Since the early 1980s, Peter Friedl has written on a variety of subjects. His latest book Secret Modernity: Selected Writings and Interviews 1981–2009, edited by Anselm Franke, compiles a representative selection of his texts, along with a series of interviews and conversations, with Roger M. Buergel, Stefan Germer, Jean-Pierre Rehm and others. In his writings, similar to his artworks, Friedl quotes from and reworks multiple genres. He offers reviews and portraits of George Sand and Clarice Lispector, of Theo van Doesburg, Alighiero Boetti and Jean-Luc Godard; articles and documents contributing to theater and film history, based, for example, on Symbolist theater, the work of Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, Lucinda Childs, Yoko Ono, or Glauber Rocha; as well as comments and reflections on his own projects.

Alongside these are essays that delve deep into the past, exploring mainly colonial history and its paradoxical traces in the present: narratives about Haiti, South Africa, Brazil, and Italy’s repressed colonial rule in Africa.