This document in front of you is the result of a conversation over lunch, which took place in the early days of Corona in Berlin. Back then, we were simply wondering: in a time in which people are, either by policy or good faith, forced to restrict their spatial radius of interaction to a bare minimum, how do we actually deal with food? Not only in the sense of what we choose to eat conceptually, but how we choose it, literally. Where do we get it, how do we prepare it, and what does something essential like food mean to ...

There is a saying that a portrait tells more about the person behind the camera than the one who is photographed. A single picture is capable of showing the ecology and multitude of relations happening inside and outside of the frame, before and after the photograph has been taken. When I look at French artist Bruno Serralongue’s series ‘Sunday afternoon’ made in Brazil over twenty years ago, from 1999-2000, I wonder: what does the work say about the artist himself and his use of the medium? ‘Sunday afternoon’ is a series of photographs performed in a park in Rio de Janeiro. ...

Conversation with editors Maria Lind, Michele Masucci, and Joanna Warsza following a postponed book launch at e-flux for Red Love: a reader on Alexandra Kollontai, presented by CuratorLab at Konstfack University, Tensta konsthall, Cabinet and Sternberg Press. Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai Alexandra Kollontai was a Bolshevik revolutionary, and after the 1917 October revolution the people’s commissar of social and one of the first female ambassadors in the world. She worked to introduce crucial reforms for women’s liberation: such as abortion rights, secularized marriage, and for paid maternity leave; and considered “comradely love” to be a political force. Red Love is the reader ...

Alexandra Kollontai was a Russian revolutionary who was appointed commissar of social welfare after the October Revolution and later one of the world’s first woman ambassadors. She fought for abortion rights, secularized marriage, and paid maternity leave—and considered “comradely love” to be a political force. This reader, in which artists and thinkers revisit Kollontai’s legacy in light of current feminist struggles, stems from a research project by CuratorLab at Konstfack and Tensta konsthall that accompanied Dora García’s exhibition “Red Love.” It also features the first English translation of the 1977 biographical play Kollontai by Swedish writer Agneta Pleijel.

Humans can exist without an institution, yet no institution can function without humans. Institutions to a large degree are the people who work in them, but they are also more than just a group of individuals working together. What then does the institutional part of an institution contain? What allows a gathering of people to become more than the sum of all its parts? And in the age of neoliberal self-exploitation, are institutions still operative in the interests of the individuals involved? As is well known, recent decades have transformed the cultural sector. Sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello identified that ...