Out now: Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, are proud to announce the release of Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent, the first reader in BAK’s BASICS series.

Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent begins from an urgent need to outline the contours of what living in non-fascist ways could mean in uncertain times, when the resurgence of fascism violates the infrastructures and very foundations of a livable life.

The reader connects to BAK’s research strand Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing), a long-term itinerary for generating knowledge about, developing proposals for, and activating tactics of “non-fascist living”: that is, practicing life—and thus modeling a world—decidedly void of fascisms. Moving from critique to propositions, the project attempts to articulate and inhabit methods of de-individualized living and to practice ways in which multiplicity and difference establish relations other than those structured by power and hierarchy.

Propositions for Non Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent, edited by Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas, includes contributions by Rosi Braidotti; Denise Ferreira da Silva, Jota Mombaça, and Thiago de Paula Souza; Stefano Harney and Fred Moten; Patricia Kaersenhout and Lukáš Likavčan; Sven Lütticken; Jumana Manna; Dan McQuillan; Shela Sheikh; Eyal Weizman and Forensic Architecture; and Mick Wilson.

The publication marks the beginning of BAK’s BASICS series, published in collaboration with MIT Press. The readers in this series probe some of the most urgent challenges of our time, engaging them through theoretically informed and politically driven artistic research and practice. If BAK is conceived as a basis—a base where art and theory meet social action to collectively negotiate the social, political, environmental, and technological conditions in which we live and, more importantly, develop and actualize proposals for being together otherwise—then BASICS is its publishing equivalent.

True to its name, the series offers “basics” that narrate in a new language the contemporary predicament, as well as ways to resist it. BASICS is a response to our current global and planetary emergencies. It initiates a revisiting of critical questions as much as it seeks to develop afresh the building blocks of lexicons, tactics, scenarios, and relations that make action possible in the face of the contemporary situation.

Edited by Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas | Published by BAK, basis actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2019 | Design by Sean van den Steenhoven for Leftloft, Milan | English language | 200 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 9780262537896

The reader Propositions for Non Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent can be purchased at BAK or via MIT press.