Essay

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.

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.

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.

How queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state.

The challenges of the library and the photographic collection founded by Aby Warburg in the 1920s, as a "laboratory" for collective research on the forms of transmission of images since Antiquity, and an intermedial device of knowledge. An exceptional case study, driven by the question: what was the impact of photography in Warburg's turning point in the history of art and culture?

The first extensive survey of Nordic art during the transition from postmodernism to what might be called "the period of contemporary art".

The first English language translation of Robert Linhart's The Sugar and the Hunger, originally published in 1980. Includes afterword by Luiz Renato Martins, and other materials.

A trans-theoretical essay: Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux explores the arcana of artists' cult status through a kaleidoscopic series of portraits of "banished" visual artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians and architects, from William S. Burroughs to Jean-Luc Godard via John Cage.

Contemporary art and degrowth.

A study of "spectral" (rather than ghostly) cinema, starting with the film Ringu by Hideo Nakata, as well as a philosophical essay on the haunting of images.

A reflection on the notions of catch and data.

The life and work of the precursor of happening and streaking in Japan, Itoi Kanji (aka Dadakan, 1920-2021): the first comprehensive chrono-biographical study in Western language on the great Japanese Dadaist nudist ascetic, with a rare iconography.

A parallel dive into the images of filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and photographer Sophie Ristelhueber.

The challenges of the library and the photographic collection founded by Aby Warburg in the 1920s, as a "laboratory" for collective research on the forms of transmission of images since Antiquity, and an intermedial device of knowledge. An exceptional case study, driven by the question: what was the impact of photography in Warburg's turning point in the history of art and culture?

Attempting to bridge the gap between specialised scholarship in the humanistic disciplines and an interdisciplinary project of cultural analysis, Mieke Bal has written an intellectual travel guide that charts the course "beyond" cultural studies.

A vast research on the notion of acoustic and sound ecology and its transition to a new sound ecosophy, integrating the multidimensionality of listening to propose to hear differently.

An essay by Robert Bonaccorsi on Gilles Aillaud's highly unusual painting "La bataille du riz", illustrated by a portfolio containing the historical documents mentioned in the text, from museum archives or the author's own collection.

A publication by artist and teacher-researcher Marie Preston on the alternative pedagogies developed in France during the 1970s-1990s in "open" schools working on the question of the relationship between co-creation and co-education.

In Perpetual Slavery, Ciarán Finlayson investigates the relationship of art to freedom in the work of Cameron Rowland and Ralph Lemon, who both utilize imagery of labor haunted and structured by the historical experience of slavery.

An analysis of the true theoretical and commercial system developed by Michel Tapié de Céleyran (1909-1987), who invented his profession of art entrepreneur by combining several activities—art critic, editor, artistic advisor, broker and collector—, contributed to the international destiny of some 200 artists (including Dubuffet, Mathieu, Pollock, Tapiès, Saura, Fontana, and De Kooning) and was at the origin of "Informal Art".

Suspected of having been completely assimilated by the commercial industries, it is not so much against these that art must be defended as against a simplistic narrative imposed by a certain sociology of art. When one is finally interested in the artistic practices themselves, it becomes obvious that the art continues to resist: by its politics of the forms.

On the border between arts and surveillance studies, this book analyzes the technopolitical role of new "machines vision" and considers sousveillance as a democratic counter-power.

What does Bergson bring to the history of the concept of "structure" even before the advent of structuralism? Why is his approach still relevant today? Sébastien Miravete proposes a rereading of Bergsonian philosophy to show how it outlines an other structuralist metaphysics, which can inspire all 21st century thought.

A collection of three new aesthetic essays, between the visual arts and literature, by Belgian philosopher and semiotician Herman Parret: a reflection on the "delicacy" in the various fields of sensoriality (the visible, the sound, the taste and the tactile)—a most suggestive reading for the construction or the development of a sensitive semiotics.

A vast study of the visual culture of industrial music during its development in Europe, the United States and Japan, from the 1970s to the 1990s, a global culture that goes beyond sound experimentation to cross different media (graphics, film, performance, video), in a close dialogue with the heritage of modernity and under the growing influence of technologies.

Two essays by Steven Feld, a leading figure in anthropology and sound studies, that challenge established acoustic perspectives and open up the exciting field of research-composition.

By introducing the main design theories of the twentieth century, Claudia Mareis outlines approaches and models that postulate an expanded notion of design, in connection with the human and technical sciences, as well as with the challenges of a changing society.

Twelve texts on as many architectural masterpieces: pursuing their project to disseminate the work and thought of Livio Vacchini, Caryatide publish a new edition in French of Capolavori, the small (and immense) milestone, full of meaning and poetry, that the architect from Ticino wrote in 2006 just before his death.

The simultaneous emergence of the serial killer and the assembly line as expressions of the rationality of modern production methods.

The most significant critical, theoretical, and art historical texts by the artist, writer, and filmmaker Aria Dean.

Three perspectives (philosophical, sociological and artist's word) on the meaning of the avant-garde, and its relationship to the counter-culture.

An experience of introspection, an epistemological reflection and an act of resistance in the face of depersonalization, around the question of the name.

New media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun exposes her original conception of programming and code, alerts us to the racialization bias, homophily and eugenic tendencies that govern our interactions on platforms, and analyzes the need to call upon the humanities and social sciences in the development of algorithmic models for predicting the evolutions and impacts of climate change.

The first book-length inquiry into the subject of the twisted romantic ballad, giving a sense of both its history and contemporary currency, from Frank Sinatra and Serge Gainsbourg to Kendrick Lamar via Soft Cell or PJ Harvey and Nick Cave.

First Arabic translation of Virginie Despentes' cult book King Kong Theory.

In this essay, Thierry de Duve leaves the aesthetics and history of the art to approach, under the religious prism, two anthropological questions that the mutation of the symbolic order in progress makes pressing: the difference of the sexes and the future of the politics of emancipation.

An artist's guide to copyright, written for makers.

an essay that opposes the discourses of justification led by artists and other agents in the field of art with a materialist conception of the history of cultural institutions. The author argues for an abolitionist approach towards art institutions against more reformist, corporatist and formalist approaches of emancipation that still prevail in the art sector.

A comprehensive overview of performance and action art in Greece, from its origins to the most contemporary practices.

How art and the artist inspire business: an examination of the origins of this relationship from Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol.

In this compelling rethinking of curatorial practice, renowned museum director, curator, and writer Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung proposes that Pidgin languages and pidginization as a mode of being and doing offer a decolonialized reinvention of communicative practices.

An international essay (France, USA, Brazil, etc.) on digital poetry, from the first attempts to generate text on the computer to the most contemporary developments and the problems posed by artificial intelligence.

What comes after end-of-world narratives: visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.

On the aesthetic and intellectual affinities between recent art and conspiracy.