The Complex Answer - On Art as a Nonbinary Intelligence
Sternberg Press 2023 ISBN 9781915609175 Acqn 33999
Pb 15x23cm 192pp £18
The Complex Answer presents the reader with a selection of texts-from 2010 to 2021-that
introduce an exercise in how a practice of art and exhibition making has been influenced by
philosophical thinking. One form of thinking oriented towards the production of an epistemological
space where art is not illustrating ideas but enacting thinking and activating experience as an
epistemological force that slowly erodes and, eventually, erases the culture-nature divide.
All the texts have been published before and yet-for the sake of creating a dramaturgy and
stressing the thesis-they have been reedited and partly rewritten. The texts aim to enforce the
idea that art is an intelligence that is influenced by ideas and the emergence of new notions but
also thinking through experience. An experience that is aesthetic and epistemological in equal
terms.
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A Rage in Harlem - June Jordan and Architecture
Sternberg Press 2024 ISBN 9783956796296 Acqn 34179
Pb 11x18cm 96pp ills £12.50
In the tense days leading up to the 2020 American elections, design critic and then-candidate for
Pennsylvania State Senate Nikil Saval addressed a virtual audience at the Harvard GSD to tell a
story about Black feminist writer June Jordan and a little-known project that resulted from the
aftermath of the 1964 Harlem riot. The events of police brutality and community grieving made a
lasting impression on Jordan, who, while known for her work as a poet, playwright, and activist,
responded with a proposal for a multiple-tower housing design. Through an unlikely partnership
with R. Buckminster Fuller, Jordan's "Skyrise for Harlem" project offered a Futuristic vision for
Harlem that argued for environmental redesign: "it is architecture, conceived of in its fullest
meaning as the creation of environment, which may actually determine the pace, pattern, and
quality of living experience." Jordan was not an architect in the conventional sense, Saval says.
"But in the understanding of someone who sought to propose and build interventions in public
space, she was."
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Eva Forest - A Strange Adventure
Sternberg Press 2024 ISBN 9781915609250 Acqn 34130
Pb 12x18cm 160pp £11
Multivocal and anonymous, A Strange Adventure is oral-history-as-theater-the theater of memory,
trauma, and torture. A play with neither named characters nor stage directions, it is a reckoning
with the immediate past: a group of women recount ten days of torture, in 1974, just after the
Spanish state rounded up Basque nationalists and other activists it could conveniently
incarcerate. This stuttering yet lucid text-written by Eva Forest, who was held in Yeserias Prison
in Madrid from 1974 to 1977 without charge or trial-is as urgent today as ever, transcending its
context of Basque struggle and Francoist fascism. Emerging from a space and time that many
prefer to forget, A Strange Adventure is testimony to the resilience, humility, and power of a group
of women who refuse repression, who find life in collectivity, who speak in echoes, silences, and
screams.
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Anton Vidokle - Citizens of the Cosmos
Sternberg Press 2024 ISBN 9781915609151 Acqn 34128
Pb 17x24cm 314pp col ills £21.50
The book's contributors speculate on Vidokle's Cosmist conceptions of technological immortality,
utopian resurrection, museology, and space travel, grappling with how these ideas embroil or
crystallize contemporary theories, practices, and technologies: atmospheric manipulation,
cryonics, biopolitics, extraplanetary prospecting, geo-engineering, transhumanism, genetics.
Franco "Bifo" Berardi disagrees with the Cosmist conjecture of death as a flaw in the conception
of the human being. Elizabeth Povinelli digests the life-nonlife mattering of dust through
relationships to and from the human and more-than-human ancestors to come.
Boris Groys contemplates the gravitational forces between Cosmism and communism according
to cosmic and social orders, grounded as they are in the laws of both physics and socialist
politics. Keti Chukhrov considers the formation of thinking through madness, dying, and
reasoning according to Cosmist philosophical and religious debates and beliefs.
Raqs Media Collective and Anton Vidokle discuss different cultures of death, finitude, and rituals.
Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins examine the in-betweeness of the categories of life and
death through the designs of terraforming vehicles navigating interplanetary space travel.
Daniel Muzyczuk investigates Vidokle's interests in the context of the history of the collection at
the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, while Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle converse about filmmaking
references and methods, from voiceover narrative to editing processes.
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