Bøger i Doormats serien

The Force of Listening explores the role of listening at the intersection of contemporary art and activism, and asks what transformations listening might facilitate in the world. Written as a constructed dialogue, The Force of Listening draws from conversations with artists, activists and political thinkers which took place during 2013-14, in the aftermath of the wave of protests and occupations against austerity.Artists Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, media theorist Nick Couldry, philosopher Adriana Cavarero and members of Ultra-red and Precarious Workers Brigade as well as feminist consciousness-raising groups meet on the page to tackle questions of listening, attention and interconnection, collectivity, solidarity and resonance, the politics of the voice and the ethics of listening, the challenges of institutional frameworks and their reflections on the Occupy movement.

Author of The Soul at Work and After the Future, Franco Berardi Bifo (born 1949) is one of today's most articulate and prominent anti-capitalism theorists. Like many others involved with the 1960s Autonomia movement in Italy (such as Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti), Berardi moved to Paris, where he worked and studied with the French philosopher and psychotherapist Felix Guattari, in the field of schizoanalysis. Skizo-Mails is a collection of Berardi's aphoristic and diaristic correspondence that combines the political and the poetic in its consideration of our present plight. "What invention will be able to call humans out of the abyss? Who will be able to gather thoughts and emotions and solidarity?" Berardi asks, in one letter. This publication is the first in Errant Bodies' new Doormats series, dedicated to rethinking the contemporary political sphere and demanding a focused and attentive presence and readership.

"Writing comes up from under my skin," writes Brandon LaBelle. "It creeps into my sleep, to tense my fingers; I am plunged into it, as a space for capturing a new voice, for figuring a new body: to take an empty page and to fill it, with the day to day." LaBelle's work as an artist and theorist focuses on the interrelation between the sonic arts, popular culture and theory, using mainly site-specific sound performances. The second volume in Errant Bodies' Doormats series Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian is LaBelle's attempt to engage the events of the Arab Spring through the diary form, in which personal memories are conjoined with broader cultural reflections on American imperialism and revolution. Written between February and June of 2011, Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian is an attempt to outline what LaBelle calls "an agency of the intimate."

Chilean journalist and independent curator Valentina Montero (born 1973) left her native country five years ago, relocating to Europe just in time for the continent's financial crisis. "I felt myself not only as someone coming from the end of the world, but also as someone coming from the future," she writes in By Reason or By Force. "In Chile the neoliberal model made its first roots over 25 years ago, leaving deep scars in a society [...] characterized by individualism, consumption, defeat and depoliticization of citizens' movements." In this book, Montero outlines some of the milestone events and moments that led to Chile's advanced neoliberalism, and its effects upon education and culture, detecting signs of hope in the lively student movement that emerged in 2011. By Reason or By Force is the third publication in Errant Bodies' Doormats series, which tackles issues of particularly urgent topicality.

Drawing on two decades of interventions in politics and culture, Fred Dewey's The School of Public Life records the author's efforts to revive and rethink public space from Los Angeles to Berlin and beyond. Drawing on manifestoes, lectures, letters and experimental texts, the book chronicles one person's efforts to secure a space for public reality, culture, appearance and power. From helping to found neighborhood councils in Los Angeles to directing Beyond Baroque, a public space for poetry, art, sound work, publishing and debate, featuring discussions of the 1992 LA riots, Black Mountain College and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dewey recounts a lived experience of self-government face to face with the rise of manufactured reality and an unknown political history. How can we answer the falsehoods of economics, parties and a new slavery of constructed powerlessness? Working from the examples of Hannah Arendt, poet Charles Olson, writer John Berger, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and others, Dewey's account of life experiences and thinking, public gesture proposes a new kind of school, one powerful enough to address all our conditions-a school for the people and their life.

"Mobile phones have replaced design in mediating our relation to the surrounding space," writes Italian artist and composer Riccardo Benassi (born 1982). "All the tools that surrounded us were dematerialized. To stay alive--and to survive the digital--objects have become invisible, and are often processed in their own narratives."Equal parts essay, diary and critical pamphlet, Techno Casa is the fifth publication in Errant Bodies' Doormats series.

Part of Errant Bodies' Doormats series, Resounding Roar takes aim at the corruption of the Mexican government."And may the Earth tremble at its core, at the resounding roar of the cannon," so ends the initial verse of the Mexican national anthem. Nowadays that resounding roar should be directed towards the corruption of an elite class that has kidnapped the country. Resounding Roar takes aim at a government that does not govern for the people, but for corporate interests and international agreements that only benefit a few. The sound and visual artist Israel Martínez reflects on the present state of Mexico and its regime of narco-politics through artistic works, interviews, notes, images and collaborations with fellow writers, curators, activists and artists that have influenced or accompanied him throughout his artistic practice over the last years. Resounding Roar is a polyphonic work of creative resistance.Contributors include: Mariana Ampudia, Mónica Arreola, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Adela Goldbard, Vicente Gutiérrez, Diego Martínez, Cuauhtémoc Medina and Sandra Sánchez.