New World Academy Reader, 5: Stateless Democracy (2015)

“New World Academy, an alternative learning platform for art and politics established by artist Jonas Staal and BAK has entered its fifth sequence. Developed together with the Kurdish Women’s Movement as a nomadic platform that unfolding throughout 2015, the fifth sequence of the New World Academy explores—from artistic, activist, and scholarly perspectives—the proposition of delinking democracy from the nation-state: the notion of “stateless democracy.” On this occasion, the fifth reader of the New World Academy, titled Stateless Democracy, has been published.

If initially the Kurdish struggle, led by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), had aimed to establish an independent state, since the 1990s PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, together with the Kurdish Women’s Movement, have turned to questioning the patriarchal and capitalist nature of the very concept of the nation-state itself. Within this process the Kurdish revolutionary movement developed an alternative model called “democratic confederalism” or “stateless democracy” that invoked a confederate composition in which gender-equality, self-governance, secularism, cultural diversity, communal economy, and social ecology form key pillars.

Since 2012 this proposition has been put fully into practice in Rojava, Western Kurdistan in Syria, in alliance with the peoples of the region. New World Academy Reader #5: Stateless Democracy provides key texts that offer an overview of both the political and cultural dimensions comprising what has now come to be known to history as the Rojava Revolution. The texts in the reader are as much an introduction to the model of stateless democracy practiced in Rojava, as a potential political paradigm through which to confront the many related crises in politics, economy, and ecology that we face across the world.”

With contributions by: Kajal Ahmed (poet and journalist), Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya (political and social scientist), Janet Biehl (writer, editor, and graphic artist), Murray Bookchin (libertarian socialist author), Dilar Dirik (researcher and representative of the Kurdish Women’s Movement), Zîlan Diyar (Kurdish guerrilla fighter), David Graeber (anthropologist), Havin Güneşer (journalist and spokesperson of “Freedom for Abdullah Öcalan – Peace in Kurdistan”),Joost Jongerden (sociologist and anthropologist), Gönül Kaya (journalist and representative of the Kurdish Women’s Movement), Abdullah Öcalan (founder and leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)), Pinar Öğünç (journalist), Jonas Staal (artist and writer), and Hito Steyerl (artist, documentary filmmaker, and writer).

Edited by Renée In der Maur and Jonas Staal in dialogue with the Kurdish Women’s Movement (and in particular Dilar Dirik, Kurdish activist and a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge)
Publisher BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, 2015
ISBN 9789077288221
256 pages
Out of print, now open access

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (5 MB)

John Hejduk: Victims (1986)

An architectural performance of 67 structures planned over 60 years, on the razed site of a Nazi torture chamber in Berlin, investigating a cryptic and negative architectural representation of loss, memory and the passage of time.

Publisher Architectural Association, London, 1986
Text series, 1
ISBN 0904503771, 9780904503777
[45] folded leaves
via tlukejones

Video footage from related exhibition at the AA in 1986 (48 min)

Commentary: AA Collections blog (2015-16).

WorldCat

PDF (86 MB)
See also Hejduk’s The Collapse of Time: Diary Constructions, 1987.

Karla Jasso, Daniel Garza Usabiaga (eds.): (Ready) Media: Hacia una arqueología de los medios y la invención en México (2012) [Spanish]

A book published to accompany an exhibition on media archaeology in Mexico.

Publisher Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, Mexico City, 2012
ISBN 9786076050132, 6076050136
519 pages
via Román Luján‏

Publisher (incl. information about the accompanying set of 6 DVDs)
WorldCat

PDF (143 MB)