The essays in this collection were written in the first decade of the new millennium by the critic, editor, and curator Chantal Pontbriand. Pontbriand examines themes of being-in-common in today’s world and their relation to the development of art practices.

Around the world, place-based projects are drawing increasing attention to the pillars of art, design, and economics as important players in the development and redevelopment of the so-called periphery. This publication poses the question: How plausible and effective are these ventures?

The fourth volume of the Mad Marginal Cahier series brings together essays by international authors that develop different threads pertaining to artist Dora García’s practice. In her research, she explores—through the figures of James Joyce and Robert Walser—deviant literature, exploded language, the unconscious, and the notion of exile as inherent to artistic practice.

The Imagines is based on the texts of four writers that each engage with a recent project by Ines Lechleitner. In response to each critical contribution, Lechleitner develops a visual section where elements and fragments of the selected projects build up their own narrative in relation to the specific space of this book.

Performativity explores the in-between space when bodies or objects are left to perform. The fact that we are living more and more in an “immaterial” world, dominated by mediatization (which some call spectacle), the impact of globalization, the increasing tendency to think of politics as biopolitics—these different factors enhance performance over materiality, or object making.

First presented in lecture format at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, these essays reflect the wealth of the exchange that exists between theoretical writing and artistic thinking, sharing the fascination that each of these authors has with both the work of an artist and how this work functions in relation to larger contexts and broader ideas.

The publication A Cookbook for Political Imagination accompanies the exhibition “… and Europe will be stunned” for the Polish Pavilion at the 54th Biennale of Art in Venice. This is not a traditional exhibition catalogue but rather a manual of political instructions and recipes, delivered by more than forty international authors.