Grabeland

Reviews / Votes

"The novel's elusive form, and formal playfulness, does some of the work I mentioned of confronting, or at least complicating, the ethical problems their project presents at the outset. By never allowing their subject and object to clearly cement themselves in typical genre-encoded positions of power, eteam on the one hand are the owners and artists subjecting others to the abstract fancy of their whims, and on the other implicate the art-making subject as the actual object being abstracted, controlled, and reworked through the process. " --Jacob Kahn, Full Stop

"For a book whose title invokes an operating system and that presents itself as an attempt to 'document and record the transformation the land was undergoing from being a place with fixed coordinates to becoming a location-independent platform,' OS Grabeland is surprisingly friendly, humble, and familiarly structured. A more apt self-description from eteam might be this: 'There is a fundamental reality, we thought, and these are its symptoms. How banal, how random.'" --Harriet "The Case of Distance Disengaged takes the reader on a mesmerizing, poetic journey through the post-war Balkans, a region whose past and the not-yet of its future move closely alongside the present. Lucid and dreamy at once, Distance Disengaged follows visual and cultural clues in search of an an ever-elusive culprit: human perception. How do we see (this part of) the world? How do we see ourselves? How does (this part of) the world see us? Weaving together suspenseful adventure with exquisite cerebral meanderings, Distance Disengaged opens up new possibilities for historical narrative, storytelling, and documentation, ultimately leading the reader through a most satisfying investigation of the tangle of reality and perception." - Hillit Zwick

"For a book whose title invokes an operating system and that presents itself as an attempt to 'document and record the transformation the land was undergoing from being a place with fixed coordinates to becoming a location-independent platform,' OS Grabeland is surprisingly friendly, humble, and familiarly structured. A more apt self-description from eteam might be this: 'There is a fundamental reality, we thought, and these are its symptoms. How banal, how random.'" -- The Poetry Foundation Harriet Blog "A random online purchase of a piece of land. Two ambitious artists on their newest art project mission: engaging a group of German villagers into imaginary cruise ship travel, or into a horse carriage ride. Grabeland successfully merges descriptions of banal everyday activities, political and historical facts and fictions, Proustian reminiscences of the artists' own childhood and the elements of a road trip novel into a dazzling read. eteam's diary-like storytelling unravels complicated, sometimes unnerving and quite often hilarious oppositions of generations, cultures, political views and ways of living, in which urgency of art making and community building is a constant undertone."-Zeljka Himbele-Kozul "I can think of no other visual artists who could synthesis their practice and emerge with a novel this good. They achieve what all art aims for-a pulse which keeps each page alive. This pulse creates a tension between the strange and the pure, between the compelling and the mundane-page-by-page it reminds me of Sebald. The few days I spent wandering its pages were precious."-Nick Flynn "This unique novel of visual ideas, Grabeland, imagines a literary, artful and art-inspired journey, a precise travelogue of sites and possible meanings."-Lynne Tillman