Imagine a novel whose main protagonist is capital itself. Agri Ismaïl’s Hyper is exactly that: a novel about capital that devours and becomes everything, while people are reduced to its character masks. People such as the members of a once-wealthy Kurdish family who, before the Iranian Revolution, flee Tehran—where the father is a co-founder of the Kurdish Communist Party—for a London suburb, only to end up stuck there on social welfare.

This psychogeographic odyssey leads us through Dubai, Baghdad, Paris, London, and New York, where we observe different functions of capital—from the bare survival mode to the fully abstract, yet with cataclysmic consequences. As the Communist Manifesto should say: “The capital has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” Artist and theorist Hito Steyerl wrote: “This is not only the best but also the most contemporary novel I have read in recent times.” Hyper is a debut novel of Kurdish writer Agri Ismaïl, who lives in Sweden and has worked as a corporate lawyer in London, Dubai, and Iraqi Kurdistan.

The conversation with Agri Ismaïl will be moderated by Marko Bauer, the translator of Hyper and co-editor of the Izhodi series at Sophia Publishing. As a special guest, Nicolas Hausdorf will join us—author of the afterword as well as of the book Superstructural Berlin, which was published in Slovene under the title Berlin is Not Berlin, Ljubljana Is Berlin.

At the event, both books will be available at a promotional price, and the authors will also be signing copies.

Organized by Sophia Publishing with the support of the Slovenian Book Agency, in cooperation with the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana—which kindly enabled the visit—and Moderna galerija.