Three Pathways to Get Anywhere (Except When There Is a Dead End)
by Anna Kostreva in collaboration with Joey Horan
A reading and discussion with the author, publisher, and designers, moderated by Sandra Bartoli
The independent press and literary project Rough Beast is pleased to announce its latest publication, Three Pathways to Get Anywhere (Except When There Is a Dead End), a work of experimental non-fiction by Berlin-based architect Anna Kostreva, edited in close collaboration with Joey Horan and designed by Studio YUKIKO.
The book is a constellation of essays, poems, impressions, and photos curated from the architect’s journals kept during her six weeks of travel through China, Japan, and Singapore in March and April of 2015. Kostreva’s sharply insightful text, as experimental as it is accessible, spreads itself across genres and themes. It integrates personal anecdotes, urban and architectural analysis, and musings on the foreign to examine what can and cannot inhabit global practices. With writing that takes both stylistic and thematic cues from the fragmentary writing of Renata Adler and Etel Adnan, Kostreva poses questions from a perspective where intercontinental travel has become normalized and societies on the opposite side of the globe increasingly appear in our imagination only as quantifiable sets of big data. Why do we still want to travel, and is it possible to escape the tropes of globalization?
Kostreva’s book presents an absorbing narrative through the mind and eyes of a young female architect interested equally in the state of modern cities as in their capacity to speak to those who visit, use, and live in them. Through its combination of subjective revelation and nuanced critique of global citizenship, her deeply probing and thought provoking writing reflects what art critic Peter Osborne describes as the ‘inherent hopefulness of travel’.
The publication – a complex dialogue between the text and images taken by the author of urban phenomena encountered along the way – is designed by the award-winning Berlin-based design studio YUKIKO, whose work with the magazine Flaneur has been distinguished with the D&AD Slice Award (2014) and, most recently, a nomination for the German Design Award (2016). Studio YUKIKO consists of Michelle Phillips and Johannes Conrad and has been active in Berlin since 2012. Their work includes clients in the arts, entertainment, cultural, and fashion industries, with projects ranging from printed matter to album art to music videos.
To mark this launch, Rough Beast will present book together with the author, who will give a reading and participate in a discussion moderated by Sandra Bartoli of Büro für Konstruktivismus and guest professor at AdBK Nürnberg Architecture and Urban Research Master Program.