Paraguay is a co-operatively run, independent art publishing company, managed by the group of artists, writers and curators behind castillo/corrales and section 7 books. Paraguay Press was conceived by this group in order to reclaim control of the means of creation, production and distribution of the books in which their work appear and to create a framework for producing publications with a growing number of artists, writers, and institutions. Each project developed by Paraguay Press looks carefully into the pragmatics of publishing, and, according to the nature of each publication, adapts each print-run and scope, deploys different printing devices, and considers various distribution strategies. But all depart from an understanding of the space of the book, considered not as a medium of documentation nor a vector of promotion, but as an act of translation and the extension of artistic, critical and curatorial thinking into a graphic, mobile, democratic and durable form.

"Dialogues" - a film by Owen Land

Paraguay Press
2010, English, German
10 x 5.5" 336 pages $25.00

Parrot

Karl Larsson

PARROT Karl Larsson Parrot is the third book written by Swedish artist Karl Larsson, whose work consistently explores language, writing, and narrative in relation to historical and contemporary experiments in literature and art. Parrot originates from a research conducted by the artist on the work of Marcel Broodthaers, who famously withdrew from poetry and developed a fascination for birds -- as in the famous piece from 1976 Ne dites pas que je ne l’ai pas dit.

Parrot by Karl Larsson is a 80-pages long poetical essay – or maybe an analytical piece of poetry – about the repetition, the dissemination, and the crystallization of words and their meanings. It is a book about bodies, containers, and documents. It harbors, generates and repeats poetical statements. A parrot is a bird whose body is inhabited by others: it mimicks their language and creates comical and uncanny resemblances. It is a very beautiful bird.

Karl Larsson – Parrot was produced in conjunction with the exhibition "Parrot" Marcel Broodthaers and Karl Larsson, at Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, Sept-Oct 2010.

I Can't See

Oscar Tuazon

Produced in the aftermath of the solo exhibitions recently organized at the Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière (France); the Kunsthalle Bern (Switzerland) and the Parc Saint Léger – Centre d’art contemporain (France), I CAN’T SEE stands as the first comprehensive monograph on the work developed by American artist Oscar Tuazon since 2002. It is an unusual "first monograph" though, as it reads as a full-page visual essay with a phantom narrative spreading over 250 pages that was composed by the artist together with graphic designer Pierre-François Letué. This image continuum is organized around three chapters, relating to those three exhibitions, and is only interrupted by a series of short texts commissioned to several artists and writers, all friends with the artist, who address his work tangently and/or poetically. The book closes on an extensive interview with the artist done by the curators of his exhibitions, Chiara Parisi, Sandra Patron and Philippe Pirotte, where Tuazon discusses his works in details, his modus operandi as well as his influences, and how he handles being a “professional” artist.

I CAN'T SEE is a joint publication between Paraguay Press and Do.Pe Press and was co-produced by Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière, Kunsthalle Bern, and Parc Saint Léger – Centre d’art contemporain.

Texts by Thomas Boutoux, Karl Holmqvist, David Lewis, Eileen Myles, Chiara Parisi, Sandra Patron, Philippe Pirotte, Ariana Reines, Carissa Rodriguez, Cedar Sigo and Matthew Stadler.

Edited by Oscar Tuazon, with Thomas Boutoux, Pierre-François Letué and Dorothée Perret

Paraguay Press
2010, 1st printing, edition of 2000.
12.5 x 9.5" 272 pages $52.00

Katinka Bock

Edited by Thomas Boutoux. Authors: Sabeth Buchmann, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Kim West

Beautifully designed by Guillaume Mojon (Zurich), and keenly edited by Thomas Boutoux (of Paraguay Press), this book is the first monograph dedicated to the German artist Katinka Bock. Following a series of solo exhibitions of Bock in France, Germany and Holland since 2007, three authors were invited to write for this book: the art critics and historians Sabeth Buchmann and Kim West, and the artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian. Their three essays offer a variety of writing styles and approaches of art criticism, between empiricism, theory and fiction. But all pursue, in their own way, the very subject of Bock’s work, which is that thinking is a social conduct, maybe the most consequential of social acts.

A joint publication between Paraguay Press and Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, this book was co-produced with Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris; Kunstverein Nürnberg; Centre d’art contemporain – La Synagogue de Delme; Centre d’art Passerelle (Brest), La Box (Bourges), La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec.

Paraguay Press
2010, 1st printing, edition of 1200.
8.5 x 5.75" 152 pages $35.00

Steal This Book

Dora Garcia

A tribute to Abbie Hoffmann’s pamphlet of the same name, Steal this Book documents eleven recent performative projects by Spanish artist Dora García. Edited by François Piron, the book presents the private correspondence of the artist with the various interpreters of the situations she sets up in the public space. It proposes a documentation of a body of work without an overview, nor an official line, since it takes neither the artist point of view nor the critic’s. Instead, it discloses questions, misunderstandings and arguments, making this book part suspense story, part user’s manual, part script for a stand-up comedy. Steal this Book is presented in exhibitions as a Dora Garcia sculpture meant to be stolen, but can also be found in selected bookstores worldwide.

Text in English, Spanich, German and French

Red Flags

Joe Scanlan

Over the past several years, Joe Scanlan has read a lot of seminal economic texts and noticed that a strange thing kept happening: where the original authors were talking about absentee ownership, stagnating markets, colonialism and government subsidies, in the artist’s head he heard them talking about artists’ neighborhoods, Chelsea galleries, tae kwon do lessons, Jack Kerouac. Fascinated with these recurrent, uncontrollable synapses, Scanlan rewrote the texts as he heard them in his head and color-coded each alteration. Produced for his exhibition at castillo/corrales in May 2009, Joe Scanlan’s Red Flags contains four essays that the artist has refracted from original texts by Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, Milton Friedman and Edward Said, gathered in a slim, elegant book, beautifully designed by Francesca Grassi.

This publication was made possible with the support of the American Center Foundation.

Text in English

The Meaning of Everything

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri

The first manifestation of a long-term creative collaboration between Ayreen Anastas (b. Bethlehem, Palestine) and Rene Gabri (b. Tehran, Iran) in the form of a series of artists books, The Meaning of Everything. Vol.1 was conceived in Paris during the summer of 2008 and the artists residency at castillo/corrales. Entirely handwritten, it presents a series of notes, quotes, thoughts and drawings about the ever-changing conditions of the blurring of art and life. The book is also a script which can open up to events, acts, performances, videos, texts, statements or diners. Anastas and Gabri are two of the primary organizers of the 16 Beaver group, an artist community that functions as a social and collaborative space on 16 Beaver street in New York, where the group hosts panel discussions, film series, artist talks, radio recordings, reading groups and more.

This publication was made possible with the support of the American Center Foundation.

Text in English