An essential sourcebook on conceptual art's famed champion, reproducing his texts as scans to immerse the reader in this deep archival dive. "Better Read Than Dead" was the title Seth Siegelaub had chosen for an anthology of his own writing—one of the projects for which he never found the time, busy as he was running his global one-man operation. The selected writings, interviews, extended bibliography and chronology in this source book fill historical gaps in the sprawling network of exhibitions, publications, projects, and collections that constitute Siegelaub’s life’s work. "Siegelaubian" paperwork comprises Siegelaub’s writings, which are reproduced as scans in order to convey the variety of the documents and to give a sense of archival immersion. Interspersed with these “writings” are interviews and talks, several newly transcribed. The majority of interviews from 1969-1972 are reprinted here. ↑ ↓ ↓

Eine bittere Liebesgeschichte/Abhandlung vom Überleben als Künstler*in in aktivistischen Zusammenhängen. ↑ ↓ ↓

In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter - with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book - and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists - Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others - in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life. ↑ ↓ ↓

Die RAF 1967-1977 ↑ ↓ ↓

A new wave of artistic activism has emerged in recent years in response to the ever-increasing dominance of authoritarian neoliberalism. Activist practices in the art field, however, have been around much longer. As Oliver Marchart claims, there has always been an activist undercurrent in art. In this book he traces trajectories of artistic activism in theater, dance, performance, and public art, and investigates the political potential of urbanism, curating, and “biennials of resistance.” What emerges is a conflictual aesthetics that does not conform with traditional approaches to the field and that activates the political potential of artistic practice. Oliver Marchart is a political theorist and philosopher. He is currently professor of political theory at the University of Vienna. His books include Post-foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (2007), Thinking Antagonism: Political Ontology after Laclau (2018), and the forthcoming Post-foundational Theories of Democracy: Reclaiming Freedom, Equality, Solidarity. ↑ ↓ ↓

Every living thing has two bodies. To be an animal is to be in possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be embedded in a worldwide network of ecosystems. When every human body has an uncanny global presence, how do we live with ourselves? In this timely and elegant essay, Daisy Hildyard captures the second body by exploring how the human is a part of animal life. She meets Richard, a butcher in Yorkshire, and sees pigs turned into boiled ham; and Gina, an environmental criminologist, who tells her about leopards and silver foxes kept as pets in luxury apartments. She speaks to Luis, a biologist, about the origins of life; and talks to Nadezhda about fungi in an effort to understand how we define animal life. Eventually, her second body comes to visit her first body when the river flooded her home last year. The Second Body is a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth. ↑ ↓ ↓

In Not to Read, Alejandro Zambra outlines his own particular theory of reading that also offers a kind of blurry self-portrait, or literary autobiography. Whether writing about Natalia Ginzburg, typewriters and computers, Paul Léautaud, or how to be silent in German, his essays function as a laboratory for his novels, a testing ground for ideas, readings and style. Not to Read also presents an alternative pantheon of Latin American literature – Zambra would rather talk about Nicanor Parra than Pablo Neruda, Mario Levrero than Gabriel García Márquez. His voice is that of a trusted friend telling you about a book or an author he’s excited about, how he reads, and why he writes. A standard-bearer of his generation in Chile, with Not to Read Alejandro Zambra confirms he is one of the most engaging writers of our time. ↑ ↓ ↓

In seinem Buch untersucht Achille Mbembe ein Phänomen, das sich in unserem globalen Zeitalter ständig rekonfiguriert: die Feindschaft. Ausgehend von den psychiatrischen und politischen Einsichten Frantz Fanons, zeigt Mbembe, wie als Folge der Konflikte um die Entkolonialisierung des 20. Jahrhunderts der Krieg – in Gestalt von Eroberung und Besatzung, von Terror und Revolte – zur Signatur unserer Zeit geworden ist. Als auf Dauer gestellter Ausnahmezustand führt er zur Erosion der liberalen Demokratie. Mbembes hochaktueller Essay spürt der Konsequenz dieser Erosion nach: der Ausbreitung autoritärer Regierungsformen. Er beschreibt die Bedingungen, unter denen heute die Fragen zum Verhältnis von Recht und Gewalt, Normalität und Ausnahmezustand, Sicherheit und Freiheit gestellt werden. Mit Blick auf die globalen Migrationsströme und das damit einhergehende unvermeidliche Zusammenwachsen der Welt formuliert er eine scharfe Kritik am atavistischen Nationalismus und plädiert für eine neue Politik der Humanität. ↑ ↓ ↓

Iman Mersal intricately weaves a new narrative of motherhood, moving between interior and exterior scapes, diaries, readings, and photographic representations of motherhood to question old and current representations of motherhood and the related space of unconditional love, guilt, personal goals, and traditional expectations. What is hidden in narratives of motherhood in fictional and nonfictional texts as well as in photographs? This is the fourth book in the Kayfa ta series, a publishing initiative of Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis. Each book in the series is a monographic essay commissioned in the style of how-to manuals that situation themselves in the space between the technical and the reflective, the everyday and the speculative, the instructional and the intuitive, and the factual and the fictional. Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet and associate professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. ↑ ↓ ↓

Wir können die extreme Armut in der Welt abschaffen: nicht erst in ferner Zukunft, sondern bereits in unserer Gegenwart. So lautet die Überzeugung von Jeffrey Sachs, eines der bedeutendsten Ökonomen der Welt. Er beschreibt in 18 Kapiteln anhand konkreter Beispiele, wie auch die Menschen der ärmsten Länder am wirtschaftlichen Wohlstand beteiligt werden können. Ausgehend von der ökonomischen und sozialen Lage in den verschiedensten Regionen zeigt Sachs den aktuellen Entwicklungsstand und zugleich Lösungsansätze für die verschiedenen Krisen auf. Sachs versteht es, lebendige Schilderungen seiner persönlichen Erfahrungen mit einer scharfen ökonomischen Analyse zu verbinden. Er zeigt, dass der Kampf gegen die Armut nicht nur eine moralische Verpflichtung ist, sondern auch existenzielle Bedeutung für die reichen Volkswirtschaften hat. ↑ ↓ ↓