Postsocialism as a Method: Anti-Geographies of Collective Desires is the title of the second cycle of collectively created research and program of the nomadic platform and online archive for video art, experimental, and documentary film D’EST. The platform maps artistic forms of memory at the intersection of postsocialist, queer-feminist, and decolonial narratives and imaginaries.

This bundle of five zines documents and expands the constellation of curated video art chapters, a nomadic cinema format, and experimental, performative publishing practices that were created by the collectives Krёlex zentre, Nhà Sàn Collective, and Fehras Publishing Practices together with D’EST’s directors Ulrike Gerhardt and Suza Husse since 2023. Following slippy timelines and diasporic geographies, they connect political desires and collective life worlds from different post/socialisms in Central Asia, Vietnam, the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa and Southwest Asia, Germany, Europe and the US.

حاضر حلال Hader Halal [With Regards To Presence]
Hader Halal assembles texts around the literary journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings published by the Afro-Asian Writers Association from 1968 to the late 1990s, aiming to promote Afro-Asian solidarity and anti-colonial politics through literature and culture. Fehras Publishing Practices initiated collective fabulations in response to their Lotus collection, and especially to texts from and in solidarity with Palestine, to explore the necessity of “Publishing as a Solidarity Practice” and to mirror the interconnectedness of hopes, liberation struggles and resistance across different geographies.
Edited by Fehras Publishing Practices. Contributions by Aaron Ahalu, Anna Ehrenstein, DNA (Blair & Clint Opara), Farkhondeh Shahroudi, Fehras Publishing Practices, Iskandar Abdalla, Jyl Franzbecker, Moonis Ahmad, Promona Sengupta, Rebecca Pokua Korang, Shaunak Mahbubani, Shrujana N. Shridhar, and Vidisha-Fadescha, 40 pages

Postsocialist Time Slips
The Almaty-and-Vienna-based Krёlex zentre is an imaginary para-institution blending queer cosmopolitics, speculative world-building, inclusive diasporic aesthetics, and translocal cultural practices. Krёlex zentre’s video art chapter Postsocialist Time Slips explores translocal queer imaginaries from Central Asia and asks how experiences of loss, silence, terror, resistance, compassion and love can lead to temporal and political slippages.
Edited by Krёlex zentre. Contributions by Dilda Ramazan, Ulrike Gerhardt & Krёlex zentre, 16 pages

Trời quê hương trong xanh như lời hát [The Hometown Sky is as Blue as a Song]
Through assembled letters, graphic interventions, layered video stills, film and performance scripts, the zine relays a stream of songs of desire, nostalgia, sex, death, humor and chaos that flows through Nhà Sàn Collective’s D’EST chapter. Their selection of moving image works echoing queer imaginaries and sonic worlds reflects experiences during an era of socialist-oriented market economy, of monetizing and spiritualizing, of globalization and localization in Vietnam and the Vietnamese diasporas in the 1990s.
Edited by Nhà Sàn Collective. Contributions by Nguyễn Văn Song, Nguyễn Duy Anh, Síu Phạm, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Vu T. Thu Ha, Quynh Dong, 16 pages

Shut Up White Boy
This zine celebrates the 2002 cult film Shut Up White Boy directed by Vũ T. Thu Hà and collectively written, produced and performed by a group of queer Asian American women and dyke artists and punk rock musicians. The film shows a racialized dream-comes-true nightmare of revenge, desire, lust and fun. Together with images from key scenes of the 16mm B&W celluloid film, the zine unfolds a conversation between two co-makers of the film as well as artists and researchers on occasion of Nhà Sàn Collective’s chapter Trời quê hương trong xanh như lời hát [The Hometown Sky is as Blue as a Song] for D’EST.
Edited by Nhà Sàn Collective and Suza Husse. Contributions by Leslie Shih Shu Mah, Vu T. Thu Ha, Nguyen Quoc Thanh & Suza Husse, 24 pages

