Too Much explores the nature of the sacred in an increasingly profane world.⁠ ⁠ This fantastic publication, subtitled 'Magazine of Romantic Geography', has made us wait quite a long time for a new issue, but now it's here! It investigates the ways in which people and environment, built and natural, shape and reshape each other.⁠ ⁠ The Sacred issue meets the Yuta shaman of the Okinawan islands; ventures to the beguinages of medieval Europe to learn how women have related to the divine in ways that ensure their own earthly survival and independence; visits mosques in contemporary Japan; elaborates festivals for ancestor worship in China; and travels to the slopes of Osore-zan and hear the cries of crows and the bereaved.⁠ ⁠ Beautiful and insightful as always, the magazine from Japan enriches us with different perspectives and stories we haven't read before, catapulting us out of our eternal algorithmic bubble. ⁠ Buy

What does the word “nature” mean to you? It may conjure up images of lush, rolling fields, rushing rivers or impenetrable woods. You’re probably not picturing many people or buildings, and it’s likely that the colour green features prominently.  The third issue of Hinterlands magazine takes as its starting point a similar thought exercise. The introductory note from editors Hanna Döring, Freia Kuper and Maike Suhr invites the reader to visualise a meadow - and immediately bursts this idyllic, imaginary bubble to point out that “nature” as we often think of it is a fiction. More

Drone Vision: Warfare, Surveillance, Protest brings the perfidious character of drones to the fore. Namely, seeing without being seen - and the associated insecurity and vulnerability, but also the usage for resistance and protest. The book presents three projects that move between art and politics - from migrant protests to colonial surveillance and the aesthetics of drone photography. The latter shows the geological scars and war remnants of five abandoned military sites in Israel - army strongholds, shooting ranges and urban warfare training facilities - and juxtaposes them with the personal and political scars engraved and marked on the private human body. Buy

Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago reflects on the changing role of colonial natural history collections in the current ecological crisis.⁠ ⁠ From DNA traces tracing teak furniture back to Indonesian plantations, to the extinction of species in the rapidly changing Malay world, an essayistic composition of Dutch paleoanthropologist Eugène Dubious's Javanese osteo-mythology, to the harmful role of monocultures, especially oil palm. In addition, a series of drone footage by Akademi Drone Indonesia, a group of young environmental activists from Nusantara, documents controversial land grabs in the region and shows the ongoing environmental violence perpetrated for profit.⁠ Buy

This is a stunning and heartbreaking photo book at the same time. French photographer Mohamed Bourouissa's iconic visual account of violence, social inequality, but also unexpected beauty and tenderness in the Parisian banlieues is published here in its entirety for the first time.⁠⁠ Buy

It’s a new year, and with it comes a new installment of our Surprise Subscription. This month, we bring you the very first issue of the new publication from the makers of Kajet Journal: introducing ‘The Future Of…’ More

For 27 years, Deanna Dikeman took photographs as her parents waved her goodbye. After each visit, they stood in the driveway to send her off while she got into her car, rolling down her window and aiming her lens towards them and their home. The pictures show them raising their arms in farewell. You see them happy and sad. You see the seasons change and the years go by. Diekman's father is visibly weakening. He leans on a walking stick and later on the car that is parked in the garage. And then, in one picture, and in all the ones that follow, her mother is seen alone. Standing in the driveway, she waves. ⁠ ⁠ “I never set out to make this series. I just took these photographs as a way to deal with the sadness of leaving. It gradually turned into our good-bye ritual,”says Dikeman.⁠ ⁠ The last picture shows her parents' house with the shutters down and no one in the driveway. It is a collective story, one that is told over and over again, yet unique to everyone. One day you are Dikeman in her car and then you are her parents in the driveway waving. It's a story about family, aging, being together and parting, and the pain of saying goodbye.⁠⁠ Buy

Do you know the work of Forensic Architecture? If not, then be prepared to get your mind blown! Connecting real cases of human rights and environmental violations with the tools used in architecture and design, this studio creates a Wolpertinger of art and real evidence which is then used in some of the biggest court cases and tribunals of recent years. ⁠ ⁠ Forensic Architecture is often challenged by voices declaring in an exhibition “This is evidence, not art!” or in a trial “This is art, not evidence!”. Truth is, that exhibiting their work in art exhibitions draws international attention to cases that States or big corporations would only too gladly keep unnoticed. It helps victims be heard and get access to a public stage. It also sheds light on injustices, corruption and failures of our political systems. ⁠ ⁠ This is the first installation of Forensic Architecture Reports, a series of books each dedicated to a single Forensic Architecture investigation:⁠ ⁠ On the evening of 4 August 2011, Mark Duggan was shot and killed by the police in the north London neighbourhood of Tottenham after the minicab in which he was traveling was pulled over by a team of undercover officers. The team had begun following Duggan shortly after receiving intelligence that he was in possession of a gun, and the officer who shot him testified that he had seen, for a ‘split second’, Duggan aiming the gun at him after he had exited the minicab. However, the gun was not found next to Duggan’s body on the pavement. According to the police, they discovered it in a patch of grass some seven meters away. The Duggan family’s legal team commissioned Forensic Architecture to conduct an investigation into the critical question at the heart of the case: How did the gun end up in the grass? With no video footage of the shooting itself, Forensic Architecture had to rely primarily on the written and oral testimony of the officers involved to develop a spatial investigation designed to test the plausibility of the police’s narrative and to examine whether the officers themselves could have planted the gun.⁠ Buy

"Das letzte Jahr", German for "the last year" does not refer to our last year 2020, which is fortunate because we already have had enough of that. The year meant is 1990, a rather important year in Germany because it was the year in which the reunification of West and East Germany was hastily accomplished. And yet it fell into a collective oblivion. Everyone remembers 1989, when we danced on the Wall. But 1990 seems too scattered to grasp. ⁠ ⁠ The author Martin Gross tried at the time. He had an intuition of the significance of the year that marked the downfall and reshaping of the country. Living in the GDR for a year, he described how people made the transition from the old to the new system. He portrayed people as diverse as the guard of a former Stasi prison, the store manager of one of the new supermarkets, the stokers of a power station, the bodyguards of a minister and the cleaners of a government building.⁠ ⁠ The book was first published in 1992, but was soon forgotten. In 2019, Jan Wenzel came across it while researching for his book "1990 Freilegen" and took many of its notes. With a distance of 30 years, these notes were now perceived by critics as "clear-sighted", "precise", "stylistically brilliant" observations of the turning year. But the author himself could not be found. Fortunately, contact was finally made in June 2020 and a new edition of the title was planned.⁠ ⁠ And so here it is again, a book that describes a historical event, not through political steps, but through the impact it had on people's daily lives. Buy

American Readers at Home is the lavishly designed outcome result of a 13000 miles long road-trip across America during and right after the presidential elections of 2016 which brought Donald Trump to the White House. These were highly contentious times in which American society was deeply polarised around all sorts of issues, from race and gender to immigration and employment. Swiss designer Ludovic Balland and his small team, were willing and able to navigate through the ongoing debates, running more than 200 interviews which draw an overview assessment of the electorate’s news consumption habits in this period. They investigated the role of the media in shaping opinions and documented key events such as the inauguration day and the Women’s Day march in Washington, capturing the gist of a defining moment in the history of the United State of America. Buy