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.

Initiated by visual artist, researcher and amateur plant breeder Åsa Sonjasdotter, in collaboration with practitioners of cultivation, the project Peace with the Earth – Tracing Agricultural Memory, Refiguring Practice revisits histories of agriculture. It investigates soil, habitat and dwelling histories, in order to challenge and transform long-established cultural narratives of cultivation and ecological thinking.

Taking as its premise that the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this collection explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis. Art in the Anthropocene brings together a multitude of disciplinary conversations, drawing together artists, curators, scientists, theorists and activists to address the geological reformation of the human species. Contributors include Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez ...

Amale Andraos examines cartography and Koolhaasian “bigness”; Georges Teyssot reviews that thing we call “nature”; Owen Hatherley visits three typologies of the national library; Ginger Nolan reads Andro Linklater’s recent book on land ownership (with a detour to Zaha Hadid’s Galaxy SOHO); Carson Chan recasts the monumental in the work of Aleksandra Domanović; and James Graham essays on essaying.

Awkward Archives proposes a manual for academic teaching and learning contexts. An ethnographic research approach is confronted with the demands of archival research as both disciplines challenge their inner logics and epistemologies. Through fieldwork and ethnographic tools and methods, both analogue and digital, the editors take various contemporary archival sites in Berlin as case studies to elaborate on controversial concepts in Western thought. Presenting as such a modular curriculum on archives in their awkwardness—with the tensions, discomfort and antagonisms they pose. With case studies on Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Hahne-Niehoff Archive and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, among others.

On the ledger and the herbarium: the settling of financial and botanical accounts. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the age of digital media and TCP/IP protocol architecture, the 1989 discovery of the manuscript of Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863) in a locked safe perhaps appears more dramatic than the unpublished novel’s retrospectively tepid dystopian prophecies. Yet its narrator Michel Jérôme Dufrénoy’s employment in the banking house of Casmodage et Cie. provides unexpected insight into what it meant to keep the books in nineteenth-century France. The novel is set in a Paris of the 1960s, when literary culture was ...

For the past 7000 years, humans have stabilized the global climate. The greenhouse gases emitted through deforestation, agriculture, and husbandry prevented the onset of a new glaciation. Only since the industrial revolution has human influence gotten out of hand, causing rapid rises in temperature and sea level. In the seventh episode of the podcast Ocean Wants, speculative writer Ingo Niermann, most recently of the book Mare Amoris, is talking to William Ruddiman, geologist and originator of the early Anthropocene hypothesis. He speaks from his home in Virginia.

Before fish and other vertebrates proliferated, it was the heyday of the cephalopods. Their descendants—squid, cuttlefish, octopus, and nautilus—are still around, coping better with human dominance than many fish. In the fourth episode of the podcast Ocean Wants, speculative writer Ingo Niermann, most recently of the book Mare Amoris, is talking to Danna Staaf, a trained marine biologist who wrote the history of the cephalopods. She speaks from her home in San Jose, California.

Amanda Susan Marie Hollis has been given the task of archiving the life of a work-shy librarian who worked at Harvard shortly after it was founded. The entanglements of history and life prove extremely hazardous and full of criminal misdeeds. What have the conquest of America, the Vinland Map, Mongolian hordes, Spanish monks, and the disappearance of a chandelier got to do with one another? Is Hollis a brilliant researcher or is she going nuts? Is there a truth beyond what can be archived? Nenik’s novel reads as a phantasmagoric prehistory of Google. Coin-Operated History has been translated from the ...

The ocean refuses empathetic ethics based on sameness with us humans. What does the urge to save nature—in certain ways—reveal about us and our desire? In the sixth episode of the podcast Ocean Wants, speculative writer Ingo Niermann, most recently of the book Mare Amoris, is talking to Eva Hayward, historian of science and faculty member in the Department of Gender and Women Studies at the University of Arizona.

We celebrate coral reefs as the colorful rain forests of the ocean. How could we not just save and restore existing coral reefs but allow them to spread? In the first episode of the podcast Ocean Wants, speculative writer Ingo Niermann, most recently of the book Mare Amoris, is talking to Marah J. Hardt, marine biologist, storyteller and director of discovery at the non-profit Future of Fish. She speaks from her home in Hawaii.

Life in all its variety and diversity is rapidly becoming the “property” of corporations through patents and “intellectual property rights.” A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention. Life, however, is not an invention. We can modify life-forms, we can manipulate living organisms. But we do not create life. The first patent on life was granted to General Electric for a genetically engineered bacterium. In 1971, General Electric and one of its employees, Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, applied for a U.S. patent on a genetically engineered Pseudomonas bacterium. Taking plasmids from three kinds of bacteria, Chakrabarty transplanted them into a fourth. ...