Your basket contains:
The Pillars of Uncertainty
Aleks Catina
A Jeu d‘Esprit on the Monument
Authors
May 2026. Pre-order a stamped and signed copy now.
Ramses Kiesele is a fictional author of non-fiction, an academic who self-identifies as a modernist. Following a student’s remark in class, Kiesele’s assumed knowledge is in crisis. Can he be a poet, or is he condemned to a life of theory? The decline of his intellectual confidence is recorded in a sequence of fragments, each testing a literary genre, which show a growing acceptance of uncertainty. Unfinished, Kiesele’s notes come into the possession of M.H. Obrasnič, an architect and opportunistic peer-reviewer, where they go on to inspire a monument to post-ironic culture: the Repeated Museum in Berlin.
Has the jeu d’ésprit lost its innocence in this translation? The Pillars of Uncertainty presents Kiesele’s fragments as annotations to the proposed monument. The reader is invited to exercise judgment on how each contribution advances Kiesele’s original question: What role do dead monuments have in describing lived experiences?
‘Someone once said that academic debate is often so vitriolic precisely because the stakes are so low – or words to that effect. It is true. And yet, we must enter this rancour because this case brings up ethical questions about the circulation of ideas, philosophy and criticism, mimesis and plagiarism (you can judge which), and it would have sent ripples through the academic world if only the two protagonists were better known.’ Ektoras Arkomanis, from the Prelude to the book
About the author
Aleks Catina (b. 1976, Năsăud, Romania) grew up in Bucharest and Stuttgart before moving to the UK at the turn of the millennium to study architecture. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2006. Aleks thinks, writes, and facilitates learning about architecture. His published work has been shaped by a sustained interest in irony’s potential for communicative action, particularly in relation to discourses of power in architectural history and theory. Aleks’s current academic writing challenges the Eurocentric canonisation of postmodern irony by examining the ironic in twenty-first-century art that deals with monuments from non-dominant and peripheral perspectives. His aim is to broaden the scope of talking about architecture in many voices. In this spirit, The Pillars of Uncertainty experimentally attempts to venture beyond the limitations of normative academic language and text. Aleks lives in Hackney, London, with his wife, Irina, and two cats, foundling brothers Vasile and Ilie.