Essay

The social, historical and cultural dimensions of the skin in Brazilian art and literature.

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.

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

Marion Laval-Jeantet's research into therapeutic care continues her work with Benoît Mangin under the name of Object-Oriented Art on microbiota, at the crossroads of scientific art, biology, anthropology, psychology and ethology.

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.

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.

A serious diagnosis of the current form of capital, a profound excavation and presentation of the most important and helpful ideas that Jean Baudrillard published: from the unravelling of western philosophy, to a redefining of marxist theories of economics and capital, to a shift in critical theory that complies with quantum theory. 

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."

An essay on the new challenges facing exhibition curators.

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.

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.