13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865. Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

This podcast, recorded with the three founders of Demilit (Bryan Finoki, Nick Sowers, and Javier Arbona) is a precedent for Archipelago since it constitutes both a walk to examine the hyper controlled policed space of downtown Oakland and a receptacle for the echoes of Occupy Oakland that comes as interludes to our discussion. We observe objects and spaces that are produced by securitarian logic that often attempt to dissimulate their function by an aesthetic of the ordinary. Starting from Oakland City Hall where Occupy used to have its encampment, we spend the first part of the conversation around the administrative/corporate center of ...

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 ...

Roberto Boettger reframes what is being conserved at Tijuca National Park and denaturalizes the project of conservation behind UNESCO’s first “urban cultural landscape”; Ella Comberg seeks views of the street beyond what Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture, and Google, ask us to see; Alexyss McClellan-Ufugusuku extends the recent COVID-19 outbreak at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to legacies of dual colonization and militarization in Okinawa; Karamia Müller revisits her architectural education alongside the imperial conception of land that came with it; and Malcom Rio and Aaron Tobey examine the design of injustice in the case of the courthouse.

Batoul Faour takes stock of the shattered glass in Beirut in the aftermath of the August 4th port explosion to uncover political violence waged through this fragile material; Jacob Cascio carefully unfolds the story of the National AIDS Memorial Grove’s ever-changing landscape; Tamara Zeina Jamil looks beyond Rikers Island to reveal the machinations of the carceral industrial complex; and Brandon Adriano Ortiz coils together a personal, spatial, and temporal account of Taos and the Taos Pueblo that casts body, building, and micaceous clay into ongoing relation.

Lori A. Brown parses legalese to uncover how the state wields spatial barriers to abortion access in Garza v. Hargan; Elisavet Hasa traces the “archive of resistance” assembled by solidarity heath care initiatives in Athens; David Hurtado unpeels Okinawa’s imperial layers through the photographs of Mao Ishikawa; and Isabelle A. Tan reflects on various encounters with the Belt and Road Initiative in Jakarta’s past, present, and future.

Brit Schulte tends to the (“anti-conclusion”) conclusion of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation; Shani Strand follows the sonic landscapes of drill and dancehall attuned to the social potentials of “badness”; and Kate Wagner walks—metaphorically and literally—through the possibilities sparked by Socialist Reconstruction.

For his lecture for the Center for Experimental Lectures (at Interstate Projects, 2017) Devin Kenny illustrated how the physical infrastructure of the network, supposedly developed in the 20th century, actually developed much earlier. Drawing from a variety of sources and traditions, Kenny’s alternative genealogy understands routes of the African diaspora and practices developed during and after the Middle Passage as the origin of network technologies. BailBloc, a computer application he also helped conceive, takes the seemingly apolitical and highly dubious culture of cryptocurrency and bends its networking potential towards an abolitionist politics. Developed by The New Inquiry’s “Dark Inquiry” lab, ...

The Bare Prison of Santo Stefano is the seventh issue of a series of publications published by Wilfried Lentz. The Bare Prison of Santo Stefano (2011) is published as an accompaniment to the presentation of a series of works with the same title at Frieze Art Fair 2011. This publication is signed and numbered in an edition of 250. The Prison of Santo Stefano, 2011 is informed by research into the state of detention. Focusing on a prisoner’s general conditions, Biscotti analyses the psychological effects caused by isolation, the aim of which is to destroy physical and intellectual abilities. The project ...

In 1915, Kazimir Malevich painted his famous Red Square painting, more properly called Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions (1915). I think about how incendiary it must have been at the time, how arresting. How it prefigured the general collapse of figuration, of representation, into a single, glowing screen, an ultimate abstraction of life and death that is later taken up by PredPol, a predictive policing software company. How the Red Square is not even a square, but a slightly angled parallelogram. Particularly exciting is the way it, along with its sibling Black Square (1915), references Russian ...

This twelfth SDUK broadsheet examines the diverse means by which individuals and communities build lasting or fleeting bonds. Coinciding with the conclusion of Crossings: Itineraries of Encounter, the Blackwood’s 2021–22 lightbox series, this issue, BONDING, echoes themes seen throughout Crossings: migration, diaspora, borders, and archives. Where the lightbox exhibitions examine image-making practices, this SDUK issue engages print culture in new and recurring formats including visual storytelling, poetry, a letter exchange, and a recipe. Food is the source of many enduring cultural bonds, and thus one might be tempted to start from the gut: See Diasporic Dumplings (p. 27) for a site-responsive ...

Charles Mudede joins us from Seattle to read “White Knee, Black Neck,” published in the June 2020 issue of e-flux journal.