Following the e-publication Austerity and Utopia, L’Internationale Online presents a second collection of interventions to think through two apparently distant concepts. Artists, thinkers and researchers were invited to reflect on a dissimilar pair of themes as fertile ground for thought and proposition. With this new issue of Degrowth and Progress, we would like to pursue a path of reflection to interrogate the ambivalence of a possible progression of degrowth, and attempt to stage a bastard/hybrid scenario of speculative thought and action. This collection draws upon the complexity of ethical, ecological and political frameworks and reveals other perspectives on the current ...

Qaleh – The Women’s Quarter” (1966) shows the life of prostitutes in Tehran’s city brothels, an area known as Shahre Now. The film closely follows a number of women and communicates how the burden of social constraints led them to surrender in the face of their common fate. By including photos in the lm, a very unique and artistic approach that brings to mind Chris Marker’s classic La Jeteé, Shirdel not only tempers the subject’s emotional heaviness but also respects the individual’s privacy, two pitfalls that often afflict films that deal with themes of this nature. The film does explore the ...

Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday is the outcome of a research project pursued by a group of artists, architects, and social theorists, who, in the face of exhilarating politics of accumulation and dispossession, explore commoning as the subject as well as the means of their collective study. The power of the commons, this book suggests, does not reside in the promise of a coming together free of friction. As different dimensions of power organize the terrain of the social, social movements are often caught between competing agendas, and in the gap between aims and ...

Civilizations at their peak present curious spectacles. They ooze wealth and pride, produce fantastic art and technologies, all while shredding the foundations of their prosperity. Their citizens seem to believe they eclipse mundane restrictions of time and space. The monuments their predecessors have left in Rome, on Easter Island, in Egypt, in Venice, littered like warning beacons elsewhere throughout the world, demonstrate such faith may not match reality. A rock thrown skyward must believe, at the top of its arc, fleetingly, that it is flying…

This title will be available soon. She stands alone in the twilight, in an empty space, holding in her hands a skein of blue yarn that weaves around her to embrace a cluster of homes, which, because of this, appear almost as a continuation of her body. Trazando el camino (1990) is among the many paintings that Rodolfo Morales, one of Mexico’s best twentieth-century artists, has dedicated to the theme of the female body as the material and social fabric holding the community together. Morales’ painting is a counterpoint to the image of the witch: with her quiet look and embroidered ...