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Explore this month’s selection of articles and new books, highlighting the finest content published during February 2026. |
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Highlights:
- In 2026, Mousse turns 20. The anniversary year opens with back-and-forth, a new column by Chus Martínez looking back and forth in time, as we often do.
- In collaboration with Basel Tourismus, we developed the book ABC BASEL, a syllabary mapping twelve key institutions across the city. Each letter pairs a word with a cultural space, proposing an editorial reading of Basel’s cultural infrastructure. Co-curated with Samuel Leuenberger and accompanied by a visual essay by Matthieu Croizier, the book traces the histories of some of Basel’s most important cultural actors, told by the people who shape the institutions themselves.
- On the occasion of the exhibition at MAMbo, Bologna, dedicated to the American artist, poet, and activist John Giorno, we published John Giorno: The Performative Word, edited by Lorenzo Balbi, curator of the exhibition, Anthony Huberman, and Bonnie Whitehouse. The first monograph devoted to Giorno, the book situates his work at the intersection of poetry, performance, painting, and political activism.
- In Mousse 94, Eyal Weizman, Nour Abuzaid, and Elizabeth Breiner of Forensic Architecture reflects in conversation on how the research agency had to rethink its methods since October 2023 to work on their “Gaza Atlas” and “Cartography of Genocide” report.
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back-and-forth: Feb 13, 2026
by Chus Martínez
“Let’s explore together the cognitive potential of memory: remembering not only as the process of retrieving images from the past, but as the true act of creating the present and the near future. Memory does not reconstruct something that is absent; it actualizes virtual forms of being that are no longer present. Therefore, exercising memory is fundamental to revitalize values that we think are gone, practices that we would like to reactivate, agencies that we feel we’ve lost. In other words, memory offers us forms of resurrection.”
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John Giorno: The Performative Word
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€40.00
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SURVEY:
Forensic Architecture
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Forensics Is What the State Does, Counter-Forensics Is What We Do:
Nour Abuzaid, Elizabeth Breiner, and Eyal Weizman in conversation
Across legal, artistic, and media forums, Forensic Architecture navigates corrupted tools—law, satellite imagery, social media—while holding to an ethics of rigorous attunement and reconstruction as the basis for understanding, presenting, and contesting violence. This conversation between three of its members— Eyal Weizman, Nour Abuzaid, and Elizabeth Breiner—reflects on how the research agency had to rethink its methods since October 2023 to work on their “Gaza Atlas” and “Cartography of Genocide” report.
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Michael E. Smith “CC” at Palazzo Bentivoglio, Bologna
by Riccardo Conti
Descending into the underground spaces of Palazzo Bentivoglio to visit CC, Michael E. Smith’s solo exhibition—curated by Simone Menegoi and Tommaso Pasquali—does not mean moving according to a legible progression, but rather entering an environment that retains, disarticulates, and redistributes weak signals, material fragments, and intermittent presences. From the very first steps, it is not only the idea of the artwork that is called into question, but the entire apparatus that normally guarantees its recognition: lighting, distance, frontality, hierarchy, continuity of the route.
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MONOGRAPH:
Gabrielle Goliath
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Gabrielle Goliath: Metabolic Urgency
by Zoé Samudzi
“What is amplified and made more clear in the caesura of the unspoken, and thus unknowable?” Writing on Gabrielle Goliath, Zoé Samudzi traces how the “chorus of wordlessness” becomes a vessel where collectivity, opacity, and durational lament push beyond representation without de-subjectifying victim personhood.
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FOCUS ON:
Monia Ben Hamouda: Path of Totality
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Path of Totality – Some Thoughts on Light and Darkness and This Book
by Gioia dal Molin
“‘Night,’ writes the Lebanese artist and author Etel Adnan, ‘is an exhalation rising from darkness foreign to it: a / long eclipse.’ (Edel Adnan, Night. Nightboat Books, New York, 2016, p. 13.) In astronomical terms, an eclipse occurs when celestial bodies obscure one another. At night, the sun disappears behind the Earth’s horizon. The night as a breath, as a long darkness. Etel Adnan’s lines echo in my mind as I sit down to write this text. In Monia Ben Hamouda’s exhibition Path of Totality at Museo Casa Rusca in Locarno, there is a room illuminated by two suns, as well as a dark room. A breath in which the night rises.”
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Monia Ben Hamouda: Path of Totality
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€40.00
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Speaking Truth to Power
by Edward W. Said
“How does one speak the truth? What truth? For whom and where?” Newly republished in Representations of the Intellectual by Fitzcarraldo Editions, Edward W. Said’s “Speaking Truth to Power” exposes the professional jargon that masks violence, the rewards of insider status, and the selective application of universal principles.
Representations of the Intellectual, Edward W. Said, Fitzcarraldo Editions, London, 2026. Copyright ©️ Edward W. Said, 1994. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Fitzcarraldo Editions.
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