Decolonizing Ethnographic Museums, Film Archives, and Public Space.

Everything Passes Except the Past takes an artistic and discursive approach to coming to grips with a colonial past that remains present in museums, public space, and image archives. The contributions in this book propose visionary theoretical, practical, and ethical foundations for future museums based on artistic and curatorial remediation of ethnographic collections. They also cover the role of colonial films in our collective and national memory, as well as the challenges and perspectives of tearing down or replacing monuments and renaming streets.

Contributions By Yaa Addæ Nantwi, Lotte Arndt, Andrés Antebi Arnó, Bianca Baldi, Daniel Blaufuks, Filipa César, Didi Cheeka, Clémentine Deliss, Karfa Diallo, Sally Fenaux Barleycorn, Alessandra Ferrini, Fradique, Pablo Gonzáles Morandi, Guido Gryseels, Jana J. Haeckel, Didier Houénoudé, Duane Jethro, Christian Kopp, Yann Legall, Alberto López Bargados, Eloy Martín Corrales, Grace Ndiritu, Inês Ponte, Linda Porn, Tamer El Said, Bénédicte Savoy, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Mnyaka Sururu Mboro

The misappropriated notion of care and the paths for its rehabilitation.

The Delusions of Care is a culmination of three long essays that ruminate on notions of care in our contemporary and historically. It is concerned with the appropriation of care by the capitalist establishment as much as supremacists of all kinds. What can we consider as care and who gives care for what reasons. Stuck in the cup de sac of a pandemic that has brought most of the world to its knees, these questions seem of some pertinence. The reflections in this book spanning a critique of care from the regimes of birth control through police brutality to the storming of the Reichstag in the summer of 2020, that very much set precedence to the storming of the Capitol Hill by Trumpists and White supremacists. The book does not only point out the pitfalls of a corrupted notion of care, but tries to offer paths for rehabilitation, restoration, restitution through a non-selfish spirit of care.

Homework by Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks & Astrid Lorange) collects twenty-seven texts written over the course of 2016–2020. Homework considers the manifold ways that embodied life (birth, death, love, friendship, solidarity, race, gender, sexuality, citizenship) are conditioned by a world that appears both ruinous and full of potential. Snack Syndicate asks how to read ruins and how to read the prophecy of hope that threads together a long history of survival and struggle. The book offers a guide for this reading, taking study to be a lifelong practice. It suggests a model for homework as the promise we make to each other through study and to the ghosts who carry us forward.

Introduction by Tom Melick and designed by Robert Milne.

Produced on the occasion of Remco Torenbosch’s exhibition of Growth, 2019 at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen for which Toren­bosch ap­pro­pri­ated a med­i­ta­tion video that he found cir­cu­lating on an in­ternet forum for stock traders. The video shows a mon­tage with a va­riety of flower fields, com­posed in such a way as to glo­rify the beauty of na­ture and ef­fec­tuate re­laxation through dig­ital de­vices. The piece ex­plores how the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of na­ture is cap­i­tal­ized on by the med­i­ta­tion in­dustry, in order to pro­mote better per­for­mance in the work­place.

The vir­tual rep­re­sen­ta­tion of flowers and na­ture and the video’s orig­inal place of cir­cu­la­tion also un­der­line the eternal con­nec­tion be­tween the nat­ural and the fi­nan­cial world: from the very first spec­u­la­tive bubble caused by tulip bulbs in the 17th cen­tury, to dis­aster in­vestors who are cashing in on the eco­log­ical cat­a­stro­phes of the fu­ture.

With a text by Sven Lütticken.

A poem written by the artist for the space of the book composed only of punctuation marks. For about twenty years, Olaf Nicolai (born 1962 in Halle, East Germany, lives and works in Berlin) has been producing conceptual artworks influenced by a philosophical background inherited from its formative years in East Germany, questioning the deadlocks of romanticism and Marxism. Alternating between photography, sculpture, publishing, design, installation and performance, Nicolai creates artistic situations whose purpose is to hijack the production patterns of the industrial world as well as its cultural, financial and social representations.

This publication brings together photographs taken by Marion Scemama during a trip through the American desert with David Wojnarowicz, shortly before his death. It features documents from Scemama’s personal archives and notes from Wojnarowicz’s diary, along with texts by Thibault Boulvain and Elisabeth Lebovici.