This conversation with two members of a relatively new whistleblowing platform—we called them Sarah and Cleo to preserve their anonymity—intends to present the latter. It allows people working on development projects in London to leak information that can be used by local inhabitant associations to organize in time their defense against their planned eviction. We discuss the platform both theoretically—the conceptual approach to disobedience will be presented in the next conversation with Elena Loizidou—and practically, through the perspective of (often young) architects working in development projects, and the ones of local associations through the workshops organized by Concrete Action. Information ...

A very personal conversation with artist and musician Tim Goldie about his involvement in Eddie Prévost’s workshop, the London’s music scene in the 2000’s, his long engagement with anti-fascism and his overcoming of rough times.

Léopold Lambert met with Indigenous Lakota activists Madonna Thunder Hawk and Marcella Gilbert during their passage in France to present Christina D. King and Elizabeth A. Castle’s film Warrior Women that portrays their struggle over two generation — Madonna is Marcella’s mother. In this conversation, we talked about four episodes of Indigenous resistance in Turtle Island (North America): the occupations of Alcatraz (1969), Mount Rushmore (1971), Wounded Knee (1973) and Standing Rock (2016), all of which were experienced by Madonna. Madonna Thunder Hawk is an Oohenumpa Lakota. Born and raised across the Oceti Sakowin homelands, she first became active in the late 1960s ...

Following our recent debate “Politics of Spatial Segregation” that shed light on racist Danish housing policies and the notion of structural discrimination co-hosted with CAMP – Center for Arts on Migration Politics in Copenhagen on 22 March, Margarida Waco from The Funambulist met with the two co-founders of the association Almen Modstand (Common Resistance), Fatma Tounsi and Marie Northroup, for a conversation about current legislation and the founding pillars of the association. The starting point of the conversation was a new strategy to rid Denmark of a parallel society by 2030 presented by the Danish Government in March 2018. To counteract ...

The education project Pink Triangle is a long term project initiated by the Education Department of Museo Reina Sofía in 2019 as a space of reflection and action regarding LGTBIQ+ activisms in school spaces. Through their experiences, perspectives and reflections, students, teachers and families contribute to this complex and necessary discussion. The project entailed 3 workshops, a video dialogue and the set of materials presented here. These didactic materials make up the vertices of a triangle of reflection and action around experiences and tools related to sexual and gender diversities that coexist in schools, which are, by their very nature, ...

Law and art are oftentimes perceived as standing in opposition, and even seen in terms. The first is dismissed as provincial, rigid, and bureaucratic, while the latter is repeatedly characterized as global, flexible, and dynamic. Yet, closer observation and analysis reveal hidden links and layers, and substantial preoccupation by both legal and art practitioners in the visual and in the judicial. It is through the unraveling of spaces, gaps, and lacunae in which both fields of practice and knowledge intersect that this publication sets in motion an exploration of influences and interactions between law and art. Offering a new critical approach ...

Between December 2006 and January 2007, Sillman and Bordowitz recorded approximately 10 hours of conversation on topics ranging from art and philosophy to their personal histories and friendship. The resulting publication follows the chronology of their discussions from beginning to end. The transcript starts where they consider the beliefs underlying their respective endeavors, what art can and cannot accomplish. This e-book contains a new postscript created by Sillman and Bordowitz in the summer of 2014.

An Anti-Catalog was the work of the Catalog Committee of the group Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC). A landmark publication of the 1970s, its purpose was to protest the Whitney Museum of American Art’s bicentennial exhibition, which was titled “Three Centuries of American Art.” The Whitney show featured John D. Rockefeller III’s collection of mainly eighteenth and nineteenth-century American art–a collection that featured only one African American and one woman artist. The Catalog Committee, which consisted of fifteen artists and two art historians, spent almost a year producing an eighty-page book containing articles and documents. Originally conceived as a critique ...

The wave of protests brought about by the Black Lives Matter movement, coming after the lockdown imposed by the spread of the coronavirus, invites a comparison between this political and epidemical moment and the context that prevailed in the late 1980s, when AIDS was causing so much death in Western countries. The art and activism of the period have been thoroughly revisited over the past few years by art institutions. In the following text, I have freely adapted the disidentification methodology of the American artist Bradley Kronz to navigate recent works, exhibitions, and institutional trends. The aim is to create ...

In this conversation, we talk about Harsha Walia’s new fantastic book, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket, 2021), which draws an international map of the border imperialist regime in its geographic, historic, and legal complexities. We then proceed in trying to envision the various forms of internationalist solidarities that emerge in the struggle against this global regime, following in particular Indigenous and/or Black resistance. Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013). Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, ...

As part of our publishing program engaged with social activism, Printed Matter published the Artists & Activists Pamphlet Series between 2008 and 2012. Inspired by the legacy of the political pamphlet, these modest format publications offered artists and collectives a space to address some of the social and political concerns of our time and critically examine the concept of art and activism. Twenty pamphlets were created in total, and they were distributed for free at the Printed Matter storefront and included in mail-order packages. Printed Matter is now making the entire series available for free download through our website.

In this issue, we’re looking at how socially engaged artists are challenging mainstream habits of seeing and doing that exclude the lived experience and creative potential of large swaths of people who do not fit into—or rather, who have been systematically oppressed by—the social norms and physical expectations of capitalist society. Rather than view difference in negative terms, these artists are using their work to affirm physical, sensory, emotional, and cognitive difference as “to be expected and respected on its own terms as part of ordinary human experience,” as Colin Cameron wrote in a 2001 article on Disability Arts that ...