We invite artists to put their notions, thoughts and ideas, their personal concept of freedom into format.

Printed and bound: Visual notes, drafts, settings, fragments, aphorisms, vignettes, allusions, refractions, tapeworms. On freedom.

With freedom books we would like to establish a logbook of current attitudes, different perspectives and unexpected concepts on the subject.

 

freedom books

Freedom has fallen into disrepute.

Functionally obstructed, hijacked and dumped into the programmatic chains of exploitation of political parties. Without hesitation, and beyond all recognizability. What was the question once again?

Right-wing populists like the Freedom Party in Austria, or The Young Freedom. They will certainly not provide the answer. It' s also involved in Neoliberalism. And fake news is part of freedom of speech. Yeah.

Brain studies reduce it to marginal importance, possibly negligible. Free decisions are based on neuronal processes, almost entirely in the unconscious. Thus we have no choice, so to speak. Free will as the automaton-like generator of regular brain waves. Being able to do what we really want. Really?

Doubly burdened: Free elections for a free living. Politicians have long tried to get people to vote. Now they are voting AfD – and again it is not correct. Or Trump. Or Erdogan. The fear of freedom. Due to their authoritarian mindset, people react to their impotence with a desire to be dominated (Erich Fromm).

And those who then feel it, the boundless freedom, not rarely feel the pressure of the countless possibilities above all. It becomes increasingly evident – the inadequate individual, the exhausted self. In the past there was compulsion and neurosea, today freedom is often accompanied by depression.

And then, oh well, the Internet. A short time happiness, quickly enjoyed, already history. At first boundlessly liberal and democratic, it quickly broke, and now it's particularly apt for surveillance, debate reduction and commercial appropriation. And how will individuality, a fundamental element of freedom after all, manifest itself in a fully developed iSociety in the future?

But we are not finished with it yet. In general, it is questionable whether there are worthy alternatives. And be it only to liberate us from the very ego that constantly keeps us striving for freedom.

It is this "positive freedom" that we are interested in. Not being free of something, but a freedom for something. It opens a vision to another art, another politics, another life, another reality. New truths, new practices. Freedom as a term of combat. Freedom will die with lack of resistance, and life will become dull and empty.

Thus boldness to freedom! We must narrate it anew. The struggle for new narratives is unleashed, the old ones have served their time. New everyday myths, new patterns of our mental existence, a new order of reality. One picture, or two or more. Create anew!

Creating is subversive, dangerous, rebellious. Creating, understood as the opposite of subjugation. When we create, we free ourselves. From subject to project (Vilém Flusser). The central element of the becoming human.

We won't go for anything less here.

Yet be brave.

We have set out to produce two freedom books a year and are looking forward to a growing archive of discourses and confrontations.

 

Format details (subject to change)
content: 4/32 pages, number of copies: 900, format: 171 x 210 mm, printing: 4/4 colour.