An artifact of art critique, All that it holds. Tout ce qu’elle renferme. Tudo o que ela abarca. Todo lo que ella alberga, reaches beyond canons, beyond singular narratives, refusing to rest on universal ideas.

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The book designed by Büro222 and published with Kerber Verlag is a curated selection of texts representing a plurality of voices on contemporary art from Africa and the global diaspora – it is a continuation of a rich and dynamic, 10-year long conversations within the C& community.

On how the book came to be…

We have this amazing archive between C& Magazine and the C& América Latina Magazine: there are about 8,000 texts. But visiting the website, people are only scratching the surface of this enormous repository of knowledge, information, perspectives, and discourses. The idea was to dig out some highlights and the 10-year anniversary gave us the perfect occasion to bring them together in a new book – a book that represents the whole spectrum of C& – thanks to our writers, the artists and cultural producers on the continent and the global diaspora.

On the selection process…

The whole C& team sent in their all time favorite texts. We had a very long list, so many texts to choose from! We brought together texts from the very beginning in 2013 and texts from today so that the whole decade is inside the book. It was important that we represented different regions: texts from the continent, Europe, from Latin America, the Caribbean. Another key aspect was to include various generations, not only young artists but also those who have been working and paving the way for a really long time.

On languages…

It is a four title book because we decided to have it in four languages: English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

We are thinking a lot about languages and how to use the colonial ones. We don’t have a real solution yet, as they are somehow still how we understand each other. In past projects we published texts in Limbum, K’iche’, Khmer, Bahasa or Haitian Creole but we still need English, French, Portuguese and Spanish as languages that most of our readers understand. In the book we tried to use them in a very non-hierarchical, organic way. So you will find each text in the native language of the writer as well as in English. Some of them can even be read in three languages if the text presents a trans-regional perspective.

In terms of hierarchy of words, we also only use one font size for every text in the book – from the headline to the captions of the images to the information in the imprint. It shows that everything is part of the book and has the same value – like the content of our magazines.

On the hopes for the book…

It’s important for us to give another point of entry into this huge archive that all the writers, artists and cultural producers have built. They are C&!

The book is a continuation of the print issues, of the platforms and our living archives…it brings together all those perspectives, similarities, interwoven stories, plural narratives from the past, present and future.

There are so many different discourses in the book – from groundbreaking biennials, to thoughts on ecologies from Black and Indigenous perspectives, to queer politics. To read about Indigenous perspectives in Brazil next to an artist who does digital, afro-surreal art in Ghana – it’s so inspiring to engage with contemporary art from Africa and the global diaspora and all that it holds. To see that there’s not one canon, there’s not one truth, there are many truths, there are many different experiences of how we are in this world and yet, some that connect us all.