We started making machines together in 2010. These machines consisted of a sensor and device couplet, by which a sensor would trigger a device to perform a simple task. We experimented with sensor inputs like passing cars and tasks like heat guns blowing up trash bags, or later we would connect the machines to trains and have them push little cardboard cars back and forth. Still triggered by trains, the machines now move clock parts.

We disassemble mechanical clocks, take their parts and combine them with L-brackets, screws, washers, nuts, motors, felt, rubber bands, fishing line, and heat shrink tubing. The characteristics of the clock parts constrain and guide our activities. As we reinvent their function, the parts become less and less recognizable, their movements more and more estranged.

—Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, 2023

Bar of soap as part of the exhibition Cut a Door in the Wolf by Jason Dodge at MACRO, Rome, 11 November, 2021–16 March, 2022.

Marina Xenofontos collects and catalogues the musings of an otherwise unknown inventor known as Christophoros Kyriakides. Born in Cyprus in 1949, he invented a board game called Six Continents Stars Compass that received little recognition and was printed in a very small number of editions. By chance encounter, Xenofontos stumbled across the game, and thus started a practice-based research into the inventor’s impressive archive—documented here in photocopies of complex scribbles, diagrams and drawings. Edition of 150.

Sven Stilinović was still a schoolboy when he started exhibiting with the Group of Six Artists on the streets of Zagreb in 1975. Photographic enlargements of small collages in which he recycled fragments of older photographs and tiny objects, as well as series where photographs of garbage interchange in a photographic sequence with photographs of cluttered shops raise the issue of photographic motif, while in “Comparison of the development of painting and non-development of photography” (1975) he concludes that that which is offered as a history of photography does not lead to its openness and creativity.

With texts from Ivana Bago, Branko Cerovac, Suzana Marjanić, Vlado Martek, Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Branka Stipančić, Raša Todosijević, Goran Trbuljak.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition R. H. Quaytman: Modern Subjects, Chapter Zero at Wiels, Brussels, 10 September, 2021–30 January, 2022, which explored Brussels’ artistic history and, more specifically, the relationship to power of some of the artists with whom the artist shares an affinity, such as Magritte and Broodthaers. In preparatory research, Quaytman came across the painter Antoine Wiertz and his personal museum, which is now nestled in the heart of the European Quarter. With its unique and spectacular hanging, this museum bears witness to the golden age of monumental painting, which was in the throes of decline in the face of photography and film. Wiertz sought to compensate for this waning with an overabundance of moralising subjects condemning injustice and inequality. He depicted chilling scenes of poverty, war, suicide, or cholera.

Designed by Goda Budvytytė.

The story of failure asks one question only: What do people who lose do next? “Let the best one win.” War is one way. The other way is religion. Let me at the stakes. It’s so much a matter of patience. No fury, beyond all reason, no sequence broken, but diverted. Nothing seems to cooperate when you lose control. Blue becomes violet. Bend your head to the blank. The solution is so simple: don’t identify yourself with your description of yourself.

Fanny Howe was professor emerita in literature at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of more than fifty books of poetry and prose. Howe taught literature and writing throughout her life and mentored a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical thinking. She died on 8 July 2025 in Lincoln, Massachusetts.