Faraway, So Close
25th Biennial of Design, Ljubljana
Published by Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) & Motto Books

Faraway, So Close presents seven investigations through the concept of time – time as a key with which to identify new patterns that can connect design with the phenomenological world and the myriad consequences of such an interrelation.

Acting in various dispersed territories across Slovenia, Faraway, So Close seeks out “low-intensity” places in which to test the possibility of changing our notions of economic progress and which could work toward and in the name of such fundamental aspirations as stability, community and a better future. Design is, or at least can be, a vehicle for exploring basic new metaphors. It is a dialogic procedure. This break from the strictly disciplinary approach of design creates space for an expansive investigation of various interdisciplinary intersections and engagement with a markedly different production of knowledge.

By presenting the seven investigative episodes developed within BIO 25 and their interchange with both local archives and broader paradigms, the book works to explore ways of changing the goals of design culture; of turning away from the urgent need to solve problems and instead opening up new frontiers for observation and experimentation, to look at our inhabited and habitable world for what it is and what it is becoming, and not simply what we think it should, ideally, be.

Contributions by
Nabil Ahmed
Andrea Branzi
Tony Côme
Brendan Cormier
matali crasset
Domitilla Dardi
Odo Fioravanti
Didier Fiúza Faustino
Studio Formafantasma
Thomas Geisler
Rory Hyde
Alexandra Midal
mischer’traxler studio
Dimitrij Mlekuž
Point Supreme Architects
Emanuele Quinz
Renata Salecl
Anna-Sophie Springer
Studio Folder
James Westcott
Elia Zenghelis
and many others

Photographic Essays by
Delfino Sisto Legnani
and Marco Cappelletti

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Published on the occasion of Emily Wardill’s exhibition “Matt Black and Rat” at Bergen Kunsthall.

Featuring production stills and images from the exhibition, this book also includes new texts by philosopher Michael Marder, critic and writer Kirsty Bell, and a conversation between Martin Clark and Emily Wardill.

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With a text by Olaf Nicolai

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In 1985, British movie director Terry Gilliam releases Brazil, a free adaptation of George Orwell’s novel 1984 (currently hitting again best-seller list in the USA). Borrowing its title from Ary Barroso’s song Brazil, after Gilliam allegedly heard it while scouting in a horrible small industrial town in the north of England, the movie is a fable about humanity’s alienation in contemporary bureaucratic and capitalist systems, and affirms the power of imagination, dream, and affect as potential tools of resistance and escape in a surrealistic, post-Monty Python tone.

2017: in Brazil, the repercussion of “Lava Jato Operation” now infiltrates all layers of the Brazilian upper class and beyond, and will likely force Michel Temer, Brazil’s coup-monger president, to move out of the presidential house imminently, and this time, not because of alleged ghosts. The “Brazilian Miracle” is definitely outdated, and the major non-Hispanic country of Latin America is experiencing the worst political and institutional crisis of its history. On the other hand, a national council of Mexican indigenous groups backed by the Zapatista rebels just selected Maria de Jésus Patricio Martínez, a Nahua woman, as the country’s first indigenous presidential candidate. This as Mexico is said to enter the world’s 10 largest economies in the next few years, dangerously challenging its northern neighbor, for better or for worse.

Cards are shuffling quickly in the Americas and it seems that what we once expected from the north or the south might soon not matter anymore. Could it be time to reconsider our origins, to invent a new future, to finally get rid of our displaced modern ambitions and appropriate critically the performance of the exotic that cursed us for so long? In this issue of Terremoto, we will talk about places which don’t really exist as such, identities traded for others, landscapes that imprison us or, on the contrary, set us free, trying to set our landmarks aside as we look for a path towards new forms of consilience.

With contributions by: Fernanda Brenner, Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, Hank Willis Thomas, Modou Dieng, Devon Van Houten Maldonado, Pedro de Niemeyer Cesarino, Carolina Castro Jorquera, Cecilia Vicuña, Gabriel Mejía Abad, Marilia Loureiro, Pedro Victor Brandão, PDP (Public Display of Professionalism), Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes, Ilê Sartuzi, Ana Vaz, Luiz Roque, Cristiano Lenhardt, Bárbara Wagner, Benjamin de Burca, Paulina Ascencio, Fabiola Torres-Alaga, Alberto García del Castillo, César Zegarra, Susana Vargas Cervantes, Veronica Stigger.

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KARL HOLMQVIST, WORD SQUARES. COMPAGNIA/MOTTO BOOKS 2017,
PUBLISHED WITH THE KIND SUPPORT OF THE CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN, GENEVA, TO COINCIDE WITH THE ARTIST’S EXHIBITION, 31.5.– 27.8.2017.

WORD SQUARES DESIGNED BY KARL HOLMQVIST AND BENEDIKT REICHENBACH.

€25.00

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Featuring interviews with DJ Stingray, J.G. Biberkopf, Interstellar Funk, Grebenstein, Brain Case, Pan Daijing and Marlene Engel, one of the curators of Wiener Festwochen; portraits on Tolouse Low Trax and Sleaford Mods; an essay called “Entropy as Exit” by DeForrest Brown Jr. on the albums Cellular Automata by Dopplereffekt and I-LP-O in Dub’s Capital Dub Chapter 1; columns featuring the development of dancehall (“Basslines”), the CDJ-2000 (“Track Down Fiction”), pictures from the Johannesburg scene (“We Are Time”), Vinyl-on-Demand (“From Here Till Now”) as well as poems (“Sound Texts”) and thoughts on the Gegenstand (“Gegen:stand”); PLUS contributions by Jackie and Gil, Tomasa Del Real, Pure Mania and mittageisen’s Bruno W.

€12.00

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TT by Nico Jungel
Published by Motto Books

Language: German
Size: 19.5 x 29.7 cm
Weight: 160 g
Binding: Softcover

€32.00

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Croissants & Architecture
Nicole Wermers

Published in an edition of 250
Size: 23 x 27.7 cm
Weight: 495 g
Binding: Softcover

€150.00

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http://v2.outoffocus.biz/nicole-wermers

These collected essays, written in Beirut over a period of 10 years between 2006 and 2016, look at the conditions of living under a temporality theorized as the “protracted now” of a civil war, one structurally capable of perpetuating the conditions of its own dominance. This protracted now, these essays argue, remains untranquil in the many unfinished strains of a troubled history that resist falling back into a settled and distant past.

What unites the diverse essays of this book is an investment in the concept of labor, understood as both interminable and his­torical: the labor of min, the labor of the corpse, the labor of near­blindness and the labor of missing. These labors are interminable since they persist in a disinclination to join the various calls for regeneration and resurrection implicit in state-sanctioned and market-driven projects for the reconstruction of Lebanon. They are also historical since they frame this disinclination as an anti-historicist position open to a non-linear conception of memory that attempts to name the many pasts slighted by a forward-looking rush towards better futures.

Together, these labors develop into a critique of hope as a reac­tionary sentiment that numbs collective action in the present and propose that within the folds of war lie moments of political significance that can be recovered and thought through, in order to initiate a livable living built with the unwelcome but necessary knowledge shouldered by unreconciled survivors.

Written by Walid Sadek

Published by Motto Books & Taipei Biennial 2016

Language: English
Pages: 253
Size: 13 x 20.5
Weight: 198 g
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 9782940524563

€15.00

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First edition 300 copies
Stamped and Signed.

ps… to read in the dark.

€ 10.00

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