Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Our new issue FGA#38 What life could be



FGA#38
What life could be/the ambivalence of success

This FGA International Edition is an oral history about place, living as an artist, being contemporaries and sharing a time frame with specific problems and enchantments. Photos, quotes, maps and documents, artists’ contributions and essays, are inserted into the flow of the conversations. Ten white pages are occupied by a scent.  

In this issue we focus on four topics: CO-OPs, Art, Money, and Psychedelics. Our main topic is learning from CO-OPs as a form of living and working together, based on a number of examples as a case study.

 In 2018 we started revisiting people, topics and places that featured in FGA’s 2008 Swiss Issue, and soon started focussing on cooperative forms of thinking, living and working together. Some good people in Zurich, Geneva and St-Imier, Glarus, Rolle, Biel and Tschlin, shared their knowledge and experiences about proposals and counter-proposals from ancient times, from the 1920’s, 50’s, 70’s, 80’s and now. 

The cities we live in are changing rapidly. Their proclaimed success excludes many from affordable space to live and work. What could life be and what can art contribute to that? “To survive as a singular artist, we must organise collectively”, Pascal Gielen said. In this issue SciFi author P.M. asks: “How would you really like to live? What do you really want to do? In what kind of society would you feel comfortable?” FGA adds: What can spur and support the possibility of imagening, building and living such proposals, and keep them outside the market? One co-op law from the 1920’s is important, but Terrence McKenna sees the root of the matter underground, and claims it is the largest rhizome of psychedelic mushrooms on earth that first sparked the collective imagination of what life could be. 

FGA#38

14 Conversations with:
Lisa Lee Benjamin, Frank Hyde-Antwi, Wenzel A. Haller, Felix Stephan Huber, Marco Jacomella, Claudia Jolles, Andreas Marti, Angela Marzullo and Michael Hofer, NORM, Jan van Oordt, Manuela Pfrunder, Curdin Tones, Eva Wagner, Hans Widmer aka P.M.

Image- and Text contributions by:
Stefan Burger, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Hayat Erdogan, Tine Milz und Julia Reichert, Anne-Laure Franchette, Patrizia Mazzei und Andreas Marti, Haus am Gern, Michael Hiltbrunner, Marco Jacomella and Michele D’Ariano Simionato, Marta Margnetti and Giacomo Galletti, Pietro Mattioli, Jan van Oordt, Elodie Pong, Arthur de Pury, Boris Siemaszko and Melina Wilson, Curdin Tones, Micha Zweifel

Dokuments, fragments and quotes by:
Søren Berner, Stefan Burger, CIRA, Ernst Gisel, Terrence Mc Kenna, Otto Mueller, Serge Stauffer

Artists and editors: Robert Hamelijnck & Nienke Terpsma
360 pages, 19 x 13 cm, paperback
Design: Nienke Terpsma, Rotterdam
Publisher: edition fink. Zürich 2018
ISBN 978-3-03746-232-4
ISSN 1874-0227
CHF 24.00 / EUR 19.95 / USD 25.00