This edition of ZIGG is interested in exploring sex as an evolutionary psychology. It brings together contributions from a network of friends, peers, colleagues who have engaged or encountered the makers of ZIGG through intellectual, psychosexual vibrations. It includes text messages, illustrations, drawings, poetry, code, conversation, rants, and essays.
Contributors: Hala Bint, Alex Cecchetti, Common Accounts, Kelly Fliedner, Chitra Ganesh, Drew Gordon, Margaret Haines, Raja’a Khalid and Ahmad Makia, Amanda Lee Koe, and Deepak Unnikrishnan.
ZIGG is a publishing association engaged in critical thinking from Dubai. It circulates amorphous aesthetics, printed matters, and promotes the disciplinary blurring between sex, media, earth matter, magic, and politics.
“Potpuri” is a collaborative publication of Termokiss Community Center (Prishtina, Kosovo) and the Master in Transdisciplinarity of the Zurich University of the Arts (Switzerland) which is published as a printed magazine and a website (www.termokissresearch.club).
Project Team: Argnes Ahmeti, Thassiannira Araujo Sousa, Bujar Aruqaj, Ardita Avdija, Rozafa Basha, Caroline Baur, Anna Bertram, Frederic Bron, Lea Burkhalter, Mara Djukaric, Njomza Dragusha, Fisnik Eger, Niştiman Erdede, Hannah Essler, Nicole Frei, Christian Gieben, Sofia Hachemi, Ervina Halili, Etrit Hasler, Valentin Hehl, Adelina Ismaili, Tinka Kelmendi, Diona Kusari, Ludwig Lederer, Nora Longatti, Roxani Marty Pavlaki, Kushtrim Memeti, Elisa Pezza, Merlin Pohl, Era Qena, Jan Reimann, Marcel Rickli , Basil Rogger, Tosca Salihu, Jehisson Santacruz Giraldo, Shpat Shkodra, Tobias Stumpp, Endrit Tasholli, Paula Thomaka, Arian Vula, Judith Weidmann, Wiebke Wiesner.
Contributors: Thassiannira Araujo Sousa, Ardita Avdija, Frederick Bron, Njomza Dragusha, Fisnik Eger, Niştiman Erdede, Hannah Essler, Fabian Gutscher, Emanuel Haab, Adelina Ismaili, Tinka Kelmendi, Nikola Koruga, Diona Kusari, Nora Longatti, Roxani Marty Pavlaki, Elisa Pezza, Era Qena, Marcel Rickli, Shpat Shkodra, Endrit Tasholli, Arian Vula, Judith Weidmann.
With KORAZON, we want to dive into topics previously discussed by Amauta’s writers within the current context of cultural activities no longer being subsidized by the government, but rather turned into for-profit projects. In this mag, we want to show how crucial identity and collective culture are to a country and how important it is to invest in us as a multicultural territory. This platform’s aim is to bring attention to issues that affect us as Peruvians, especially those that we hardly emphasize and pinpoint as oppressive or holding us back as a community.
A River “The story here is that nothing happens. There is no resolution. Things disappear. People disappear. The earth changes. I wake up to write.” Lisa Robertson pens a narrative, part of an untitled novel in progress, about decline and invisibility as freedom. It centers on an aesthetics of decay, bodily and urban, through memories of water—specifically the flooding and ebbing of the Bièvre river.
The Depression Artist Through a writing process that offers a fractal poetics of AI and a glimpse into the future of literature, K Allado-McDowell and GPT-3—the latter an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text—coauthor a satirical account of an artist who, having abandoned their brushes in favor of NFTs, finds themselves stuck in a reclusive and stale existence until an unidentified, rhythmic pulse rouses them.
Basement Jazz In building an imaginary milieu for Dora Budor’s practice, Marina Vishmidt is drawn to the category of “infrastructure,” in the sense of both artists who poeticize or pattern voids into significant structure, and a transversal way of working that is attentive to the conditions of possibility in exhibition. In architectural, economic, linguistic, and organizational ways, Budor generates a transformation of gaps and absences.
Focus on: Fujiko Nakaya Big Talk Is Talking about the Weather Into Pure White Darkness: The Ecology of Fujiko Nakaya An early member of Experiments in Art and Technology and a crucial figure for Japanese video art, Fujiko Nakaya is mostly known for her sculptural and installation ecosystems using fog. Here, Stuart Comer, Michelle Kuo, Astrida Neimanis, and Sarah Johanna Theurer discuss the artist’s environmental awareness, the poetics of the fog, and what it means to talk about the weather, while Reiko Setsuda retraces Nakaya’s collaborative and networked thinking. Nakaya’s approach does not objectify nature but treats the global environment as an organic ecosystem shaped by social, political, and technological relations.
