Book launch of Giorgio Agamben as part of the "Translation Series"
The Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art's "Translation Series" has been purposefully created and developed since 2003 and since then the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art has published 15 translations of important texts in aesthetics and art theory. The first book in the Translation Series was Walter Benjamin's collection of articles Illuminations, which was published in June 2005 and is now sold out. In February 2006, Wolfgang Welch's book "The Frontiers of Aesthetics" was published, and in December 2006, Roland Barthes's "Camera lucida. A Note on Photography" was translated into Latvian. The book attracted great public interest and was nominated for the "Culture Award of the Year" by the newspaper "Diena" in January 2007. Similarly, the discussions on the philosophy website "Satori" have had a wide resonance and have encouraged philosophers and photography specialists to discuss an important theoretical work on the lack of photographs in Latvian. In 2010, another book in the series, Diary of a Mourner, was published. In September 2007, a Latvian translation of Morris Merleau-Ponty's The Eye and the Spirit was published, and in March 2008, Jean-François Lyotard's Postmodern Condition. A review of knowledge". Later books in the series include Susan Sontag's On Photography (2008; sold out), T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer's Dialectics of Enlightenment and Nicolas Bourriaud's The Aesthetics of Relations (2009). In 2017, Guy Debord's The Society of Performance was published; at the end of 2018, Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary; and in January 2020, Jacques Rancière's The Fate of Images. This year, a selection of Giorgio Agamben's essays is planned and work will continue on the Latvian translation of Chris Krauss's novel I Love Dick. In the coming years, we plan to translate Piotr Petrauski's seminal work Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe and the works of Italian philosopher Franco "Bifo" Benardi on post-humanism.