Opera Village, a participatory art experiment by the late German multimedia artist Christoph Schlingensief, serves as a testing ground for a critical interrogation of Richard Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Sarah Hegenbart traces the path from Wagner’s introduction of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Bayreuth to Schlingensief’s attempt to charge the idea of the total artwork with new meaning by transposing it to the West African country Burkina Faso. Schlingensief developed Opera Village ...

This compelling publication traces the broad arc of photography’s development in France from the 1970s to the present day. A decade-by-decade account reveals unexpected points of convergence between practices that are not usually considered in a comparative perspective. These include photographic practices in contemporary art, documentary, photojournalism, and fashion. Author Olga Smith sets these practices in dialogue with French philosophy – the writings of Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrill...

The “clear line”, a term coined in 1977 by Dutch essayist and artist Joost Swarte, has become shorthand in the field of comics studies for the style originally developed by Hergé and the École de Bruxelles. It refers to certain storytelling strategies that generate a deceptively simple, lucid, and hygienic narration: in Philippe Marion’s words, it is a style “made out of light, fluidity and limpid clarity”.

By cataloguing and critically analysing clear line comics from historical ...

The Berlin Sound Archive (Lautarchiv) consists of an extensive collection of sound recordings, compiled for scientific purposes in the first half of the 20th century. Recorded on shellac are stories and songs, personal testimonies and poems, glossaries and numbers. This book engages with the archive by consistently focusing on the colonial conditions under which the recordings were produced.

With a firm commitment to postcolonial scholarship, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive is a hist...

Transparency is the metaphor of our time. Whether in government or corporate governance, finance, technology, health or the media – it is ubiquitous today, and there is hardly a current debate that does not call for more transparency. But what does this word actually stand for and what are the consequences for the life of individuals? Can knowledge from the arts, and its play of visibility and invisibility, tell us something about the paradoxical logics of transparency and mediation? This O...

The practice of architecture manifests in myriad forms and engagements. Overcoming false divides, this volume frames the fertile relationship between the cultural and scholarly production of academia and the process of designing and building in the material world. It proposes the concept of the hybrid practitioner, who bridges the gap between academia and practice by considering how different aspects of architectural practice, theory, and history intersect, opening up a fascinating array of p...

Glass beads, both beautiful and portable, have been produced and traded globally for thousands of years. Modern archaeologists study these artifacts through sophisticated methods that analyze the glass composition, a process which can be utilized to trace bead usage through time and across regions. This book publishes open-access compositional data obtained from laser ablation – inductively coupled plasma – mass spectrometry, from a single analytical laboratory, providing a uniquely compa...

Since the inception of Translation Studies in the 1970s, its researchers have held regular metareflections. Largely based on the assessment of translation and interpreting as two distinct but related modes of language mediation, each with its own research culture, these intradisciplinary debates have sought to take stock of the state of research within an ever-expanding discipline in search of (institutional) identity and autonomy. Recharting Territories proposes a more widespread and systema...

More than one hundred years after the conclusion of the First World War, the edited collection States of Emergency: Architecture, Urbanism, and the First World War reassesses what that cataclysmic global conflict meant for architecture and urbanism from a human, social, economic, and cultural perspective. Chapters probe how underdevelopment and economic collapse manifested spatially, how military technologies were repurposed by civilians, and how cultures of education, care, and memory emerge...

The art world is a multi-billion-dollar industry which captures world headlines on a regular basis, for both good and bad reasons. This book deals with one of the most-discussed areas of controversy: high-profile objects that have experts arguing about their veracity. Some may have been looted, others may be fakes, some may be heavily restored or misattributed. Often, in these cases, analytical science is called on to settle a dispute. The authors of this book have decades of experience in th...