Object-Oriented: Toward a Regeneration of Art Criticism as Literary Practice Could the key to art criticism’s present-future redemption be found in the past? Travis Jeppesen muses on the origins of critical commentary, guiding our way through the dispute opposing “art criticism” and “art writing.” Via an analysis of different categories, such as meta- and ficto-criticism, Jeppesen debunks how a “poetics of indeterminacy” may grace and empower a form of art writing that is a vanguard practice within the wider genre of art criticism.
The House in Which We Live Seamlessly moving from the page into sculpture, installation, and performance, and often focusing on histories of queer community, Caspar Heinemann responds to a short but significant period in British history with humor and irreverence, and with an intimate and melancholic material sensitivity. Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe reflects on Heinemann’s linguistic play with poetic negations and absences.
A Hypothesis of Resistance In the first of a series of five essays aimed at examining the temporalities of performance, defying and eclipsing the standardization that drives individual and collective bodies to perform toward an entirely metric-oriented future, Cally Spooner intertwines the psoas major muscle; Donald W. Winnicott’s studies on developmental psychology; motherhood; and chrononormativity.
Concrete Poetry Through installations that combine conceptual rigor with revolutionary poetry, Ignacio Gatica investigates the long shadow of neoliberalism in Chile. Harry Burke peruses how the weaknesses and contradictions of Chilean politics’ recent history interweave with Gatica’s practice, pointing to social movements whose demands extend beyond the constitutional forms of liberal democracy.
Tidbits: Céline Mathieu by Leila Peacock; Jerzy Bereś by Krzysztof Kościuczuk; David Moser by Laura McLean-Ferris; Ayo Akingbade by Faridah Folawiyo; Steph Huang by Olivia Aherne; Selma Selman by Arnisa Caterina Zeqo; Simon Lehner by Christina Lehnert; Deborah-Joyce Holman by Olamiju Fajemisin; Francisco Tropa by Simone Menegoi.
Please join us for the presentation of Simulacrum Magazine’s thirtieth anniversary issue het Reflectienummer with editors Mirna Vrdoljak and Kenneth Geurts.
14 October 2022 from 6.30pm
Motto Berlin Skalitzer Str. 68 10997 Berlin
* Simulacrum is an arts and culture magazine based in Amsterdam. Since thirty years, it functions as an accessible and high-quality platform for students and experts from various fields to publish together. Simulacrum is a quarterly thematic publishing project that aims at fostering transdisciplinary connections among contributions that explore both historical and contemporary perspectives of the European cultural landscape.
On 14 October, Simulacrum is coming to Motto Berlin to celebrate the magazine’s thirtieth anniversary issue titled het Reflectienummer. For this issue the editors delved into the full archive and asked contributors to reflect on their submissions. These reflections offer insight into how art, culture, and historiography have changed over the course of thirty years. However, the eleven reflections bundled together do not only refer to the past. Reflection is an exercise with an eye to the future; it is a moment of standing still and thinking about how it was, how it is, and how it could be.
Editors Mirna Vrdoljak and Kenneth Geurts will hold a discussion on the blurring of boundaries across disciplines in the humanities, and the magazine’s role in adequately responding to the reciprocal influence between academic and artistic spheres. Bearing in mind the magazine’s primary focus on art historical research thirty years ago, we will speak from our own experiences with the diverging range of submissions, as well as the questions that arise with the use of new media platforms and digital modes of archiving. There will also be a moment to introduce Simulacrum’s freshly printed autumnal newspaper on documenta fifteen, The documenta Issue.
From a bridge to blockchain, Amazonian urbanism to artificial intelligence, Log 55 recognizes the vast concerns of architecture today. This 176-page open issue, which includes a 16-page color insert, compiles essays, building and exhibition reviews, and remarks by 25 architects, theorists, and artists from around the world. In Berlin, Tim Altenhof critiques the newly rebuilt Humboldt Forum; in Los Angeles, Victor J. Jones reviews Michael Maltzan’s Ribbon of Light Viaduct; in New York, Cynthia Davidson visits the late Virgil Abloh’s “social sculpture,” and Thomas de Monchaux views “Anthony Ames Fifty Paintings”; in Quito, Ana María Durán Calisto and Sanford Kwinter draw inspiration from Indigenous territorial intelligence; in Rotterdam, Christophe Van Gerrewey reflects on MVRDV’s Boijmans Depot; in Taipei, Kwang-Yu King compares two new cultural venues by OMA and RUR; and in Tokyo, Jan Vranoský pens a postmortem for Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower. Matthew Allen looks to computer science for a way out of the theory-practice divide; Simone Brott considers the ways NFTs will change architectural practice; Karel Klein draws parallels between memory and AI; and Marija Marič warns against digitized real estate fractions.
