Christoph Keller

If there's an artist whose oeuvre merits the title " creation," it is Sebastian St hrer. Shaping clay-- essentially, soil-- he molds his " denizens" colorful and friendly-looking sculptural beings, some of them enhanced with sticks or branches reminiscent of limbs. Despite their air of levity and humor, they are not the products of mere momentary inspiration or a whim. It takes decades of dedicated experimentation with the kiln based on the millennia-old art of ceramics as well as expert knowledge of chemistry and physics to create such colors and shapes. St hrer has been called an alchemist, and indeed he has made it his mission to vindicate this researcher's craft, an ancestor of the natural sciences. Alchemy, like St hrer's oeuvre, combines pure rationality with coincidence and a scintilla of magic. The artist plays an intuitive and sensual game with his clay and the virtually incalculable chromaticity of the glazes-- chaos, anarchy, and irrepressible urges being an integral dimension of all creation. In St hrer's " denizens," we encounter the embodiments of that creation: likenesses of ourselves and perhaps also heralds of a future more good-natured version.

'Fascinating ... compelling ... very funny' Sunday Times'A defiant call to arms ... affecting ... lingers long in the memory after its final page' Morning Star'A skilful act of literary witness, sharp, moving and funny' Joanne Limburg 'Christoph Keller ... ranks among the great Swiss writers' Neue Zürcher ZeitungMost stories of disability follow a familiar pattern: Life Before Accident. Life After Accident. For Christoph Keller, it was different: his childhood diagnosis with a form of Spinal Muscular Atrophy only revealed what had been with him since birth. SMA III, the 'kindest one', allows those who have it to live a long life, and it progresses slowly. There is no cure. By the age of 25, he had to use a wheelchair some of the time. 'There were two of me: Walking Me. Rolling Me.' By 32, he could still walk into a restaurant with a cane or on somebody's arm. At 45, 'Rolling Me' took over altogether. Intimate, absurdist and winningly frank, Every Cripple a Superhero is at once a memoir of life with a progressive disorder, and a profound exploration of the challenges of loving, being loved, and living a public life - navigating restaurants, aeroplanes, museums and artists' retreats - in a world not designed for you. Threaded throughout are Keller's own photographs of the unexpected beauty found in puddle-filled 'curb cuts', the pavement ramps that, left to disintegrate, form part of the urban obstacle course. Those puddles become portals into a different, truer city; and, as they do, so this book - told with humour and immense grace - begins to uncover a truer world: one where the 'normal' is not normal, where disability is far more widespread than we might think, and where there always exist, just alongside our own, the lives of everyday superheroes.

Who owns the past? Are museum archives and their re-collections of cultural heritage a cult of the dead — and if so, are we living in a necropolis? This book on photography, cemeteries, and the archive evolved out of an experimental research project at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, with its immense collection of canonic photographs from the history of art and architecture. An artist’s book, it takes on the form of a description of an unfinished film in five acts — a cinematic fragment, so to speak: DOPOSTORIA. The title essay by Christoph Keller is complemented by two contributions on burial cultures in prehistory and in modernity from the archaeologist Maria Clara Martinelli and the modern historian Carolin Kosuch. A sequence of collages at the back of the book conjures up a phantasmagorical journey through an ancient-modern Rome.

'Fascinating ... compelling ... very funny' Sunday Times'A defiant call to arms ... affecting ... lingers long in the memory after its final page' Morning Star'A skilful act of literary witness, sharp, moving and funny' Joanne Limburg 'Christoph Keller ... ranks among the great Swiss writers' Neue Zürcher ZeitungMost stories of disability follow a familiar pattern: Life Before Accident. Life After Accident. For Christoph Keller, it was different: his childhood diagnosis with a form of Spinal Muscular Atrophy only revealed what had been with him since birth. SMA III, the 'kindest one', allows those who have it to live a long life, and it progresses slowly. There is no cure. By the age of 25, he had to use a wheelchair some of the time. 'There were two of me: Walking Me. Rolling Me.' By 32, he could still walk into a restaurant with a cane or on somebody's arm. At 45, 'Rolling Me' took over altogether. Intimate, absurdist and winningly frank, Every Cripple a Superhero is at once a memoir of life with a progressive disorder, and a profound exploration of the challenges of loving, being loved, and living a public life - navigating restaurants, aeroplanes, museums and artists' retreats - in a world not designed for you. Threaded throughout are Keller's own photographs of the unexpected beauty found in puddle-filled 'curb cuts', the pavement ramps that, left to disintegrate, form part of the urban obstacle course. Those puddles become portals into a different, truer city; and, as they do, so this book - told with humour and immense grace - begins to uncover a truer world: one where the 'normal' is not normal, where disability is far more widespread than we might think, and where there always exist, just alongside our own, the lives of everyday superheroes.

A collection of twelve homilies at funerals by Christoph Keller, III, an Episcopal priest and theologian.