as a documentary film on post-independence Guinea-Bissau, but was abandoned in the editing process in 1980. The archive testifies to a decade of collective and internationally connected cinema praxis in the country, as part of the people’s struggle for independence from Portuguese colonialism.

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Overlapping every day observations with archival material, confronting, jumping. Figures that intervene – interruptions into the reproduction and maintenance of colonial poison cabinets and patriarchal canons. Histories of involvement. The folding of histories. Entangling feminist fictions. Taking care of. Trouble, always trouble.

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An archive of film and studio material in Bissau. On the verge of complete ruin, the footage testifies to the birth of Guinean cinema as part of the decolonising vision of Amílcar Cabral, the liberation leader who was assassinated in 1973. In collaboration with the Guinean filmmakers Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes, as well as many allies, Filipa César imagines a journey where in this fragile matter from the past operates as a visionary prism of shrapnel, with which to look through. Digitised in Berlin and screened at various locations – in what would come to resemble a transnational itinerant cinema – the archive convokes debates, storytelling and forecasts. From their screening in isolated villages in Guinea-Bissau to European capitals, the silent reels are now a place from which people might search for antidotes to a world in crisis.

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Stonemasons, cinema staff, a climbers’ cooperative, a group of 1970s militants. These communities testify to a period of upheaval that swept across Europe from the late 1960s to 1989. The fragments of biographies and the social relationships that Cora Piantoni depicts, are episodes in the context of this historic narrative: the legacy of anti-fascism in Italy, political dissent in the former Eastern Bloc, the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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Instead of passing off art as a model for a better politics, we wish to test it for the signatures, the markers and forms of these deeply antagonistic relations of which art itself is a material part: we are concerned with art as a class language, as well as with class languages in art; with art’s room for maneuver as well as with its limits and restrictions, curatorially, in writing and debate.

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This third volume of The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism emerges from deliberations that took place during two different symposia. The first was a collaboration between Warren Neidich and Mark Fisher at the Department of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College, titled The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part Three: The Cognitive Turn, and the second was an event organized in conjunction with the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, Noise and the Possibility of a Future.

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This publication looks at proxy-politics on both a micro and a macro level, exploring proxies as objects, as well as networks as objects. What is the relation between the molecular and the planetary? How to fathom the computational regime?
Yet, whilst being a manifestation of the networked age, thinking like a proxy offers loopholes and strategies for survival.

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Although the short-lived Brazilian cultural movement known as Tropicália is most commonly associated with music and the visual arts, its sense of playfulness and strategies of appropriation have stimulated many of the country’s filmmakers from the 1960s to the present. Fifty years after its emergence, what is the legacy of Tropicália today?

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This publication’s title references the UN Security Counsel Resolution that in 1993 established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). It is the outcome of a collaboration between Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. Previously taking the form of an exhibition and artist presentations at SMBA and a panel discussion hosted by the Stedelijk Museum’s Public Program, it now finds it result in this publication that brings together various texts by the participating artists, visual documentation of their works and adaptions of the discussions that took place.

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Retrieving, processing, tracking and tracing have evolved into standard actions performed with any available data, including their instant translation into images, thus transforming, modifying, and adjusting them for the visualized results. tracelation underscores the indispensable action of translation within the performance of tracing, which results in histories of action, movement, performance, as time-specific changes of particles: big data.

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1975 is an artist book by Daniela Comani, based on research following the finding of a childhood notebook from ’75. Through neutral images selected by the manufacturers for brochures Comani researches cars that were on the road in the 70’s, some of which are icons of this time and define the spirit of the age. The project becomes a social and historical study on style in the pre-globalized world and, above all, a kind of self-portrait.

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The White Hunter, African Memories and Representations is a publication produced on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition produced by FM Centre for Contemporary Art in Milan. This book is not only a catalogue on the exhibition, but it is rather a context in which the subjects of the show, are interrogated in another form.

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In Bare Lives Mario Rizzi portays Yazidi refugee camps and their inhabitants, exploring hidden stories and consequences of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ and how they entangled individual political lives and wider geopolitics of the region.

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The Mobile Cinema presentation apparatus – somewhere between urban model, cinema, and plate camera – derived its form from Alexander Medvedkin’s film The New Moscow (1938), in which an engineer used it to present his designs and visions for Moscow on his journey into the Soviet capital. The real space is replaced by a city of models representing a new reality by cinematographic means.

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Travelling through the forest in Mexico, I reread Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, which is set on a planet covered with forest. The inhabitants of the planet have trained themselves to master their dreams. For them, dream-time and world-time are equally real. At some point, a group of earthlings arrives, intending to colonise the planet. To the locals, the invaders’ dreams seem like those of a 3-year-old with no control and no awareness. Also, the earthlings use hallucinogens that send their dreams out of control.