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

Thursday, June 27, 2019

The Spot for the End of Time

Chapter 1: Birth

We received an official invitation for The Spot for the End of Time by our friends from Woodstone Kugelblitz to come to their house in France for a duration of 2 to 22 days. It is a new project about 'free time', or time for nothing as they write and Apocalypse (present and future).
We accept of course! Their house is not far from the Loire, the last "wild" river in Europe. This is going to be a wonderful summer :-) Rien est trop tard la vie, les pompiers volantaires de l'apocalypse.
RH

This is the invitation letter we received:







Tuesday, May 28, 2019

FGA in Basel: I Never Read + Liste magazine table

Please go to our website if you like to buy FGA38.
www.fuckinggoodart.nl
Liste 10—16 June 2019. Burgweg 15, Basel.
In two and a half weeks (12—15 June) we will be in Basel for the I Never Read Art Book Fair in the Kaserne to present our new FGA#38 International Edition (2019). We could have also called it the COOP-Issue because it is partly about how we can create and keep affordable living and working space for the long term. This is becoming more and more a problem.

We will also bring our Existentialism Issue (FGA#35) made in 2017 to the table. It is the closing project of Alexandra Blättlers project New Existentialism, and contains 3 conversations and an essay. The conversations are with: Ger Groot, Dutch philosopher and writer; Alana Jelinek, Australian artist and writer of the book This is Not Art: Activism and Other "Not-Art"; and Alexandra Blättler, curator of the show and Swiss art historian. The essay The Crude Read of True Resolve is by Jan Verwoert, he is a German critic, writer and lecturer on cultural theory, and a musician.

At the same time both editions can be found on the Liste magazine table. We have been at the Liste magazine table for more than 10 years and for us it is kind of a reality check to see how your own publication relates to other magazines, especially since we are not a "real" art magazine. But who knows, maybe we are? How we look at it is that we operate in the folds of the system.

Just like in previous years, we have a barter deal and we share our banners and information.
Hope to see you in Basel!

***

FGA#38, International edition—What life could be.
Published by edition fink, Zurich.
FGA38_Title: What life could be / the ambivalence of success
(International Edition: Zurich—2019)

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


360 pages, 72 img., 52 in colour, 17 facsimiles
19 x 13 cm, paperback
Design: Nienke Terpsma, Rotterdam
Publisher: edition fink. Zürich 2018
ISBN 978-3-03746-232-4
ISSN 1874-0227









































FGA at La Dépendance in St-Imier

From 15—27 May we were artists-in-residence at La Dépendance in Saint-Imier in Switzerland. La Dépendance is a tiny idyllic summer house nested in a once kind of bourgeois garden with conifers, and apple tree etc. But now everything is overgrown and wild. The house belonged to the hairdresser of the village and is 100 meters remote from Sur Le Pont, a big old house that was once an Inn and restaurant. Now a group of 9 (young) people live there. It is a heterogenous group all with different professions and most of them are from Basel and 7 years ago they bought the house and it took them years to renovate it. A year ago Jan van Oordt—he is an artist—bought it for 35,000 CHF and he has found a nice way to earn back the borrowed money. He calls it Drawings for La Dépendance.



It works like this: Jan asks people (not just artists) to make a drawing (or several) on a sheet of A5. They have to send them by post to St-Imier. With the collection of drawings Jan makes exhibitions and tries to sell them for 1 CHF. He now has a collection of around 10,000 drawings and has sold 2,500. He still has a long way to go.