Archive Books

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In recent decades, artists, photographers, curators, and critics have caught archive fever. Archives and their processes have dominated the discussions in and around photography, with particular consequences for documentary and artistic practices.
Following these debates, Notes on Archives 1: Obtuse, flitting by, and in spite of all—image archives in practice starts with the assumption that an archive today is not only a place of storage but also a place of production, where our relation to the past is materialized and where our present writes itself into the future.
This book explores the difficulties for documentary and artistic practice in and with the archive, and revolves around four key questions: What is the relation between an image and language? What is an author or an owner of an image? What is missing in the archive? And what is an active archive?

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In the process of transferring analog material to digital data banks, small independent archives are often not able to keep up with bigger, economically driven archives, such as stock-image companies.
Notes on Archives 2: Culture Is Our Business considers the case of Willy Römer, who in 1919 took a photograph of the street battles in the media district of Berlin during the German Revolution. Circulating widely throughout the twentieth century, Römer’s photograph in 2004 came to be owned simultaneously by a number of archives.

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The concept of the archive of the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery concentrates on the notion of place rather than on the identity of a photographer or a person being shown. This became the point of departure for the artwork Dear Jadwa, by Ines Schaber. How could one write a history of a place through images? How could one deal with what might be excluded by it? What would happen if there was a need for images that would not fit into the concept of the newly established archive? 
The latter was the case with two photographs of the Arab Ladies’ Union meeting in Jerusalem in 1944, images found originally in the Matson Collection. In Dear Jadwa, both images are shown along with a letter addressed to a woman who is pictured in both. The photographs are accompanied by an interview with Dr. Mustafa Kabha, cocurator of the exhibition and archive “Memories of a Place,” and a text by Schaber reflecting on the making of the archive. 

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Coming from dance, music, film, performance, visual art, and critical theory, nine artists from the UdK Graduate School in Berlin get together to talk concepts and share work. They respond to the sense of despair spreading in times of political backlash: What if it won’t stop here?

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Gentrification is not a law of nature, it is a war against the poor. It is a carefully planned development in cities, where it is welcomed and supported by political actors who prefer wealthy citizens. From 2008 until 2018, Berlin artist Ina Wudtke’s works focused on the displacement of low income tenants from their apartments in the city center, through massive rent hikes and with the help of judicial instruments like the so-called “Modernisierungsklage”, a tool used by landlords to revamp apartments for future high income tenants, or the so-called “Eigenbedarfsklage”, whereby the new owners of former public housing claim occupancy against longterm tenants.

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Labor migration is worldwide creating new models of the transnational family, which despite geographical distances strives to maintain contact between the separated family members. But, how is the relationship between parents and children to be redefined whenever gifts and material support take the place of shared experience? When physical closeness has to take second place to communication programs like Skype and WhatsApp? How does this changing family landscape impact children and their parents? Bitter Things retraces positions on this topic from the 1960s right up to present day perspectives.

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Forty-eight entries are organized alphabetically as a lexicon, each written by various members of the aneducation team and documenta 14 Chorus, as well as curators, artists, and educators who contributed to the program. The publication’s many points of departure present just as many desires for other sites of learning. Cross references among the entries show the deep relationships that existed—and continue to deepen—between the methods, programs, and locations of aneducation.

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When Attitudes Become the Norm is a collection of essays and interviews by art historian and theorist Beti Žerovc on the topic of curatorship in contemporary art. Žerovc examines curatorship in its broader social, political and economic contexts, as well as in relation to the profound changes that have taken place in the art field over the last century. She analyses the curator as a figure who appears, evolves, and participates in the institutionalisation of contemporary art and argues that with the curator institutional art – art designed to fit the art institution’s space and needs – achieves its fullest expression.

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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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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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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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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?