Today, as we celebrate books, we're thrilled to share a few of the titles that have recently joined Tabletimes’ selection.
Let’s Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts
Valiz—240 x 170 mm—336 pages—2023—ISBN 9789493246287—Spanish
Yasmine, Andrea, and Rommy have collaborated to create this wonderful book, a precise example of a good book as a collective effort. Through many hours of conversations, Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez gathered fascinating knowledge from multiple voices from Latin American and Caribbean lands. Rommy González captured the beauty and delicacy of the entire piece in each illustration, and the editorial design by Andrea Spikker is inspiring at all levels.
Like fungi, we don’t only carry our landscapes, ancestors, traumas, knowledges, and microbes in and throughout our bodies, we embody a complicity, caused by the entanglements within a system. Being aware of this embodied complicity requires us to stop thinking in terms of us and them. […] When we are our microbes, we feed beyond comfort and taste. And this we learn best by walking, gardening, cooking, dancing, feeling, moving, and perhaps by getting lost sometimes.
This rhizomatic network carries a profound usefulness as a metaphor for our potential new systems, ways of thinking and behaviours. Let’s Become Fungal! is structured around twelve questions; twelve teachings rooted in multispecies collaboration, symbiosis, and decentralization; practices that reflect the complex dance of mycelium and invite us to explore a universe where the essence of life mirrors the interconnected beauty of fungi, urging us to reconsider our own systems.
Potato Salad
Happy Potato Press—297 x 208 mm—24 pages—2023—English
Generating reflection through humor without any pretense is a commendable skill. Martijn in 't Veld excels in this, as well as in posing questions that may seem simple or vague at first glance but, upon closer inspection, lead to complex and unexpected territories. Potato Salad is a perfect illustration of this.
Salmon: A Red Herring
isolarii—108 x 70 mm—176 pages—2020—ISBN9781735075006—English
isolarii’s publications speak of the death of humanism—«believing man was exceptional, it opened the abyss of extinction», and offer a new—and necessary approach to establish the commonality of all life on Earth, to tear down convention in order to preserve what is meaningful. With this purpose and on the occasion of the Art Now exhibition by Cooking Sections at Tate Britain (2020), Salmon: A Red Herring emerged.
This small but immensely powerful book accounts for how we ended up in a deceptive world where sparrows molt pink, dogs turn blue, and honey glows maraschino red; where pharaohs tint paint, laptops flavor fog, and farms feed colour.
The words of Hannah Landecker, Bruno Latour, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and David Zilber invite us to recognize and value the premonitory signs of the most evident environmental crisis, while also raising questions about the colours we expect in our "natural" environment. Can our perception of colour evolve at the same pace as we transform the planet?
Cooking Sections—Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, examines the systems that order the world through food. Using site-responsive installations, performances, and videos, they explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics.
The Girl Who Crossed the River with a Tablecloth
Art Paper Editions—240 x 170 mm—272 pages—2023—ISBN9789464665178—English
Just like threads shape and give meaning to a fabric, family stories construct our identity. When Lara Bongard inherited a centuries-old Shabbat tablecloth—the sole family heirloom surviving from the vanished world of her ancestors, she embarked on a journey through her family's fragmented history. In 1911, Lara's great-grandfather, Mordko Bongard, crossed the river from his shtetl and never looked back. He left behind his family and community to flee the pogroms ravaging the region.
The Girl Who Crossed the River with a Tablecloth is the result of this extensive research; the gathering of testimonies, photographs, and archival material. The tablecloth becomes a symbol of connection and continuity as the project weaves together fictional narratives, lunar calendars, travel stories, and personal memories to explore the fluid meaning of home and the diverse identities that shape us.
This intimate and multidimensional work is also a profound reflection on the power of shared meals, cultural connections, and the importance of storytelling in shaping our understanding of the past and present.
Hawker Colours
Hans Tan Studio, In Plain Words—210 x 170 mm—175 pages—2023—ISBN9789811882487—English
Sheere Ng told me last year that she was working on a new project called Hawker Colours, an exploration around the melamine plates and bowls used in many dishes served by hawkers in Singapore. The project started as a final-year project by Kwa Li Ying when studying in the Industrial Design Division of the National University of Singapore, and later expanded with the help of a team led by her supervisor, Associate Professor Hans Tan.
The team developed an online public survey launched in June 2023, and the final results were later compiled into this book, reflecting how an object can shape the cultural imaginary of a place, acquiring deep meanings for both the hawkers and the consumers, after decades of use. This leads us to question whether Singapore's hawker dishes will remain the same without these colourful melamine tableware.
The book, published in five different colours, traces the origins of the tableware and its widespread adoption, questioning its value as commerce adapts to the changing needs of the city-state.
May books be a celebration every day. More titles coming soon!