This conversation addresses an important aspect of Merve Bedir’s work (along with Jason Hilgefort at Land+Civilization Compositions) regarding the architectural and linguistic dimension of Turkish politics regarding the 2.5 million refugees the country currently “hosts”—the very notions of “host” and “guest” are the first things discussed here. Through the description of several sites of either appropriation or dispossession/detention by and of refugee bodies in Istanbul and in other regions of Turkey, we try to think of the architect’s political role and responsibility, remembering however that we must always doubt of our own actions when they have such drastic consequences. Merve Bedir ...

How can you navigate towards something when there are no fixed points when you cannot determine your position? How do you know where to go, or even know when you have got there? This fourth volume in the Archifutures series investigates how architecture, traditionally considered to be a future?oriented activity, can best respond as we find ourselves on the threshold of a “post-futurist” condition where the future is not necessarily ahead of us, but everywhere and – perhaps most especially – “now”. Contributors include: Nora Akawi, Florian Bengert, Filipe Estrela, Mariabruna Fabrizi, Nikita Gyawali, Ana Jeini, Holly Lewis, Fosco Lucarelli, Brett ...

Playwright, poet and activist Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was known for his theory of the Epic Theatre and his attempts to break down the division between high art and popular culture. The Threepenny Opera, his collaboration with composer Kurt Weill, was a milestone in musical theatre, and plays like Mother Courage and Galileo changed the course of modern drama and aesthetic theory. Framed by two world wars, the Weimar Republic and a global depression, Nazism and exile and East German socialism, Brecht’s own life became a project, illuminating and intervening in the ongoing crisis of modern experience, shaped by capitalism, nationalism and visions of social utopia. Brecht ...

In the second episode of Aridity Lines, my guest is Ala Tannir, an architect, researcher, and curator from Beirut, Lebanon. We focus on her work and research concerned with exploring the Mediterranean Sea as a space of resistance and possible interspecies alliances. Where Tannir maps out new currents of movement of jellyfish and humans at risk in the Mediterranean Sea. She connects the undefeated underwater species, which thrive in ailing seas where oxygen levels are low, with the movement (or the denial thereof of vulnerable human beings) above water to help us understand how the crisis of climate change and ...

The Distance Plan, Journal Issue 3, 2015 “Climate and Precarity,” The Distance Plan Journal’s third issue, sets out to survey how migration, environmental crisis and climate activism are debated in relation to capitalism and its alternatives. Taking Judith Butler’s notion of precarity—the destruction of the conditions of liveability—as a starting point, the issue brings together texts and artist pages that speak about the relationship between ecological and economic precarity. A recurring question is how climate change is most effectively represented as an issue of social justice, and the role of artists and thinkers in developing a critical vocabulary and imaginary for ...

This conversation with Hana Sleiman begins a series of several around the Palestinian question(s). After evoking her archiving work of historical Arabic comic books and their construction of a political imaginary, Hana and I talk about this important construction of a Palestinian Oral History Archive at the American University of Beirut. This archive comprises about a thousand hours of interview with Palestinian having experienced the 1948 Nakba and its evictive violence. We particularly insist on the embraced subjectivities of such narratives, stressing that what is remembered and how it is remembered is more important than the illusory ambition of an ...

The ninth episode of the Corona Under the Ocean series, with ship captain and sea rescue activist Carola Rackete, begins with her early research in the Arctic and Antarctic, and how she experienced the melting of the poles, without the need for scientific data. That was also when she decided to engage in political action in order to have a real impact on the multiple forms of violence the capitalist system perpetrates, both human and environmental, both individual and structural. This podcast is the result of a conversation between Carola Rackete and Sonia Fernández Pan, in which the Covid-19 pandemic ...

Saraba Magazine announces the forthcoming publication of a special issue featuring the work of Tobias Zielony and Victor Ehikhamenor. Tobias Zielony is one of the artists included in the German Pavilion of 56th Venice Biennale of Arts 2015, curated by Florian Ebner. Ehikhamenor is a renowned Nigerian visual artist, writer and satirist. The special issue themed “Displacement” prefaces Saraba Magazine’s “Survival Issue.” A selection of ten photographs on migrants and migrant workers by Zielony is included, as well a short story and several drawings by Victor Ehikhamenor. Acclaimed Nigerian poet Jumoke Verissimo, author of the forthcoming Birth of Illusion, contributed three ...

Beyond performative resistance and melancholic complicity with the existing order, a crucial strategy emerged in the 1980s from a collective of artists in Yugoslavia who used complicity as its most lethal weapon. Inke Arns and Slavoj Žižek have respectively described the activities of NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) and its sub-groupings (the band Laibach and the artist collective IRWIN, and Scipion Našice Sisters Theatre, among others) variously in terms of over-identification or subversive affirmation, as performing the “hidden reverse” of state ideology. From Laibach’s nationalism in drag to the issuing of a passport for an imagined “NSK state,” NSK is perhaps ...

To get rid of violence, you have to get rid of people, Tariq Ramadan once said in an interview. Of course, Ramadan meant this as an impossibility and a warning against overzealous idealism. But what an idea! By getting rid of people completely, we could have totally frictionless surfaces for exchange. Removing the human factor would effectively erase the difference between ethical and unethical behavior, visible and invisible infrastructure, finally relieving the increasingly tedious obligation to explain how political orders function, how economic transactions are guided. Those still living would only need to deal with the end products of systems ...

Exile/Refuge, includes the texts: “The Long Time of History,” by Manuel Borja-Villel; “Republican Exile: Constructing from Absence,” by Mari Paz Balibrea; “Not Letting Live and Letting Die,” by Judith Revel; “Visualising Climate Refugees,” by T. J. Demos; “Visualising Scarcity and Loss: Contemporary Art and the Representation of Capital and its Failures,” by Simon Sheikh; and the visual essay “À tous les clandestins,” by Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González.

Two movements, perhaps antithetical, affect space. Individuals exclude themselves, exit (exilium, exsul, ex-solum), come out of their own land, withdraw into another circumstance, depose power from within, shun the power that withholds. Exile can be an individual choice, but it can also be a constraint that involves, cumulatively, a large number. At the same time, peoples, animals, and plants are in exodus, moving, fleeing, migrating, changing the design and the sense of territory and geographies. Three figures take shape from these movements: the space of the journey and the traces of the crossing, the destination or just the place of arrival, and finally the image ...