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The Forest Encounters book invites you into the forest and its many meanings. It brings together voices from different disciplines, geographies, and cultures. Artists, foresters, art historians, philosophers, anthropologists, wildlife researchers, landscape architects, and writers all participate in this collective reflection on the diverse meanings, challenges, and perspectives related to the forest.

Edited by Urška Jurman and Mateja Kurir
Contributors: Giovanni Aloi, Daniela Brasil and Nayarí Castillo, T. J. Demos, Marjolijn Dijkman, Dušica Dražić, Katharina Flich, Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes, Lea Hartmeyer, Urška Jurman, Agata A. Konczal, Miha Krofel, Ana Kučan, Mateja Kurir, Polonca Lovšin, Felicita Medved, Teo Hrvoje Oršanič, Borut Peterlin, Bojana Piškur, Titta C. Raccagni, Zoe Jo Rae, Alex Schuurbiers

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The 7th issue of Commodity Frontiers is now live on our new journal website.

The issue explores carbon frontiers through carbon histories, carbon technocracy, carbon sovereignty, carbon financing, carbon credits, carbon offsets, and carbon capture and storage.

Multidisciplinary authors take us on a journey through carbon debates and conflicts (Shin and Jackson), from energy use and resilience in colonized India (Sayako Kanda) to carbon and state power in 19th century East Asia (Bartoletti, Coghe, and Seow) to agricultural education in the Central Valley in present-day California (Gharibian and Cruz). We read about carbon financing and violence in the rangelands of Northern Kenya (Atieno Owino), the invisibilized and exploited labor of “decarbonization” in Indonesia’s palm oil industry (Roswaldy and Sawit Women’s Education Group), and the false promises of carbon capture and storage in Norway (Dijkman and Ressler). Julia Loginova reviews Andrew Curley’s book, Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, development, and energy transition in the Navajo Nation. The issue also includes an in-depth article about the metal mining giant, Zijin, by Joan Martinez-Alier and Marcel Llavero-Pasquina from the EJAtlas.

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Vertical Atlas brings together the insights of a diverse group of internationally renowned artists, scientists and technologists from different backgrounds and places. From an investigation into the lithium mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo to maps of the fiber-optic submarine cables in the Atlantic and the ride-hailing platforms of China.

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Art and Climate Change, published by Thames & Hudson, is an introduction to ecologically conscious contemporary art. The artists in the book are bound together by a deep concern for the planet and the future of all living creatures.

Includes ‘That What Makes Us Human’ (2016) & ‘Prospect of Interception’ (2016) by Marjolijn Dijkman.

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Contributions in this issue take up the commodity frontier lens in various ways. They deal with a range of minerals and frontiers: gold (Engels; Verbrugge and Robles Mengoa), copper (Cottyn), coal (Yeni), lithium (Arndt and Gueye; Cariola; Marquez), “green energy” (Arndt and Gueye; Cariola; Vázquez Ruiz), and seabed and ocean floor mining (Menon). More than this, the articles highlight various approaches to the study of, and engagement with, capitalism’s mineral frontiers.

Commodity Frontiers is one part of the CFI network and project. Through the pages of this journal, we want to further create and foster community among thinkers and doers who critically engage with commodity frontiers. In these pages we can share perspectives and analyses, data and doubts, reflections and hopes, questions and possible answers. We can exchange ideas, collaborate, and debate. And we can examine the past, while looking to the future.

Wandering stars have occupied the human mind across centuries and millennia, along with the quest to explore and colonize cosmic space. Is there something in us that refuses to believe that we are alone in the universe? Does our longing for the stars conceal something different? To what extent can fiction shape future realities?

The construction of such inquiries are at the centre of Marjolijn Dijkman’s work, which pivots around humankind’s fascination for cosmic space, the position of our planet in the universe, and human subjectivity in relation to celestial bodies. Radiant Matter comprises a series of recent artworks that desire to analyse and reflect on the nature of scientific inquiry, the role of speculation, fiction and spiritualism.

Together with a poetic image essay and a conversation between the artist and the editor Kris Dittel, this widely illustrated book includes texts by Maarten Vanden Eynde, Ken Hollings and Raqs Media Collective.

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History Rising is a subversive and engaging study of museum display by artist Marjolijn Dijkman and curator Jes Fernie. By distancing museum objects from their support structures the project seeks to critique the assumptions that are made about how things are positioned, who chooses to display them, and how the social, political and aesthetic choices that are made in the process dictate the language of display.

This book is made up of visual and written essays, an interview between the artist and curator, an inventory of works, and documentation of Dijkman’s installations in museums and galleries in the UK. These installations propose strange and fantastical juxtapositions, alleviate objects from the weight of history and create links with modernism, the heritage industry and the aesthetics of sci-fi.

Editors Jes Fernie and Marjolijn Dijkman
Design by Salome Schmuki
Published by Onomatopee, Eindhoven, NL
ISBN 9789491677304

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The first survey of its kind to explore contemporary art that focuses on ecology From land art and earthworks in the 1960s to conceptual art of the new millennium, ecology-focused art has been a prominent genre in the art world for decades. This book offers a look into the recent explosion in contemporary art that deals directly with nature, the environment, climate change, and ecology. Organized into six thematic chapters, Art & Ecology Now moves through the various levels of artists’ engagement, from those who document and reflect on nature, to those who use the physical environment as the raw material for their art, and committed activists who set out to make art that transforms both our attitudes and our habits.

Including works by: Allora & Calzadilla, Edward Burtynsky, Marjolijn Dijkman, Tue Greenfort, Hans Haacke, Eva Jospin, Nadav Kander, Yao Lu, David Maisel, Gustav Metzger, Svetlana Ostapovici, Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo, and more.

Edited by: Andrew Brown
ISBN-10: 0500239169 / ISBN-13: 978-0500239162

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Hosted by the Cameroonian artist magazine DiARTgonale, the two special editions JAMAN (2012)  and ECHOES (2013) present the outcome of a long-term curatorial endeavour, initiated in 2009, for which Cameroonian and European artists collaboratively produced new, research-based artworks. The upcoming launches continue a series started last December in Cameroon during the triennale Salon Urbain de Douala 2013. Initiated by: Annette Schemmel and Marjolijn Dijkman

12 February 2014: SMBA, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
13 February 2014: WIELS & Enough Room for Space HQ, Brussels, Belgium
21 February 2014: SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, Germany

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P.E.A.R. (Paper for Emerging Architectural Research) aims to re-establish the fanzine as a primary medium for the dissemination of architectural ideas, musings, research and works, and to present the complexity and variety of architectural practice. We actively seek to publish thinking that wouldn’t ordinarily be seen in the mainstream architectural press, and we are interested in showing that the architectural is concerned with more than just architecture.

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A publication, edited/curated by Zoë Mendelson and published by And Publishing, will include articles, artworks and fiction. Alongside This Mess is a Place‘s own collaborators from psychiatric and archival fields there will be contributions of artistic projects from Jim Bay (UK); Michel Blazy (FR); Carrie M Becker (USA); Marjolijn Dijkman (NL); Nat Goodden (UK), Jefford Horrigan (UK), Catrin Huber (UK); Dean Hughes (UK); Verity Jane Keefe (UK); Mierle Laderman Ukeles (USA); Florence Peake (UK); Michael Samuels (UK); Kathryn Spence (USA); Robin Waart (NL); Julian Walker (UK) and Laura White (UK) among others.

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