In 2015 the legendary filmmaker Jonas Mekas made a six-hour film about his Austrian friend, the architect Raimund Abraham. The film, entitled Scenes from the life of Raimund Abraham, portrays, in the manner of a documentary, several important moments in the architect’s life and also contains two unpublished lectures by Abraham, speeches and numerous discussions with personalities such as Patti Smith, Hermann Nitsch, Peter Kubelka, Vito Acconci, Peter Eisenman etc. Therefore, this film is a document that belongs to the history of art, cinema, and architecture. Thus, for several years now, the project has been transcribing, in collaboration with Jonas Mekas, all the dialogues in order to record the film’s unique content on paper. Transcription represents the major challenge of the project: transferring one medium to another. The book aims to make a film readable without using images and will be both a literary work and a document for researchers.

Raimund Johann Abraham Austrian-born architect created visionary and powerful architectural projects on paper; among the few of his designs that were built, the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York City (completed 2002), an arresting 24-story building on a narrow 25-foot plot, won plaudits. Abraham established an avant-garde architectural studio in Vienna in 1959 before relocating to the United States in 1964. He taught at the Rhode Island School of Design; the Cooper Union, New York City; and also at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. He also lectured at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Abraham’s designs were often exhibited in museums and were gathered in Raimund Abraham: (Un)built (1996), edited by Brigitte Groihofer. The Musicians’ House, an artists’ residence he designed, was being built in Düsseldorf at the time of his death.

Marc Leschelier is an architect and teacher. He has participated in several symposiums at EHESS Paris, Foundation Hartung Bergman, and lectured at Villa Medicis in Rome where he was a fellow between 2017–18. He's the founder of the Unbuilt Archive, an archive about experimental architecture and projects that weren’t meant to be built. Leschelier received a research grant from the Le Corbusier Foundation in 2011. He lives, teaches, and works between Milan and Paris, collaborating with the architecture offices of Christian Kerez, Philippe Rahm, and SANAA. His architectural projects develop a chaotic and plastic language that breaks with all the certainties of the discipline, carried out in three different medias: protocols writing, architectural models, and construction of mock-ups to end to a global reorganization of the construction field and its language.

Founded in 2004, NERO is a quarterly contemporary culture magazine—distributed in Europe and in the US—as well as a publishing house specialized in the production of artist’s books, editions, and catalogues commissioned by museums, foundations and private collections. NERO also works in curating, art direction, and consulting for cultural projects and contemporary art.