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Contested Landscapes is dedicated to different rural regions—their landscapes, their producers, and their work. The paths of the family of the artist Sandra Schäfer and those of the famous German photographer August Sander cross in the Westerwald, a rural area in Germany shaped by farming and mining. A hundred years ago, the photographer August Sander captured his series of peasants there including the artist’s relatives. Schäfer’s “homecoming” is represented in the book by three works dealing with the changes of the landscape, its farming, and Sander’s photographs, as well as amateur ones from Schäfer’s family. Contributions from Schäfer’s interlocutors reflect ..., https://www.librarystack.org/contested-landscapes/?ref=unknown

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., https://www.librarystack.org/archive-journal-issue-09/?ref=unknown

“Peace on earth and a new and peaceful relationship with the earth are inseparable.” The pamphlet Peace with the Earth (Fred med jorden) was published by the Swedish suffragettes and peace activists Elisabeth Tamm and Elin Wägner in 1940, just after the outbreak of the Second World War. Elisabeth Tamm (1880–1958) served as one of the first women in parliament and was an organic farmer. Elin Wägner (1882–1949) worked as a writer and activist on matters of women’s rights, peace, and ecology, and was a member of the Swedish Academy. The authors’ observations and proposals connect questions of agriculture to those of custody of land and habitats, where the “arrogant desire” to own land must be overcome. This English translation of this pamphlet enables a wider access to the informed and lively debate on ecology, agriculture and our relationship with the land, as it was raised by feminists, ecologists and peace activists in Scandinavia during the first half of the 20th century. The arguments gathered in Peace with the Earth are even more relevant today, as they bring depth to pressing issues regarding the collapse of ecosystems caused by over-intensive farming methods. Peace with the Earth is part of a series of publications that investigate agricultural narratives and practices initiated by artist, writer and curator Åsa Sonjasdotter. The first book in the series, Peace with the Earth – Tracing Agricultural Memory – Refiguring Practice, was published by Archive Books in 2019., https://www.librarystack.org/peace-with-the-earth/?ref=unknown

The exhibition Monoculture – A Recent History approaches monoculture, or ‘cultural homogeneity’, from various historical, social and ideological perspectives, as well as philosophical and linguistic ones. As a museum for art and visual culture, M HKA has looked at many different case studies from approximately the last one hundred years in order to consider the impetus for monoculture or the monocultural self-image, and how this has been reflected in artistic work as well as in propaganda and philosophical thought. Seeking as much as possible to consider monoculture not as something exclusively conservative or right-wing, the exhibition rather considers it as something that can be found across social and ideological partialities. With the inclusion of ambiguity, artistically and philosophically-speaking, this exhibition also wishes to look at what ways of living or perceiving might be excluded by the formation of a monoculture. Monoculture – A Recent History asks questions on what kind of society and cultural space we want, taking into account human subjectivity along with its great capacities of creativity and empathy., https://www.librarystack.org/monoculture-a-recent-history/?ref=unknown

This month, we are very glad to have our first guest-edited issue of e-flux journal care of Irit Rogoff, whose activities we have followed with great interest over the years, drawn to her insights into the potentialities of education unbounded. Already a number of contributions to the journal in its first year (those of Tom Holert, Luis Camnitzer, and Dieter Lesage, in addition to Rogoff’s own immensely influential text, “Turning”) have surveyed current conditions and possible reformulations of educational structures. But at a time when even the status quo of many educational institutions is threatened by budget cuts, tuition hikes, ..., https://www.librarystack.org/e-flux-journal-14/?ref=unknown

This month, we are very glad to have our first guest-edited issue of e-flux journal care of Irit Rogoff, whose activities we have followed with great interest over the years, drawn to her insights into the potentialities of education unbounded. Already a number of contributions to the journal in its first year (those of Tom Holert, Luis Camnitzer, and Dieter Lesage, in addition to Rogoff’s own immensely influential text, “Turning”) have surveyed current conditions and possible reformulations of educational structures. But at a time when even the status quo of many educational institutions is threatened by budget cuts, tuition hikes, and measures taken to standardize and regiment learning (see for instance the recent protests throughout the University of California system or the Bologna Process in general), and the art world increasingly seems to absorb an “educational turn” as a mannerist curiosity, it becomes all the more important to consider how forms of learning and exchange, of thinking and making, can take place within flexible, temporary, unstable configurations—which may or may not be educational or instructive—unrestricted by measurable outcomes or predetermined expectations… “Education Actualized” – Editorial Irit Rogoff Unglamorous Tasks: What Can Education Learn from its Political Traditions? Nora Sternfeld Artistic Education of the Public Adrian Rifkin Debt and Study Fred Moten and Stefano Harney Mourning Bologna Dietrich Lemke Learning by Doing: Reflections on Setting Up a New Art Academy Nicolas Siepen and Åsa Sonjasdotter FREE Irit Rogoff Magic Hat – Property of the People Susanne Lang and Darius James Transindividuation Bernard Stiegler and Irit Rogoff Can the Cognitariat Speak? Isabelle Bruno and Christopher Newfield (Extend, https://www.librarystack.org/e-flux-journal-14/?ref=unknown