In Splendide Hotel – 1887 there is one sole room and it is transparent, containing apparitions of all literary, musical, scientific and abstract sorts. From an internal monologue to quantum physics to the gramophone and bioluminescence, within this little book there is a collection of nearly all the references serving to rebuild this hotel within the Cristal Palace to reveal 1887 as the birth year of our universe.

Climatologists have confirmed it is now too late to avoid certain global warming and that a shift to a low or zero carbon economy is thus vital. This implies an urgent transition to renewable energy sources as well as radical adaptive measures, which collide against established industrial monopolies. This episode gathers several geoengineering patent applications, and through these documents presents the history of these emerging technologies and the private interests, actors, think tanks, and corporations behind them. Within the debate of climate change mitigation, geoengineering—the technological management of weather patterns and carbon capture processes—occupies an especially politicized place. It has slowly ...

A children’s book on agriculture in Le Cateau brings together drawings by students from three classes at three different schools in the region to partner with Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis, located in rural northern France. At the invitation of Carrie Pilto, director of the museum, artist Harrell Fletcher joined by Nolan Calisch and Molly Sherman proposed instructions for children to illustrate a text on the agricultural history of the region. This book traces the first meeting between these artists and the inhabitants of Le Cateau and its environs, beginning a series of participatory projects initiated by Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis.

Léopold Lambert met with Indigenous Lakota activists Madonna Thunder Hawk and Marcella Gilbert during their passage in France to present Christina D. King and Elizabeth A. Castle’s film Warrior Women that portrays their struggle over two generation — Madonna is Marcella’s mother. In this conversation, we talked about four episodes of Indigenous resistance in Turtle Island (North America): the occupations of Alcatraz (1969), Mount Rushmore (1971), Wounded Knee (1973) and Standing Rock (2016), all of which were experienced by Madonna. Madonna Thunder Hawk is an Oohenumpa Lakota. Born and raised across the Oceti Sakowin homelands, she first became active in the late 1960s ...

German cinema is best known for its art cinema and its long line of outstanding individual directors. The double spotlight on these two subjects has only deepened the obscurity surrounding the popular cinema. A Second Life performs a kind of archaeology on a period largely overlooked: the first two decades of German cinema. This collection of essays by established authors refocuses the terms of a debate that will develop in the years to come concerning the historical and cultural significance of popular cinema in Wilhelmine Germany.

Walter Mignolo (1941, Córdoba, Argentina) is a semiotician and professor at Duke University, who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. In “Enacting the Archives, Decentring the Muses,” Mignolo reads through the Museum of Islamic Art and of Asian Civilizations Museum, attempting to decolonize the single story of western museums by showing how de-westernization works. The author’s argument will be that the de-colonial story of western museums through the appropriation of the museum model ...

For this outing of BDP’s Empathy When, we were delighted to be joined on the terrace of Tropez by Adam Fearon. Get ready to travel from Berlin to Frankfurt, Cairo to Baghdad, Adam reads his incredible essay that goes below the surface of the Fayum mummy portraits that date from the 1st century BC onwards, and how our contemporary self-expression is more tactile that our flat screens may suggest.

Afghanistan: A Lexicon uses the form of a lexicon to present a nonlinear narrative of twentieth-century Afghan history as a recursive loop of modernization attempts, revolts, collapses, and recoveries.The lexicon covers seventy-one terms, most illustrated by archival and original images, including: vocabulary unique to Afghan politics, like bi-tarafi, jirga, and nizamnamah; terms that have specific meanings or resonances in the Afghan context, like “infidel,” “martyr,” and spetsnaz; key players and places, from Bacha-i-Saqqao to Hizb-i-Islami and from the Bala Hissar to the Microrayan; and special entries on recurrent events and themes that form the weft and warp of the century, ...

Two figures go out into this world and traverse it: the explorer and the imposter. The explorer stands on terra firma, surveying the horizon that magnetically pulls him. Sometimes Fernweh (in German, “yearning for the faraway”) produces an explorer who never returns, but his traveling is still made possible by the knowledge that he could return at any time. The image of the explorer appends a few basic corollaries to the nature of the Western image and the way it renders history. This Western image is weightless, infinitely thin, hovering above everything, including history. It is reproducible on all channels, ...

A fragment of XXth century European history.