Postsocialism as Method: Anti-Geographies of Collective Desires. Ciné Moon Mobile
This introductory double zine accompanies D’EST cycle #2 at Schloss Biesdorf and Flutgraben e.V. (summer–winter 2023). Cover and inlay are its own small zine by Suza Husse and Ulrike Gerhardt, they introduce the ideas, collectivities, anti-geographies, artistic and curatorial practices that shape D’EST cycle #2. The main zine focuses on the Ciné Moon Mobile, a nomadic performative architecture and hosting vehicle developed by Aziza Kadyri and Kim Bode in exchange with Husse, Gerhardt and the East Berlin environments of cycle #2. Bode’s contribution shows how the Ciné Moon Mobile is situated in relation to Soviet cinema buses that traveled across the USSR, former Yugoslavia, and Africa in the 1960s. Kadyri weaves her investigation of Suzani embroidery – a Central Asian art form connected to invisibilized female labor and intergenerational knowledge transfer – into the making of this vehicle. Karolina Majewska-Güde and Gal Kirn deepen the historical and artistic-methodological resonances of the Ciné Moon Mobile with a view on decolonial and archival perspectives in feminist art history (Majewska-Güde) and on the history of revolutionary cinefication (Kirn).
Edited by Suza Husse, Ulrike Gerhardt. Contributions by Aziza Kadyri, Gal Kirn, Karolina Majewska-Güde, Kim Bode, Suza Husse, Ulrike Gerhardt, 24 pages

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Dissident practices and sociabilities of the late GDR unfolded in a present that was largely detached from any utopian future. Their traces are nonetheless alive in the memory of those involved in the cultural and political underground at the time, and in numerous materials and documents held in archives and collections. This book is the result of a transdisciplinary research process that brought artists, researchers, writers, curators, archivists, activists, and multiple interlocutors together at the Archive of the GDR Opposition in Berlin. The materials gathered there draw a complex picture of individual and collective life worlds that deviated from repressive social norms and of the environmental, feminist, and grass-roots democratic practices and radical proposals that took shape in response to the promise and failures of state socialism.

wild recuperations follows a shared desire to bring these experiences and environments from below into a meaningful dialogue with the present. Drawing on current artistic and political forms of working with archives and memory, the book gathers a plurality of approaches from and across critical post-socialist, queer*feminist, Black, post-migrant, and intersectional perspectives. The positions from which histories are experienced, desired, and told – their situatedness in bodies, languages, and ecologies – are part of each story.

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The publication Black Studium documents the installation Black Lives Audio Triptych by Ina Wudtke. It uncovers traces of the history of Black people in Germany and is a multidirectional reminder of past and present anti-racist struggles.  

The work activates archive material, in particular songs, texts and photos relating to Fasia Jansen (1929 – 1997), Hilarius Gilges (1909 – 1933) and Joseph Ekwe Bilé (1892 – 1959) – all three were active in the context of the workers’ movement. 

The audio work consists of three staged audio self-portraits. The staging goes back to the techniques of the agit-prop play groups of the Weimar Republic. Local dialects were often used to reach workers; the actors were not supposed to merge with the roles as in bourgeois theater.  

The speakers, through their current social commitment, can be seen as continuing the protagonists’ political work: Jasmin Eding (speaker Fasia), for example, belongs to a group of Black women who organized with others ADEFRA (Black Women in Germany) in the 1980s for the rights and visibility of Black people in Germany. The Krump dancer Kofie Boachie (speaker Hilarius Gilges) was instrumental in organizing the Black Lives Matter demos in Düsseldorf. Jaenne-Ange Wagne (speaker Joseph Ekwe Bilé) deals with the colonial entanglements of cultural institutions. 

„We only started to deal with our Black history in the mid-1980s and now 37 years have passed and a lot has happened.“ – Jasmin Eding

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This e-book is a digital record, documenting the gathering of materials and the process of creating the project The Scream of the Strawbear. In his photographs, videos, installations and performances, visual artist Matthew Cowan surveys European customs and traditions and their continuing social function today. This interest originally stemmed from learning English ritual dances in New Zealand and has sparked an ongoing exploration of folklore and its contemporary connotations in a wider European context. A sequence of rituals, materials, costumes, plants, and museum artefacts form the central staging point of his artistic research.

In The Scream of the Strawbear, the New Zealand-born artist documents selected traditions from the German city of Giessen and the surrounding countryside, placing them in the context of contemporary art. The publication includes texts that reveal the process of artistic research involved in the work. It covers diverse yet connected themes of folklore originating from traditions in Hesse as well as historical links that cross the world from New Zealand to Europe and the United Kingdom.

