Repetition and Ruins Launch Party

A conversation and celebration for Repetition and Ruins: The Art of Radical Political Thinking, by Julie Evanoff & Dalie Giroux

Free with RSVP!
Books available for purchase and signing!

“But one may ask: What is there at the bottom of these heaps of money and guns? Is there a point of zero accumulation? Is this a place, theoretical, or utopian, where we can stand?”

4Columns is thrilled to announce an evening of conversation and revelry celebrating the publication of Repetition and Ruins: The Art of Radical Political Thinking, a collaboration between the magazine’s own Julie Evanoff and University of Ottawa Professor Dalie Giroux, out now as an edition of 300 artist books published by Rakish Light. We warmly invite you to join us at Giorno Poetry Systems for a discussion between Evanoff and 4Columns Senior Editor Ania Szremski, followed by merriment and communion!

A bold, unusual, and radically generous adventure in theory and image, Repetition and Ruins contemplates and questions our current shared condition as twenty-first-century earthlings living in, by, and against power accumulators: capitalism and the state. The book’s images and concepts are an invitation to notice and interpret the connection between these power accumulators and daily life.

Repetition and Ruins is based on a lecture by Giroux that Evanoff first learned of in a panel discussion following a screening of Moyra Davey’s i confess, which included footage of Giroux’s accompanying chalkboard drawing. The original talk freely used terms and ideas from critical theory, philosophy, and political theory, which Evanoff and Giroux have translated here into democratic, accessible language and images. Evanoff’s comics draw from a deep well of inspirations ranging from the art-historical to the pop-cultural, all rooted in her raw, compulsive, spontaneous drawing practice, and often including her characteristic philosophical-eyed animals as illustrative interlocutors.

The result is a sly, incisive, and urgent intervention slicing through our current political climate of obfuscation, uncertainty, and fear.