Thomas Hirschhorn Books

Of Bridges & Borders celebrates the opening up of communication ("bridges") among writers and artists worldwide following the collapse of the Berlin Wall (the primary border referred to in the title), to mark the emergence of a new collective memory in the age of global connectivity. Described as "a project in book form," its numerous contributors include Carlos Amorales, John Bock, Chris Burden, Matias Duville, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Elmgreen & Dragset, Carlos Garaicoa, Liam Gillick, Fabrice Gygi, Thomas Hirschhorn, Hassan Khan, Guillermo Kuitca, Dr. Lakra, Gianni Motti, Antoni Muntadas, Carsten Nicolai, Alva Noto, Hans Op de Beeck, Dan Perjovschi, Ishmael Randall Weeks, Reynold Reynolds and Santiago Sierra.

Autonomous labor and its attendant values have now become familiar tools of neoliberal work has become freelance, flexible, mobile, project-based, hybrid and temporary. If these conditions are novel to the general economy, this way of working is not new to artists, who began experiencing these precarious conditions long before Post-Fordism was a buzzword. The contributors to Mobile Autonomy , drawn from a variety of disciplines including art, political philosophy and sociology, examine the alternate working methods and economic models developed, in theory and in practice, by artists and other creative professionals to make artistic work viable in contemporary social, economic and political conditions. As Nico Dockx and Pascal Gielen put it in their introduction to this “We need to stay mobile to keep our autonomy alive, and we need to develop new autonomous practices to keep our mobility alive.”