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"The current volume presents a selection of 126 texts in Uyghur posted in public spaces, translated, and annotated for this book. The author started photographing Uyghur texts in 2008 at the time of the Beijing olympics and continued to do so during 2009, the year of the so-called "Urumqi uprising" of July 5. This event generated a stream of texts posted in public spaces that reflected the efforts made by the authorities to re-establish control. In the course of his travels in the years thereafter the author continued to add to the corpus of photographed Uyghur texts. At the same time he started collecting, as comprehensively as possible, various types of folders, brochures, handouts, and product wrappings with texts illustrating aspects of Uyghur culture and society. The texts, published here for the first time, are primary source materials documenting a wide variety of aspects of daily life of the Uyghurs in Shinjang. The implicit messages or explicit references contained in many of these texts give them significance as clues towards an understanding of the existential realities they reflect or illustrate."--Provided by publisher

Momentography of a failure brings essays, timelines, film, photography, and a series of conversations together to deal with Ethiopia's controversial urbanisation and the transformative space of the city. It explores the gradual transition of rural-urban space, inner-city migration, emerging and disappearing spaces, and commoning in public space. Momentography of a failure is established at the verge of a hyper-documented world, a hybrid space of digital sociability. While the media production, its reception, and distribution was pluralized by digitization, practices such as "media-sharing" and "citizen journalism" established new conditions for visibility, reinvented the authorial image, and promoted yet another dematerialization of authorship. The author camouflages in the cloud(s). Adoption, appropriation, and recycling are standardized. Authorship becomes secondary to content and alternative models of authorship are formulated: co-authoring, collaborative creation, interactivity, and strategic anonymity, in which cultural activism is reinforced. Momentography of a failure sets out on this point and draws up a multidisciplinary artistic and urban research platform that calls for practicing forms of participatory citizenship through collaborative thinking, creation, and reflection. Momentography of a failure is a network of artists, urbanists, writers, and activists that stand where aesthetic-artistic practice and sociopolitical activism come together to explore failure--and its various realities--and claim, reaffirm, and dream alternatives