Book launch: All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film by Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner

The publication All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film by Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner  is a continuation of a multimedia project that began with the film A Demonstration. The book launch coincides with the closing of Litvintseva's & Wagner's exhibition A Demonstration at CIAP. During the event, the artists will speak with curator and writer Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk about the book and their research. The talk will be live-streamed on our website, on Wednesday the 31st of March. We start at 7pm. This event is held in English.

All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film is a narrative assemblage of prose and image. At once historical, theoretical and personal, the book continues the authors’ inquiry into the curious presence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of Early Modern European science. The word ‘monster’ comes from the Latin ‘monstrare’, meaning ‘to show’, ‘to demonstrate’, ‘to reveal’. Picking up on this etymology, the authors explore monsters as prisms for modes of seeing and deciphering the natural world. When treated as perceptual apparatus, the monster also becomes a means of probing the medium of film and its relationship to indexicality, chance, corporeality, and metamorphosis. 

This book extends a multimedia project the authors began with their film A Demonstration (2020). The film’s underlying modular formal structure is here reconfigured and brought into new relations specific to the book as a medium.

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The book is designed by Christophe Clarijs, co-produced by CIAP, and published by Sonic Acts – an interdisciplinary art organisation based in Amsterdam.