In addition, a special section guest edited by Francesco Marullo is devoted to Notes on the Desert. The section, which raises issues of climate change and the extraction economy, includes essays by architect Nathan Friedman on the US-Mexico border, artist Kim Stringfellow on jackrabbit homesteads, feminist scholar Traci Brynne Voyles on the 49ers, and architect Lydia Xynogala speaking for a desert toad; photo essays by the Center for Land Use Interpretation on nuclear tombs and by photographer Susan Lipper on desert utopia; as well as an interview with photographer Richard Misrach on his Cantos series.
Aren’t we all familiar with the deeply personal experience of waking up alone, in anguish and despair, from the depths of a nightmare? Whether it’s disordered sleeping, sleep paralysis or the more regular frightening dream, the night and its terrors have kept us occupied since the very beginning of humanity. For this issue of Simulacrum, we – together – delve into the furthest corners of our minds to discover the dark and disorienting meaning we might find there. But a nightmare is much more than something to be fearful of. The nightmare is entangled with our histories and can lead us to our deepest selves, by bringing up feelings which we don’t dare to feel in real life. It has provided many creators with inspiration for their art of many forms. As we will discover within this issue of Simulacrum, this personal aspect of the nightmare can lead to incredibly diverse approaches and interpretations that we hope will allow you to reconsider the meaning and feeling that nightmares can bring us.
Authors: Neža Kokol, Joyce Poot, Niels Noot, Jonas van Kappel, Jérémy Bernard, Kenneth Geurts, Denise van Rooij, Kim Mulder, Frank van der Wulp, Laure Vanrijckeghem, Sanne Kabalt.
Log 54: Coauthoring gathers essays by and conversations with architects, curators, historians, and collectives that, as guest editors Ana Miljački and Ann Lui write, begin to “imagine the field of architecture orienting around coauthoring instead of authoring” and “challenge the model of architectural authorship that dominates both architectural discourse and the market.” In so doing, the contributors to this 176-page thematic issue “enter the space of political and identity negotiations to relinquish absolutes and to open up to multiple forms of agency.” These forms of agency manifest in numerous ways, from the Fluxus Manifesto to the words of an Enlightenment painter, from bats to spider webs, from cartography to geological deep time, from AI-generated toys to PowerPoint and Miro boards.
Miljački and Lui talk with Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers from Dream the Combine; J. Yolande Daniels and Amanda Williams from the Black Reconstruction Collective; architect and curator Andrés Jaque, and 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial curator David Brown about their collaborative practices. Sumayya Vally and Moad Musbahi transcribe site-specific music, while Curtis Roth uses gig workers’ gestures to create paintings. The Architecture Lobby and Dark Matter University discuss the implications of coauthorship through their cowritten dialogues; Timothy Hyde and Lisa Haber-Thomson study Welsh building codes; Sarah Hirschman looks at US copyright law; and De Peter Yi and Laura Marie Peterson document how residents use the Detroit Land Bank. Historians Anna Bokov, S.E. Eisterer, and Michael Kubo recount coauthorship in Soviet education, resistance in gestapo prisons, and today’s anonymous architectural megacorporation.
When starting to work on the 25th issue of our magazine, we were discussing whether there should be some sort of content to celebrate this milestone and the past ten years leading up to it. But, as further reading will indicate, there are no texts praising past issues or reflections on the musical developments we documented over the years. However, the anniversary helps in presenting the underlying theme of this issue. As loyal readers might know, zweikommasieben started out as a fanzine and aspired to keep this character somewhat alive. Therefore, in zweikommasieben #25, we would like to reflect on various aspects of what fandom entails.
As fans, the authors, editors, and photographers of this magazine are dependent on artists — niche or mainstream — to be willing to have their practice documented. To put it bluntly: if they don’t want to speak to us, there is not much we can do. Likewise, and without overestimating the impact of our small publication, it might have positive consequences for artists to be featured in zweikommasieben, which is not simply a unidirectional channel between fans and artists: over the years some artists highlighted their own fandom, interviewing other artists they admire for this very magazine, while some contributors developed artistic practices which led them to having fans on their own.
Such an ever-changing web of dependencies is highlighted on the following pages. This edition features a text by media theorist and artist DeForrest Brown Jr. dedicated to the multiple talents of singer-songwriter Dawn Richard: an exploration of why fans could be drawn to her practice over the past 15 years. Jasmin Hoek visits a new museum in Amsterdam that is dedicated to techno and club culture to investigate whether such an institution can be true to something we all have been fans of. In Anna Froelicher’s interview with Price, the artist elaborates on how he plays with both institutions’ and fans’ conceptualization of his music. The complexities of being a fan not only relate to other people and institutions but also to oneself and one’s personal development. In a new essay, Friedemann Dupelius uses his ever-evolving fascination with trance to reflect on the genre’s current status quo.