Matthew Cowan collaborated with communities whose annual traditional ritual customs, such as the Strawbear and Maimann, take place close to Giessen. These community rituals provide a focus for the aesthetic material of the project. Straw, eggs, leaves, tobacco, cameras, and sound recording devices all feature as artistic motifs in the resulting exhibition at Kunsthalle Giessen.

The e-book contains extensive photographs and documents from the research and exhibition and five performance videos produced over the course of the project.

The Scream of the Strawbear was exhibited at Kunsthalle Giessen and the Oberhessisches Museum from September 7 to November 17, 2019.

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This e-book is a digital record, documenting the gathering of materials and the process of creating the project The Scream of the Strawbear. In his photographs, videos, installations and performances, visual artist Matthew Cowan surveys European customs and traditions and their continuing social function today. This interest originally stemmed from learning English ritual dances in New Zealand and has sparked an ongoing exploration of folklore and its contemporary connotations in a wider European context. A sequence of rituals, materials, costumes, plants, and museum artefacts form the central staging point of his artistic research.

In The Scream of the Strawbear, the New Zealand-born artist documents selected traditions from the German city of Giessen and the surrounding countryside, placing them in the context of contemporary art. The publication includes texts that reveal the process of artistic research involved in the work. It covers diverse yet connected themes of folklore originating from traditions in Hesse as well as historical links that cross the world from New Zealand to Europe and the United Kingdom.

Matthew Cowan collaborated with communities whose annual traditional ritual customs, such as the Strawbear and Maimann, take place close to Giessen. These community rituals provide a focus for the aesthetic material of the project. Straw, eggs, leaves, tobacco, cameras, and sound recording devices all feature as artistic motifs in the resulting exhibition at Kunsthalle Giessen.

The e-book contains extensive photographs and documents from the research and exhibition and five performance videos produced over the course of the project.

The Scream of the Strawbear was exhibited at Kunsthalle Giessen and the Oberhessisches Museum from September 7 to November 17, 2019.

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In The Scream of the Strawbear, the New Zealand-born artist documents selected traditions from the German city of Giessen and the surrounding countryside, placing them in the context of contemporary art. The publication includes texts that reveal the process of artistic research involved in the work. It covers diverse yet connected themes of folklore originating from traditions in Hesse as well as historical links that cross the world from New Zealand to Europe and the United Kingdom.

Matthew Cowan collaborated with communities whose annual traditional ritual customs, such as the Strawbear and Maimann, take place close to Giessen. These community rituals provide a focus for the aesthetic material of the project. Straw, eggs, leaves, tobacco, cameras, and sound recording devices all feature as artistic motifs in the resulting exhibition at Kunsthalle Giessen.

The e-book contains extensive photographs and documents from the research and exhibition and five performance videos produced over the course of the project.

The Scream of the Strawbear was exhibited at Kunsthalle Giessen and the Oberhessisches Museum from September 7 to November 17, 2019.

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In her email correspondence with the New Zealand artist Matthew Cowan, which took place during the Corona pandemic, the artist provides insights into her photographic working methods. She outlines a practice that combines photography as a communicative and documentary medium with the process of archiving and its artistic translation.

She documents, among other things, legal exhibits in the evidence rooms of cities in Germany, re-enacts the police search of her parents’ house 13 years after the actual event in 1990 and artistically examines a playground with its special history as a background. For her, the use of glass as a working material is both functionally and conceptually an important filter for historical aesthetics, temporary architectures and the absent as information. Within these strategies, Müller’s photographic practice is an inventory of real and fictional events that address claims of the legal and artistic truth of objects.

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Such a philosophical approach offers an effective theoretical tool for opening up original and pointed perspectives to redefine the crisis of anthropocentrism by putting the place and capacities of what is human in relation to what is non-human, be it living or technical. Helmuth Plessner’s work is really brought into play here and serves as the basis for experimental performances and the formulation of new concepts.

The publication gathers two films by Sylvie Boisseau & Frank Westermeyer, which are accessible in full length together with the book, as well as the text by David Zerbib:

– Der Freie Mensch – mit KI, Germany/Switzerland, video 4k, 7:43 min, 2019
– ƒ zwischen den Stufen des Organischen, Germany/Switzerland, video 4k, 20:40 min, 2021
– David Zerbib, Der Mensch, der Hund, der Roboter und die Seerose. Philosophische Anthropologie und Ästhetik des Falls ƒ, 2021

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