ART

Film X Autochthonous Struggles Today

Sternberg Press 2023 ISBN 9783956796500 Acqn 33902
Pb 17x24cm 544pp col ills £20

Film X Autochthonous Struggles Today brings together for the first time filmmakers, activists, film
curators, and scholars who share a common interest in filmmaking practices that emerge from
and participate in the various situations of struggle that the Autochthonous/Indigenous/Native/
Aboriginal/First Nations peoples and communities are involved in worldwide.

Starting with the Edison Studio's 1894 short films Buffalo Dance and Sioux Ghost Dance,
representations of Autochthonous peoples have been part of cinema right from its inception. The
vast majority of these representations, however, have not been produced by nor for
Autochthonous peoples. In the wake of political and cultural self-determination movements of the
1960s and 1970s, and with the gradual democratization and accessibility of the tools of moving-
image making, Autochthonous communities have displaced and renewed cinema's forms and
means of production, increasingly reclaiming their right for self-representation by way of film and
video.

Along with the vibrant forms of moving images arising from within the communities, close to their
existential political concerns, filmmaking has also become a potent tool in Autochthonous
struggles. This book answers the need to take a global look at the diverse ways of filmmaking
that fight for land rights and against environmental injustice (Brazil, Morocco, Taiwan, USA), that
resist neocolonial domination, economic and political exploitation (Japan, Philippines), that offer a
counterpoint during low intensity or drawn-out armed conflicts (Colombia, Mexico), that invent
strategies of counter information and representation (Australia, Canada, Russia, Samoa), and
that strive for visibility.

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No Dandy, No Fun - Looking Good as Things Fall Apart

Sternberg Press 2023 ISBN 9783956795619 Acqn 33353
Pb 12x18cm 240pp ills £16.50

As the old order collapses, the dandy makes no claim to be leading an exemplary life. He does
not defend property or privileges. He finds conflicts over the distribution of goods distasteful. To
the dandy, any kind of war, even a war of liberation, seems an affair of the benighted, of those
who don't realise that the only point of putting on a uniform is to look good in it. As an ascetic, he
has always been in favour of less of everything, and opposed to any claims to novelty, which
generally prove to be little more than advertising for a new product. The dandy doesn't ask how
he wants to live; he lives, albeit with a sad countenance. He proposes no solutions, and
denounces nothing as false - since he makes no declarations of any kind. He simply plays a
different game.

The essay follows the traces of this masquerade ball, moving among accounts of lives as they
were lived, literary sketches and performances in the visual arts down to the present day. In a
time of transition, it sifts through tactics in order to find a way towards a self-determined future.

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 ART

Dexter Sinister - yksihW kcalB

Sternberg Press 2023 ISBN 9781915609069 Acqn 33919
Hb 11x17th 256pp col ills £22.50

yksihW kcalB recounts the 15-year history of the production of a "German scotch" Black Whisky,
made by Dexter Sinister together with Stahlemuhle, a distillery set up by former publisher,
Christoph Keller. The story is told in reverse, starting with the delivery of 342 bottles to Berlin in
2022, and ending with an interview with Christoph for the journal Dot Dot Dot in 2007, during
which the idea began to germinate. A summary of the project is accompanied by photographs
taken at the time, interspersed with five previously published texts (an essay, three
conversations, and a statement of intent) written along the way.

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 ART

Critical Spatial Practice 13 - Building Carbon Europe

Sternberg Press 2023 ISBN 9781915609014 Acqn 33920
Pb 11x15cm 320pp col ills £16.50

In this volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series, Dennis Pohl locates the origin of Europe's
dependency on carbon and nuclear power in the postwar architectural designs and energy
policies of the European Community. Since the 1950s, architects have proposed territorial,
regional, and urban development plans that served the European political project. They
collaborated with the European Coal and Steel Community in an effort to render the steel building
industry as efficient as the car industry; they incorporated the ideas of infinite nuclear energy, as
promoted by the European Atomic Energy Community, into their designs.

This book demonstrates how architecture served the political economy of postwar Europe as a
means of turning coal, steel, and radioactivity into tools of European governance. Architectural
design enabled EU institutions to support social policies and worker housing within the coal and
steel industry as well as to promote a new pan-European lifestyle based on nuclear energy. In
other words, architecture powered Europe's larger infrastructural, economic, and cultural network.
Pohl's work not only sheds light on how architecture has contributed to the carbonization of
Europe, it also highlights the environmental issue, which challenges both architectural criticism
and historiography in the era of the Anthropocene.

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 ART

Agonistic Assemblies - On the Spatial Politics of Horizontality

Sternberg Press 2023 ISBN 9781915609144 Acqn 33921
Pb 15x23cm 336pp col ills £21.50

This anthology presents work on cultures of assembly. It stresses the relevance of small-scale
and decentralized spatial formats of local knowledge production to community building and
embedded political decision-making in the context of the socio-ecological transition. It reinforces
the role of both individual and collective action while proposing distributed assembly and
proximity as core attributes in the production of the contemporary and future city. It calls for a
revised form of spatial politics.

Miessen's ongoing research trajectory Cultures of Assembly was initially kicked off during a
Harvard GSD fellowship in collaboration with Joseph Grima, in which the two architects
investigated the sociopolitical dimension of (urban) spatial design. Observing the Kuwaiti cultural
and social landscape with a specific interest in the politico-spatial phenomenon of Diwaniya, this
distributed urban form of para-institutional assembly established a starting point for a long-term
body of research.

Diwaniya can be understood and interpreted in multiple ways. Beyond a techno-futuristic idea of
progress, it presents a showcase of an alternative that attempts to imagine a model of a (more)
solidary city. On the scale of a city, and in fact small country, it interrogates how we-as a society-
can learn from and produce alternative formats of physical exchange, working towards realistic
scenarios of decentralized decision-making and spatial justice.

Agonistic Assemblies asks: how can spaces-both physical and virtual-be envisaged to create
publics? How is collectivity and society being generated spatially and in terms of policy? How do
we "practice" society as a bodily, spatial form, and how does this practice contribute to spatial
justice? Are there specific spatial settings that can intensify these practices? What kind of spatial
design can we imagine as platforms for change?

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