Had it been produced, Maryanne Amacher’s media opera Intelligent Life would have represented the summation of the composer’s concept to date. As she wrote to John Cage in the autumn of 1983, following the untimely deaths of the opera’s patrons—Wies Smals, founder of De Appel, and curator Josine van Droffelaar, in a plane crash in the Swiss Alps—she would have at last had the support to “communicate the finest of my thought to others.” Amacher’s serial, intended for broadcast, sought to transmit her evolving ideas about perception, listening, and composition to a broader public—shifting music away from “nod and tap recognition” toward a transformative practice that could awaken intelligence to “unrecognized and new perceptual modes.”

Correspondences: de Appel 1975–2025 traces the activities of de Appel through letters, telegrams, airmail, postcards, faxes, and emails, sent to and by de Appel. The book features materials by more than a hundred different authors and includes paper-based and digital correspondence by, amongst many others, Laurie Anderson, James Lee Byars, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, General Idea, Mona Hatoum, Patricia Kaersenhout and Carolee Schneemann. Context is provided by written guest contributions by Alice Butler, Alison Burstein, Annet Dekker, Susan Gibb and Brian Fuata and de Appel’s archivist Nell Donkers. An edition by Alison Knowles in the shape of a ribbon forms a special prompt to the reader of the book.

Edited by Martha Jager & Hannah Cheney. Designed by Bardhi Haliti & Zuzana Kostelanská.

Produced on the occasion of Thomas Schütte’s exhibition The Laundry Mohr’s Life at Portikus, Frankfurt, 17 June–3 September, 1989 and de Appel, Amsterdam, 26 August–23 September, 1989.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

Memorial edition produced on the 10 year anniversary of the deaths of Wies Smals, Josine van Droffelaar, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Martin Barkhuis and Hendrik Smals in a plane crash.

“This is a facsimile of a small aluminum tag which reads ‘Aanwezig’ (Present) on one side, and ‘Afwezig’ (Absent) on the other. It was found at an airport for private planes in Holland in May of 1983. These tags hung on hooks under the names of pilots who frequented that airport, indicating their presence or absence. I was moved to take one, and have had it on my desk ever since.”

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

Produced on the occasion of the performance of Partial Eclipse at de Appel Amsterdam, 25 April–10 May, 1980.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

Produced on the occasion of Jean-Marc Bustamante’s exhibition at de Appel, 17 March–22 April, 1990. With a text from Saskia Bos, designed by Irma Boom.