Sweet Sixties is a long-term trans-regional research initiative working between art, research, media, and educational contexts in Europe, the Middle East, western and central Asia, Latin America, and northern Africa. Involving a particular group of experimentally oriented arts and research groups as well as individual artists, researchers, and media, Sweet Sixties investigates hidden histories or underexposed cultural junctions and exchange channels in the revolutionary period of the 1960s.

In the 1960s, the landscapes and cities of protectorates and former colonies from India to the Maghreb, from the Soviet Republics to the new states in the southern hemisphere were replete with the spirit and forms of modernity, forms that transmogrify and then dissolve into the thin air of the vernacular. The air of the 1960s echoes a spirit of emancipation. And the newly arising art-scapes are interspersed with double agents: diasporas bring their academies; the streams between Soviet, North and South American, Western European, Non-Aligned, etc., are full of interlocutions, hidden pathways, and narratives of trade routes beyond the seemingly stable hegemonies of the blocs. The stories and spirits of a parallel avant-garde, whose silhouettes have yet to be found on the walls of the Western canon, are the theme of this publication.

An exchange of letters; two mother tongues; two ways to tell a story. What happened during the week-long meetings in 1972 organized by the MLF (Mouvement de libération des femmes) and Psychoanalyse et Politique (which formed in 1968 in Paris), which were attended by some of the women who went on to found The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. These encounters gave rise to a series of practices that continue to distinguish the Italian movement. The publication Two Voices offers an opening into this story.

Haris Epaminonda uses video and film, collage, photography, books and objects in an extensive process of assembling and disassembling appropriated materials to reconstruct non-linear narratives. The artist works with found images from the past – sometimes faded travel photographs, or the pages of old nature magazines, ethnographic artifacts or footage from forgotten television programmes. Epaminonda then manipulates the images, cutting and layering, to create new works that feel wholly part of the present.

In tracing some of the notions and narratives embedded in Chapters, a 16 mm film shot in Cyprus in 2012, the idea of making a book came about as an exercise, or rather an experiment, to deconstruct the film into some of its subject matters. Embarking on a new set of associations between image and subject, source and information, meaning and abstraction, this book is both a document and a memory map, tracing the beginnings of a thought, a time, an image, a place.

Chapters I–XXX is published and presented in conjunction with the exhibitions Haris Epaminonda. Chapter IV at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, 14 March–18 May 2014; Haris Epaminonda. Vol. XIV at Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia, 25 March–18 May, 2014.