Shadow Architecture: Part I. Street Vending

Book published by The Other Space Foundation (2013)

Shadow Architecture. Part I. Street Vending is the first text in a series about art&architecture, informal economy, street trade and vendors, and their role in shaping modern cities all over the world ... [more ▼]

Shadow Architecture. Part I. Street Vending is the first text in a series about art&architecture, informal economy, street trade and vendors, and their role in shaping modern cities all over the world. Project developed by Aleksandra Wasilkowska in cooperation with The Other Space Foundation / Fundacja Inna Przestrzeń. Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the City of Warsaw. Coordination: Julia Missala, Proofreading - Polish version: Monika Buraczyńska, cooperation: Katarzyna Kolibabska Proofreading - English version: Anna Krawczyk, assistance: Monika Heppner Translation: Anna Artymiuk, Maciej Graca, Małgorzata Nowicka, Ewa Talewska, Łukasz Witczak, Lidex [less ▲]

Institutions by Artists

Book published by Fillip Editions (2013)

Artist-run initiatives in North America provide a space for the presentation and legitimization of experimental work and for the assertion of socially progressive and politically radical ideas and ... [more ▼]

Artist-run initiatives in North America provide a space for the presentation and legitimization of experimental work and for the assertion of socially progressive and politically radical ideas and questions. In making such spaces available, artist-run initiatives have operated alternately as flash points for heated debates and controversies, as well as platforms for social understanding. Institutions by Artists: Volume One presents a collection of texts addressing the performance and promise of contemporary global artist-run centres and initiatives within the historical contexts that saw their emergence. The texts address centres in Amman (Jordan), Brisbane (Australia), Vancouver (Canada), Zurich (Switzerland), Tokyo (Japan), and Barcelona (Spain), among others. The book is published as part of Fillip’s ongoing Folio Series, which presents anthologies of new and previously published essays on international contemporary art. [less ▲]

Institutional Attitudes Instituting Art in a Flat World

Book published by Valiz (2013)

Today's networked society offers us many possibilities for transmitting information, for interactive communication, mobility and flexibility. It also has a latent side effect: it renders the world 'flat ... [more ▼]

Today's networked society offers us many possibilities for transmitting information, for interactive communication, mobility and flexibility. It also has a latent side effect: it renders the world 'flat.' Time-honored hierarchies, traditions, elites and canons are subject to the challenge of eroding movements. In such a flattened, horizontal world, art institutions are finding it hard to survive. After all, institutions traditionally represent verticality: historic profundity, tradition, dignity and certainty. In Institutional Attitudes, Kenny Cupers, Bart De Baere, Ann Demeester, Jimmie Durham, Alex Farquharson, Mark Fisher, Pascal Gielen, Marc Jacobs, Sonja Lavaert, Thijs Lijster, Isabell Lorey, Markus Miessen, Chantal Mouffe, Gerald Raunig, Patricia Reed, Nicolaus Schafhausen and Blake Stimson explore the future identity of art institutions. Will they be able to reinvent historical profundity? Is this desirable? And if so, what would these new vertical institutions look like? [less ▲]

Design Anthropology 2013 Peter Lang Edited by Yana Milev

Book published by Peter Lang (2013)

«D.A.» represents a cultural science handbook of «Design Anthropology», providing an epistemology, phenomenology and survey of the varieties of the extended concept of design. Here the design concept is ... [more ▼]

«D.A.» represents a cultural science handbook of «Design Anthropology», providing an epistemology, phenomenology and survey of the varieties of the extended concept of design. Here the design concept is placed at the centre of the nexus of meaning of cultural production that rests on the three pillars Segno, Mythus and Techne. Anthropological design research is trans-disciplinary, developing in the connexion between Visual Culture (signal, in/visibility, image/void, imagination, representation), Doing Culture (act, cooperation, relation, fabrication, exchange), Material Culture (object, artefact, thing, facing, texture), Knowledge Culture (techniques, practices, norms, beliefs, values), Narrative Culture (mythology, significance, meaning, memory, identity), Critical Culture (watching, criterion, antagonism, crisis, theory) and Aesthetic Culture (emotion, sentiment, taste, feel, sense). It is only against this background that the complex anthropological dimension of Design Culture can be understood, extending far beyond the horizon of a design science concept of design, industry-near design thinking and marketing, or a product-oriented concept of manufacture. «Design Anthropology» is the research field of the «Coming Community», which has been founded here with a «D.A.» fraternity of more than 100 contributions, partners and friends. Through «D.A.» Yana Milev has formulated the theoretical and curatorial foundation for an extended concept of design that she has been representing and practicing since the 1990s in the context of the arts, rendering it now as «Anthropo Design». [less ▲]

