Based on Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Author as Producer,” an array of theorists have developed approaches towards an aesthetics of production. The texts of this issue investigate how Benjamin’s arguments may serve as a ground for reflecting and theorizing current art practices. What are the consequences of political art’s function of “supplying the capitalist production apparatus, not changing it”? How can artistic methods subvert cooptation following Brecht and Tretyakov? Where are there new models of artists/intellectuals as producers and “specialists” rather than experts for the universal?

Decolonising Museums is the second thematic publication of L’Internationale Online; it addresses colonial legacies and mindsets, which are still so rooted and present today in the museum institutions in Europe and beyond. The publication draws from the conference Decolonising the Museum which took place at MACBA in Barcelona, 27-29 November 2014 (among the contributors to this thematic issue, Clémentine Deliss, Daniela Ortiz and Francisco Godoy Vega participated at this seminar), and offers new essays, responding to texts published on the online platform earlier this year.

Once there was an idea of a vast human family ready to realize humanistic ideals and internationalist partnerships like the United Nations, and some people called it Globalism. But then the idea got bundled with a way of carrying the sentiment of internationalism over to economics, turning jurisdictional partnerships and trade relations into pretty much the same thing. And its name sounds less like a principle than a process—a making global, a globalization of the earth. And since at least the 1980s it was decided that this is how we would all come together, with the globe as market and the ...

In form and content alike, Paris Arcades was to be Walter Benjamin’s most demanding project for a new method of gaining insight into history: a history in images reflecting the multilayered character of the past. Benjamin’s historical-philosophical approach was directed against the authority of dogmatic systems, taking the marginal, the peculiar, and the fault lines as its orientation. Benjamin outlines the importance of things, images, architectures, and experiences for historical insight using the figure of the ragpicker. The shadowy labyrinths and crowded merchandise backdrops of the Parisian arcades constituted for Benjamin the historically charged districts in which the metropolis was ...

The Lesson of Zoology first appeared in the trash heap of contemporary Lisbon. While researching the role of Lisbon’s Geographical Society in one of the first planetary colonizations, we happened upon an antiquarian bookshop with seemingly endless piles of natural history lithographs. Among them, The Lesson stood out as an especially compelling meta-image of just what a lesson is—an ordering of nature, by way of presentation, about who intended to possess the earth.

Dear Kris, first I would like to thank you for participating to Unfold as our third guest curator with The Economy is Spinning, a multi-faceted curatorial project on the language of finance and its irrationality. Your Unfold#3 is in fact connected to the exhibition of the same name you have just curated for Onomatopee in Eindhoven and which, as is the case with all Onomatopee’s projects, will also produce a publication. With Unfold the process of translation and transmigration between the exhibition and the publication expands and takes over the space of the digital folder. Could you describe this three-folded relation between the exhibition, the folder and ...

Walter Benjamin is universally recognized as one of the key thinkers of modernity: his writings on politics, language, literature, media, theology and law have had an incalculable influence on contemporary thought. Yet the problem of architecture in and for Benjamin’s work remains relatively underexamined. Does Benjamin’s project have an architecture and, if so, how does this architecture affect the explicit propositions that he offers us? In what ways are Benjamin’s writings centrally caught up with architectural concerns, from the redevelopment of major urban centres to the movements that individuals can make within the new spaces of modern cities? How can ...