Essay

The Photograph Looked Back at Me is a series of prose miniatures, each born from an image the author cannot turn away from: a ghostly plant printed in a book about Chernobyl; a miner's face obscured by smoke, hanging in a Kyiv gallery; a picture of Katja Petrowskaja's parents, from an old family album.

Reflections on the conditions of contemporary exile, refugeehood, migration, and community building at the margins of society.

How the transition to fossil fuels entailed an intensification of ongoing processes of racialization.

Karenna Gore posits a future for the design practices that works within the living and intelligent design of Earth.

A personal reflection on fragmentation, language, and place.

A reflection on the autonomy and eternity of art by Canadian writer Madeleine Thien, based on a mural in the Thousand Buddha Grottoes of Bezeklik, China.

The edition offers a new approach to what Ines Weizman names "documentary architecture," meaning that to write about the history of a building is also to map the world in which it is located.

The origins, scope, and legacy of Duchamp's revolution in the visual arts.

Sylvia Sasse explores and analyzes subversive affirmation as a critical practice in different political systems.

A counter-history of contemporary art, where experience becomes form, and aesthetics is redefined as a radical relationship with the living.

A genealogy of the modern artist.

An expansive, wide-ranging exploration of the long, little-known prehistory of contemporary media.

An insect theory of media to understand our media devices and our technological modernity.

A powerful and highly original psychoanalytical, philosophical, and political exploration of the dimensions of sensitivity, the unconscious, and psychedelia in the context of an experience based on medicinal plants (peyote, mushrooms, and ayahuasca) and psychotropic drugs, in the wake of Félix Guattari's thinking.

On the forms of sabotage, insubordination, and invisible activity that evade the terrain of politics.

An essay by Alexandra Midal on visual learning experiences through images, based on two revolutionary projects by major 20th-century designers: Charles & Ray Eames, Georges Nelson and Alexander Girard, and Ken Isaacs.

An intellectual portrait of a major figure in 20th-century architecture.

Three essays in which philosopher Étienne Balibar questions the notion of war through the thinking of Simone Weil, Carl von Clausewitz, and Karl Marx, as well as the current geopolitical situation and the war in Ukraine.

A reflection on our present, through a series of portraits of contemporary artists.

Art as a set of practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context: the manifesto that has renewed the approach of contemporary art (also available in English edition).

A radicant thought extended to modes of cultural production, consumption and use, against the multiculturalist critical model.

D. N. Rodowick examines the complex relationships between contemporary art and cinema, around questions of movement, image, time, and history.

An essay on the figure of the writer-

The choreographic in cinema.

A highly personal reflection on the practice, teaching, and very essence of architecture and design.

Exploring the contemporary art scene in Cambodia, Soko Phay examines modes of representing extremes and shows how memorial works prompt reflection on the profound scars left by the Cambodian genocide on society.

A meditative reflection by the Lebanese artist and writer on language and its loss.

Colonial images, educational images. A major study in art history in which Sophie Leclercq, drawing on and analyzing multiple sources, texts, and visual documents, sheds light on a blind spot in French colonialism: how, between 1870 and 1960, children were taught about colonial conquest through edifying imagery, and how their view of colonized populations was shaped?

Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa revisits a sequence of Morocco's cultural history: the encounter of two anthropologists and the intersecting history of their approaches to popular and traditional art objects.

An artistic exploration of the political and emotional stakes of translation in the context of asylum law, through the lens of rarely heard testimonies: those of interpreters.

A delightful dive, both documentary and imaginary, into a dreamlike and cult horror cinema in the southern United States.

A groundbreaking study on the relationship between Wassily Kandinsky, pioneer of abstract art, and the photographic image.

Over a decade’s worth of essays: movies of America in parallax view.

Architect Mark Lee presents a body of work on the basis of five considerations: on history, on cadence, on autonomy, on America, and on point.

The new information regimes and document uses created by four major figures in the art world between the 1960s and 1970s—Germano Celant, Lucy R. Lippard, and Carla Lonzi, curators and art critics, as well as Seth Siegelaub

How does photography depict our environment? How does it contribute to its destruction? This book explores this paradox through the analysis of the work of fifteen contemporary artists.

A non-relationalist anthropological approach to singularity.

On the occasion of Seasons, Maurizio Cattelan's exhibition at GAMeC, art historian Lisa Parola, investigates how contemporary art can redefine the idea of the monument.

"Para- hosting" as a cooperative methodology for arts institutions.

An artistic stroll with Vanessa Morisset.

Eiscafé Europa is a cartwheeling essay collection by Enis Maci on the culture, media, and politics of Europe. Comprehensive in its targets, the author mixes the personal and political to skewer and expose the media strategies and fascist lineage of the Identitarian Movement.

When considered in parallel, Sigmund Freud's study of Michelangelo's Moses and his private collection of antique statuettes reveal elements of visual psychoanalysis that contradict the supposedly iconoclastic nature of this science.

A history of art in France from the women's perspective.

Maria Clara Araújo dos Passos examines the interplay of education, identity, and liberation in Brazil's travesti community.

The act of translation as a pedagogical tool, a political act, and ultimately a gesture of care in these tense cultural times.

First published in 1998, Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics laid out a thesis for art's turn towards participation, experience, and the whole of human relations. Over twenty years after its original release, Relational Aesthetics has been updated with a new translation by Denyse Beaulieu and a new foreword by the author.

The first French translation of Giorgio Grassi's 1967 text La construction logique de l'architecture [The Logical Construction of Architecture] is a strong statement in favor of an architecture conceived for its own sake, standing in opposition to the experimental excesses characteristic of both his time and ours.