Essay

A wide-ranging study of the visual and theoretical practice of Anni Albers, a pivotal figure between two continents and two modernities, as part of a general history of art, design and textile production in the European and American women's avant-gardes.

A philosophical reflection on the place of sound, from musical aesthetics to sound habitat, at the crossroads of sound, music and technology studies, and phenomenology.

If discourse is the foundation of democracy, how can the design of our cities empower and enable discourse? In 1981, Richard Sennett delivered six lectures about this relationship, and issued a call to action that remains relevant today.

An essay-length book arguing for the autonomy of art in the present.

A theory of passive vitalism.

Jean-Christophe Thomas analyzes François Bayle's complete work in 52 recurring features (book augmented with 151 sound examples to download).

This book brings together Bernhard Rüdiger's theoretical texts on the questions of language and form in contemporary art, seen from the perspective of the possibility of thinking them within the paradigm of shock or awe.

A history of stupidity (deliberate and sometimes even claimed), regression and superficiality in the arts.

The notion of primitivism rethought to highlight the role of the African referent in the development of the artistic and literary avant-garde in Europe.

Parker and Pollock's seminal volume of feminist art history.

The first attempt to map that ensemble of subcultures, popular narratives, and visual and auditory languages we now recognize as "internet aesthetics".

A stunning look at Stravinski's The Rite of Spring, recreated by choreographer Dominique Brun with thirty dancers in 2013.

Art, empathy and political solidarity.

The Significance and Relevance of Early Modern Indian Painters to the Contemporary Indian Art, written in 1971, reevaluates the legacies of painting inherited by the artist Nilima Sheikh.

Indian artist Kiran Subbaiah reevaluates the history of Modernism, through its ideals of growth and progress, as one steeped in contradictions around industrialisation and its effects on society.

How does the world—and the world of visual culture in particular—creates itself in a creative act that knows no economic return.

An interdisciplinary investigation by French-Bulgarian visual artist Iglika Christova, an explorer of the microcosm, into the relationship between the mechanisms of the living world and drawing.

The story/manifesto of an architect's life: a re-reading of Gilles Perraudin's career by himself, enabling us to retrace the path of a thought in perpetual motion.

In the first monograph on the feminist conceptual artist collective Claire Fontaine, political theorist and somatic practitioner Anita Chari explores the artist's theoretical and political innovations to illuminate a more haptic, embodied approach to the practice of critical theory.

This monographic essay explores Iris Clert, an unclassifiable and emblematic figure of the 1960s artistic avant-garde.

A philosophico-cinematographic journey through Fassbinder's filmic oeuvre, from the avant-garde daring of 1968 to the fallout of the leaden years ten years later.

A chronicle of the recent transformations of art schools, from the point of view of a teacher, at a time when these spaces are both threatened by increasingly fragile and uncertain public policy management, and at the same time more than ever spaces where the word opens up, practices change and art finds itself in direct contact with the most avant-garde movements in society.

Three texts by Michel Guérin on the notions of ornament and decoration, at the crossroads of theological, anthropological, aesthetic and philosophical considerations.

The first French translation of the texts of the Japanese artist and writer Akasegawa Genpei (Katsuhiko Akasegawa, aka Otsuji Katsuhiko, 1937-2014), a figure of the Tokyo avant-garde of the 1960s, on the concept of Tomason, with a rich iconography.

An overview of the use of textile in contemporary visual arts around the world.

An audacious account of the ways in which the arts in the Americas were modernized during the first half of the 20th century.

Where sounding is understood as an exhibition of activity, vitality, and power, Nina Dragičević proposes that we analyse sonic phenomena in econo-political terms.

A collection of early texts by Reiner Schürmann, on religion, Zen, language, Eckhart and Heidegger.

How do we perceive and think about the infrastructures that condition the ways in which we perceive, think and experience our world? Four essays by Jamie Allen, whose experiments as artist and researcher cross media, disciplines and borders, that invite us to make visible the backstage work of the digitized world, and to think (post)critically about the very notion of critique.

Charles Fourier or utopia as reality.

An experimental fictional ("post-apocalyptic") anthropology of philosophy, focusing on the dialectic of master and slave, itself understood as myth.

The first book to draw a comprehensive cartography of the relationship between visual arts and digital culture since the early 2000s, tracing the history of memes "from Duchamp to TikTok."

Two essays by psychoanalysts Angelo Antonio Moroni and Pietro Roberto Goisis on Rachel Whiteread's singular project and experience in Bergamo, Italia.

A genuine investigation, in the opposite direction to the narrative imposed by art historians, of artistic, cultural and political developments in the Western world after the Second World War, between Paris and New York.

The Monadic Age unfolds in thirty-three autonomous—monadic—essays on topics as diverse as environmentalism, terrorism, geopolitics, housing, the metaverse, nonbinarism, language, charity, euthanasia, identity politics, tattoos, ableism, AI, birthrates, war, religion, sex, and art.

How architecture powered European energy politics in the postwar era and paved the way for today's dependency on coal, steel, and nuclear power.

Toward a Transindividual Self examines the process of performing the self, distinctive for the formation of the self in Western neoliberal societies in the 21st century. It approaches the self from a transdisciplinary angle where political and cultural anthropology, performance studies, and dramaturgy intersect.

Jesús María Aparicio Guisado expounds here his conception of architecture by exploring the notion of the wall in four major buildings through drawing and words.

A critical and ethical reflection on contemporary art and ecology, based on long-term research into the work of some twenty international artists committed to environmental issues.

The most comprehensive case study ever written on the crucial subject of text typography, by one of the major representatives of this discipline.

An in-depth historical study of the artistic and political project of the Situationist International (1952-1972).

Dancer and playwright Esther Meunier Corfdyr ventures into sleeping territories.

From the negative hands on the walls of the Chauvet caves (minus 30,000 years ago) to the most recent experiments of a number of contemporary artists, an entire history of art can be written under the prism of breathing. Between these two milestones, this study attempts to highlight the innovative force of breath and the importance accorded to breathing as a creative gesture and artwork on its own.