September 30, 2013
Sternberg Press is pleased to announce the publication of Solution 247–261: Love (ed. Ingo Niermann). Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Chus Martínez, Eva Munz, Ingo Niermann, and Alexander Tarakhovsky will be in conversation to launch the book at e-flux in New York. This event might also be the first book-launch-as-wedding.
Can one solve what is not even a problem?
Love is a force, an imagination of adding. Adding humans to humans, humans to animals, animals to things, things to other things, adding being to time, time to movement. Solution Love means to contest the idea of foundation and, instead, celebrate the logic of and.
Using the form of essays and short stories, the book offers a series of speculative takes on love. Love is understood as a solution, but also as a problem; the book revolves around the issue of how to solve love. Love actualizes the difference between conciousness and conscience, between desire and will. Love manifests thinking by making us unable to think.
In its ninth volume, the Solution series departs from its previous geopolitical focus on regions and countries. With contributions ranging from manifesto to (science) fiction, Solution 247–261: Love realizes that the past, present, and future of love is a demanding mix of charity, sex, trust, lust, economics, genetics, and cybernetics. This volume explores varying ideas of the body, the self, as a spirited micro-region with borders that cannot hold.
Every body contains at least four penises (two on the legs, two on the arms) and an indeterminate number of vaginas (as many holes and folds as can be artificially opened within the body).
—Beatriz Preciado
I find that younger people of all types are highly aware that too much sex will desensitize them to love.
—Douglas Coupland
Convince your lovers you have a gun, and wait to see if your lie gets manufactured into ammo.
—Emily Segal
It is our ordinary heterosexual relationships that have become queer indeed: complicated and elusive and impossible to predict and control.
—Eva Illouz
By cherishing, at least in principle, each bacterium and each grain of dust as highly as we cherish ourselves, we can maintain our superiority vis-à-vis both technology and all other life.
—Ingo Niermann
Love is about mixing genes to compete with bacteria and viruses, and to dream together about conquering the cosmos in its various forms. People who do not mix fluids, do not dream, and use hand sanitizer or mouthwash will be extinct.
—Alexander Tarakhovsky
Have you ever been a lover?
—Chus Martínez
Solution 247–261: Love
Edited by Ingo Niermann
With contributions by Etel Adnan, Douglas Coupland, Eva Illouz, Martti Kalliala, Ben Marcus, Chus Martínez, Momus, Eva Munz, Ingo Niermann, David Pearce, Beatriz Preciado, Emily Segal, Alexander Tarakhovsky, Ignacio Vidal-Folch
11.2 x 17.8 cm, 188 pages, 18 b/w ills., softcover
ISBN 978-3-943365-78-8
For orders, please contact order [at] sternberg-press.com.
For press inquiries and all other concerns, please contact mail [at] sternberg-press.com.
Sternberg Press
Caroline Schneider
Karl-Marx-Allee 78
D-10243 Berlin
www.sternberg-press.com