ALEX HEAD
Here Comes Trouble • ZK/U Press
Ivar Kvaal
Here Comes Trouble, an Inquiry into Art, Magic & Madness as Deviant Knowledge is a book project created between late 2015 and June 2016. It has subsequently been distributed globally by Donlon Books, Vice Versa Art Books, by the author and Motto Distribution and is currently in its third print.
Imagine the infinitely tiny size of an atom. Focus on the size of this microscopic particle in relation to your own human body. Now scale up to the size of the planets, galaxies, to the solar system as a whole. The weight of your body exists between these vastly different scales.Here Comes Trouble, An Inquiry into Art, Magic and Madness as Deviant Knowledge, is not about thermodynamics, negative feedback or refrigerators. Neither have I written a book about geology, black holes or migration, yet each of these material systems offer insights into the slippery topic of deviancy. So what is deviancy? What forms does it take historically and what, as it were, does it do? Read more below...
ORDER HERE COMES TROUBLE
Outline
In this work, I have tried to analyse the way in which deviancy has been historically ascribed and how the treatment of those bearing its title has been legitimised. Parallel to this, I have offered the reader a series of reflections upon a pressing, European, socio-political arena, within which the traits, fears and repressive violence which historically contextualise the ascription of deviancy, have begun to increase.
The methodology I have used sought to identify two or more ‘stable states’ and an area of transition between these two spatio-temporal, or political fixities. Between the feudal and capitalist systems of organisation I have argued, as others have before me, a process of violent political consolidation occurred across Europe. The evidence for this is written into the very language we use, such as in the word faggot, as well as in state/public, citizen, and cultural records.
Furthermore, the repression and servitude installed within the human psyche during this period, haunts many of us in the continuing bourgeois economic, colonial relation of master and slave, abstracted for the West in the form of the debt fuelled working day. Where credit or money performs as the ‘intercalary element’ (in place of dialogue, questioning and material communication), these pitiless labour relations, that would drive you and me to the slave-master relation given the slightest opportunity, can only worsen. Yet, there is always the potential to do things differently, providing a meaningful space exists into which new, deviant forms may proliferate.
Launch Presentation of Here Comes Trouble
Introduced by artist and urbanist Anna Kostreva, this opening lecture attempts to explore the core themes of my book Here Comes Trouble an Inquiry into Art, Magic & Madness as Deviant Knowledge. Published by and delivered at ZK/U - Center of Art and Urbanistic, the book employs modelling from the fields of physics, geology, historical analysis and activism to propose answers to the question 'what is deviant knowledge?'
Thanks to Gustavo Sanromán for filming the event.
Here Comes Trouble presented at Club al Hakawati (Refugee Club Impulse) Berlin-Moabit!
Roni Efrin Yezidi Ma
Impress
Alex Head
ZK/U Press, Berlin
Third Edition
Editor: Anna Kostreva
Layout: Philipp Koller
Additional research & conceptualisation: Anna Kostreva
Illustrations of paper collage and plants by the author
Printer: Janet 45, Plovdiv, Bulgaria
Fonts: Deviancy, Suisse Works, Suisse International
Cover image: Garden of Ronald, in memory of the late Ronald Harper, 1925-2015
First edition of 150 - May 2016
Second edition of 500 - September 2016
Third edition of 800 - June 2018
Published by ZK/U PRESS, 2016
All rights reserved, save for images declared under the Creative Commons International License
ZK/U (Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik)
Siemensstraße 27, D-10551 Berlin
ISBN: 978-3-945659-09-0
publish@zku-berlin.org