Katharina Ludwig

Review by Megan Mckenzie in Cleveland Review of Books

In memory of Sean Bonney, Diane di Prima, Jack Hirschman, Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan, Kamau Brathwaite, Keith Waldrop & all the others

The publication brings together contributions from PhD researchers in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Exhibiting an extensive range of material exploration and subject matter, the publication provides an intimate glimpse into practice-based research projects at disparate stages of development. Entries materialise as excerpts, excess, studio residue, and field notes, capturing fragments from long-term projects, and moments of play from newly sparked curiosities and quarantine experimentation.

Taken together, they exhibit the wide range of innovative approaches being employed across the Art Research programme.

As we found ourselves scattered across the globe this academic year, the organic process of cross-pollination amongst researchers through chance encounters and casual conversation became obsolete.

The publication rekindles lost connections while revealing fresh ones and offers the opportunity for our work to exist in the same physical space once more.

At the memorial for Rosa Luxemburg on 13 June 1919, the political radical, art historian, critic, and writer Carl Einstein gave an oration. There is no record of what Einstein said, how he said it, or what it addressed. This collection assembles a broad range of texts from artists, film-makers, writers, poets, critics, philosophers, and art historians. Each contribution is a speculation on what Einstein might have delivered, each as likely and as unlikely to be Einstein’s as any other. Through the multiple substitutions of Carl Einstein—a practice that Einstein pursued throughout his life—themes of masquerade, mistaken identities, of persons substituted after the event, of orations, speeches, and texts rewritten, speculated upon and redelivered, celebrating, mapping, and fictionalising a past life, are explored.

FELT – Aesthetics of Grey is the second of a series of anthologies published by ZenoPress. A new collection of writings including essays, experimental texts and short stories. Featuring works by artists and writers who have been invited to respond creatively to the colour Grey.

Care is a matter of responsibility for human and nonhuman allies, an ecological network. Care is an imperative, and acting with care approaches the world beyond selfhood. ON CARE, an aggregate of voices, discusses the politics of caring, support, and the role of welfare in an increasingly neoliberal society. It questions who is seen as worthy of care, whose narratives are given attention, and whose lives are overlooked in a complex web of assemblages: conceptions of medical authority, the co-option of self-care in political rhetoric, care as a commodity in the hospitality industry, intergenerational intimacy, sexecology; care as utopian and care as transactional. ON CARE maps a constellation of perspectives, as testaments, fictions, and essays, addressing the relation between good health, interdependence, and the ethics of (self)care.

The Salon for a Speculative Future was inaugurated in March 2019 in celebration of Women’s History Month, as a platform for cross-generational and cross-disciplinary exchange. Reflecting on the current political and economic global situation, in particular the exponential acceleration of a technology-driven platform capitalism, many women advocate positive change for an ecologically sustainable and humane future. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin argues that science fiction does not simply extrapolate from the present to predict the future—instead, the fiction writer engages in thought-experiments where ideas and intuition move within the confines set by the experiment. This book hosts imaginative thinking by seventy-five women artists, sharing their influences, inspired by women’s contributions to diverse fields, from art, education, and science to political activism. Salon for a Speculative Future honours and shares insights and experimental thinking towards a positive future.