'This publication is concerned with play, mapping, and the experience of a collective writing. Thought of as a manual of history and geography for contemporary art, it is the result of a series of invitations and programs of those who conceived the event, together with Thierry Raspail. Bringing together 70 "players" from around the world (artists, critics, or exhibition curators) divided into two groups according to the type of intervention they were asked for, the project was developed around a central question: How to define the current decade. If the first group was asked to choose responses among the production of the artists, the players of the second group had to sequence their choices or confront them with others. Altogether, these subjectivities, framed by a few rules of presentation (who? why? how?) participate in an exercise of determining, repositioning, and reframing a decade and an object—art—the course of which is more and more indispensable.' -excerpt from backcover

Published on occasion of the 9th Lyon Biennial from 19 September 2007 to January 2008, this book is co-edited by curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Stéphanie Moisdon. Includes previously unpublished texts by and interviews with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Stefano Boeri, François Cusset, Okwui Enwezor, Michel Houellebecq, Anselm Jappe, Paul Veyne, and Ralph Rugoff. With biographies of the contributors.

Please note only Asian artists and art practitioners are listed below.