Attimi Fondamentali

Book published by Mousse Publishing (2013)

"Inhabiting different roles – such as writer, photographer, performer, musician, designer, sculptor – for Riccardo Benassi seems to be a productive and genuine method to meet people, to open up the ... [more ▼]

"Inhabiting different roles – such as writer, photographer, performer, musician, designer, sculptor – for Riccardo Benassi seems to be a productive and genuine method to meet people, to open up the spectrum of possibilities for new encounters, collaborations, and productions. The gap, the interstice, is the territory for his actions. 
It seems evident that, today, one's role as a hermetic professional has become, at least in the field of cultural production, increasingly insignificant. What counts, at the end of the day, is a recognizable product, whether this is an actual artwork, a book, a building, a conference, or a curated show. The question, however, that arises is what are the mechanisms that make this work possible, what are the variables that have produced this work and how can one generate an integrated distribution of its core idea and knowledge, which has been produced along its becoming." (Markus Miessen, excerpt from Never Take Final Sides. On Riccardo Benassi's Practice, 2012) Published for his solo show at Museo Marino Marini in Florence, Attimi Fondamentali by Riccardo Benassi develops through heterogeneous contributions and reflections – provided for the occasion by the writer and philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi, the architects Gian Piero Frassinelli and Markus Miessen, the artist Liam Gillick and the chief curator of the Florentine institution, Alberto Salvadori – that attempt to challenge a technicist, professionalizing view of the role of the artist. The triggering of these mechanisms is based on the artist’s desire to activate experiences through which freedom of thought and action can move towards new experiential limits, as the most effective tool – in Benassi’s view – for artistic expression and investigation. [less ▲]

Spike – art quarterly no. 32 Der Crossbench-Praktiker

in Spike (2012), 32

Zeit Online Albtraum Partizipation

in Zeit Online Albtraum Partizipation (2012)

Fluor no. 1 Indignattion and post-politics

in Fluor (2012), 1

NIKOLAUS HIRSCH, MARKUS MIESSEN (EDS.) What Is Critical Spatial Practice?

Book published by Sternberg Press (2012)

In September 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen invited protagonists from the fields of architecture, art, philosophy, and literature to reflect on the single question of what, today, can be ... [more ▼]

In September 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen invited protagonists from the fields of architecture, art, philosophy, and literature to reflect on the single question of what, today, can be understood as a critical modality of spatial practice. Most of the sixty-four contribu­tions presented in this volume were composed concurrently with the evictions of many of the Occupy movements, sustained turmoil in countries of the Arab Spring, and continued spasms in the global financial system, which, interestingly, all pointed at the question and problematic of whether archi­tecture and our physical environment can still be understood as a res publica. A response by the editors takes the form of a conversation. This book is first in a series on critical spatial practice developed alongside the Städelschule program of the same name. Each edition includes work by invited artists—the first includes newly commissioned work by the photographer Armin Linke, who documented the Occupy camp around the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. [less ▲]

mountainislandglacier

Book published by Broken Dimanche (2012)

After a game-changing year when Europe, in all its tangible and intangible consequences reached far and wide, BDP are proud to announce one of our most ambitious compilations of art, writing and ... [more ▼]

After a game-changing year when Europe, in all its tangible and intangible consequences reached far and wide, BDP are proud to announce one of our most ambitious compilations of art, writing and investigation on our contemporary’s troubled, shape-shifting realities. In a unique dual book publication (English/Spanish editions) edited by the group ‘Correspondence from Eyjafjallajökull’ the book contains the artistic results and research of the group, along with eleven probing and insightful carefully selected ‘collaborations’. These diverse entries take many forms, including fiction, essay, polemnic, After working together as a research group centering around the event that was Eyjafjallajökull in May 2010, ‘Correspondence from Eyjafjallajökull’ went about re-examining the idea of Europe. With no air traffic possible, Europe found itself connected in a very physical way, a unity that is the opposite in many ways of how ‘Europe’ has been so recently conceived. Through various forms of artistic research and development new, kaleidoscopic perspectives of Europe came about, moving from peripheries such as Turkey and Iceland itself, moving inward to the imaginative world of European identity creation. [less ▲]