Critical and Creative Inquiries

We produce well-researched publications, texts, talks, artwork, workshops, and walking tours related to social, political, and environmental themes. We are experienced in teaching and particularly enjoy bringing complex topics to life for broad audiences through visualisations and engaging narratives.

Alex Head

 

1001 Accurate Memories - Alex Head, Plural Studio (2025) - Pre Order and receive free SPONGE ZINE #1

In 1001 Accurate Memories Berlin artist Alex Head presents patterns of self-repair amongst the ruins of ideas, relationships and human bodies. The author travels across space and time attempting to gain insights into class, disability and trauma through drawing, writing and photography. His investigation into traumatic memory tempts the author to suggest a shift from Germany’s professed ‘memory culture’ to a ‘traumatic memory culture’, in that traumatic memory is greatly more accurate.

Consequently, 1001 Accurate Memories seeks to locate the reader back within their own skin by highlighting our differentiated but ultimately shared anatomy.

Birthed from a seven year odyssey into blood, guts and tears, the work proposes that sensations in the body begin wider processes of understanding. By identifying the value of listening to the body in this way, the interpretative role of the human brain becomes more apparent. From this insight stems the ability to see trauma, memory and political propaganda as forms of easily manipulated emotional information. This leads Head to conclude that the primary way to counter such manipulation is the spiritual, physical and mental self-determination of the human body.

SPONGE ZINE #1 Assessing the Threats - Tech in Activism, Plural Studio (2025) Third Edition

“Acting responsibly towards online threats is not simply an app I can purchase. Is not a new titanium door that I can order online. The logic of consuming our way out of danger is inherently flawed because it defeats at the outset the development of the new ways of thinking that will create flexible and situation appropriate thinking and action.”

THIRD EDITION

 
 

Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows

This book foregrounds architecture into storytelling. Natalie, an architect, describes the city of Berlin governed by algorithms where human participation is rewarded with creature comforts as well as ecstatic experiences. She and her friend Winter, a daring software programmer, begin to have doubts about how to direct their own lives amidst these accelerating control mechanisms. They start to dissect their digital and physical realities and, eventually, Winter resolves to test these limits no matter the cost. Along the way, they encounter humans, software, and architecture that challenge their perspectives and the stability of the world they live in.

ISBN: 978-1-7394041-0-9

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Three Pathways to Get Anywhere

Three Pathways to Get Anywhere (Except When There Is a Dead End) is a book of experimental non-fiction on travel and cities in East Asia. It was published by Rough Beast in 2015 and was made in close collaboration with Joey Horan and designed by Studio YUKIKO. The book is a constellation of essays, poems, impressions, and photos curated from journals written during six weeks of travel through China, Japan, and Singapore. It integrates personal anecdotes, urban and architectural analysis, and musings on how the foreign may or may not inhabit global practices.

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Ricochet - Cultural Epigenetics and the Philosophy of Change

The term ‘ricochet’ is a means to discuss unintended consequences, rapidly delivered information and viral outbreaks, but it is also used to describe the way in which sound echoes or reverberates against objects in space.

Ricochet is a work of history, art and biology that is explained in detail through over 100 graphic elements developed with the artist Jørn Aargaard. It is 304 pages, full colour and offset printed including sources from contemporary and ancient historical records. Among other culturally silenced artefacts, it connects the history of the sacred date palm tree from the tenth millennium to the German Secret Service building of 2016.
Image: Ivar Kvaal

ISBN: 978-82-999761-6-9

 

Here Comes Trouble, An Inquiry into Art, Magic & Madness as Deviant Knowledge

Imagine the infinitely tiny size of an atom. Focus on the size of this microscopic particle in relation to your own human body. Now scale up to the size of the planets, galaxies, to the solar system as a whole. The weight of your body exists between these vastly different scales.

Here Comes Trouble, An Inquiry into Art, Magic and Madness as Deviant Knowledge, is not about thermodynamics, negative feedback or refrigerators. Neither have I written a book about geology, black holes or migration, yet each of these material systems offer insights into the slippery topic of deviancy.
Image: Ivar Kvaal

ISBN: 978-3-945659-09-0

THIRD EDITION

 

Berlin: A Morphology of Walls

This book project is about creating the drawings that are missing from history books and revealing the forces that have shaped the built environment around us. In Berlin, historic walls dating back to the city’s beginnings have been the strongest forces to form the physical environment, even if they have now vanished from view.

ISBN: 978-3-94362013-9

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