“How do fictions give rise to nations and nationalities? How do they come to be understood as real and fundamental to identity?” An essay on fictional homelands, Potemkin nations, and wonders of the industrial world.

There is a statement, “Africa is a country,” used to satirize Western‘ preconceptions about Africa. With billions of people, thousands of ethnicities, several colonial histories and varied post-independence struggles, the continent is spoken of as a single plane that is beset by bad leadership, unending poverty, and the odd scenery. Yes, the continent has these, and yes, there really are some similarities across the different countries and cultures. But, the question remains: Is that all that can be said? And there is another question: How can you represent what truly is Africa? For us at Saraba, we set out to have ...

Three characters populate Agnieszka Kurant’s Cutaways, 2013, a short film premiering as part of exformation, the artist’s first exhibition in a United States museum. Played by Dick Miller, Charlotte Rampling, and Abe Vigoda, these characters were found, or more precisely reclaimed, from the cutting room, having been edited out of the final cuts of the feature films for which they were created: Pulp Fiction, Vanishing Point, and The Conversation, respectively. Kurant revives these figures not only by writing a brilliant new script for them but also by casting the original actors: twenty to forty years later, the roles are the ...

This Saturday for the next installment in our series Empathy When we’ll be joined on the terrace by Alan Murrin! Alan Murrin is an Irish fiction writer based in Berlin. His fiction has been anthologised in Literally Speaking Berlin 2019, and The Sacred Exists to be Found and he has been short-listed for the Irish Arts and Writers Festival short story prize.

Jakob Nolte’s debut novel ALFF tells of a series of murders at the High & Low High School in Beetaville, New England. A “fencecutioner” has killed Benjamin, the head of the debate club, and sewed his corpse to a fence. The murder sets in motion a string of bizarre events in the teenagers’ lives: from the founding of the band La Deutsche Vita to the establishment of the Anachronistic Youth. After a second murder, Agent Donna Jones is summoned and is flummoxed by the seemingly unsolvable case. In the style of a high-school mystery thriller, ALFF takes us on a ...

Keren Cytter’s absurdist novel tells the life story of “Media Star” Moshe Klinberg with language that suggests both a young woman’s diary entry and an American action movie script. Cytter’s intricate and evocative descriptions are accompanied by hilariously staged photographs, ostensibly taken from the personal archives of Moshe Klinberg.

It‘s a shame and a sham to lose experiments. You could say that this is an experiment, black and white and lines, and a slight shade of blue. But on the larger, more intricate, scale, it is an experiment to see how much success we can make from failure, and how much introspection we can make from goodwill. This job—without pay—has taught us to believe in creation, and to look upon our creation with wonder, awe and intensity. That is, if this is still our creation. You discover that it has become the creation of a larger audience, even French ...

We think that to deal with art we ought to present it, not talk about it. For four months we opened our window to artists producing the finest work in Nigeria, Africa and elsewhere, and the result is what you will see. Seeing is ultimately a trafficking in subtlety, especially if that process of seeing is influenced by art. What, exactly, is art? Since at Saraba we’re open to this kind of questioning that is essentially a voyage, the kind that assembles literary content, art is a process as well as an outcome. Art is the reverberation of colour; art is ...

6-years old Arturo Campagna discusses children’s literature and dispenses advice to writers for children.

This program originally aired on WynwoodRadio.com, Wednesday, December 2, 2015, at 4pm EST, live from the Untitled, Art Fair in Miami Beach. Today at Untitled, curator Catherine Taft will be reading from book 5 of the New Lovers series of new erotica fiction: Al Bedell’s I Would Do Anything For Love. Founded in 2010, Badlands Unlimited publishes e-books, paper books, and artist works in digital and print forms. Historical distinctions between books, files, and artworks are dissolving rapidly. We publish and produce new works by artists and writers that embody the spirit of this emerging dissolution.    

In this episode John talks with Calla Henkel. She was born in 1988 in Minneapolis, MN, USA. A writer, playwright, director and artist, she currently lives and works in Berlin. She has staged plays at Volksbühne Berlin, The Whitney Museum of Art, as well as at New Theater, the experimental theatre space she founded and programmed in Berlin from 2013-2015. Her art writing has been published in periodicals such as Texte zur Kunst, Spike, Mousse, and others. Her artistic work with Max Pitegoff has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. She currently operates a bar, performance space and film ...

The way to begin is on a tiny road with no traffic, no nothing, perhaps only a flicker of light at the end of the road. This is the summary of Saraba for this second issue, and one is tempted to end it there. We received fewer entries than the first, and we could not get a Guest Editor. Our box was almost as empty as we left it. That is why there is a very high tendency for us to get despondent, end this all, easily, pocket our losses, and who can say anything? But Saraba deserves more than ...