In Long Distance Music, composers Max Eilbacher and Stefan Maier explore listening and composition across vast geographic distances. Drawing on Maryanne Amacher’s text-scores of the same name, Eilbacher and Maier reinterpret Amacher’s call for “new awarenesses” beyond normative spatial listening and investigate the prospect of telematic listening in the contemporary moment of supposed unprecedented “interconnectedness.” Having emailed on-and-off for a number of years with the intention of eventually collaborating, the duo’s attempts at working together were continually frustrated by competing projects, touring schedules, and, most of all, by the fact that Eilbacher and Maier do not live in the same city. ...

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 ...

There is a statement, “Africa is a country,” used to satirize Western‘ preconceptions about Africa. With billions of people, thousands of ethnicities, several colonial histories and varied post-independence struggles, the continent is spoken of as a single plane that is beset by bad leadership, unending poverty, and the odd scenery. Yes, the continent has these, and yes, there really are some similarities across the different countries and cultures. But, the question remains: Is that all that can be said? And there is another question: How can you represent what truly is Africa? For us at Saraba, we set out to have ...

This conversation is the second one recorded live at Studio-X Amman Lab (the first one being with Rahel Aima & Ahmad Makia). Recorded with Dena Qaddumi, it attempts to propose a struggle narrative for Palestine that is not focused on Jerusalem to which many of us contribute, thus participating in a debate mostly focused on the 1967 war. By examining the spatial politics of Jaffa-Tel Aviv, Dena attempts to show that similar “ethonocratic” logic of segregation are also at work in an environment admittedly less militarized. This logic also incorporates the same capitalist mechanisms of gentrification at work in other ...

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, ...

The House of Students of the Empire Ana Naomi de Sousa is a documentary filmmaker and writer, who works on spatial politics, identity, history and resistance.

The Anthropocene Issue is a special series of short videos shot during the “Anthropocene Curriculum,” campus held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, from November 14 to 22, 2014. The program brought together more than a 100 people from various disciplines around a series of workshops, presentations, and talks. It included, among many others, specialists in climatology, geography, law, history of science and technology, architecture, and art to discuss the concept of the Anthropocene. This special series presents the week-long gathering with a set of close-ups, interviews, group discussions, and informal conversations with some of its participants, launched over two ...

This conversation with Nina Valerie Kolowratnik is divided into two parts. The first one consists in the description of her work to engage the dilemma that the Native American tribe of Jemez Pueblo faces in the lawsuit they filed against the United States to regain ownership over parts of their ancestral homeland in New Mexico. The dilemma for the tribe consists in either documenting and revealing their use of the land and the secret ritual practices linked to it, or not being able to produce any valid proof for the standards of a Western court. Her architectural expertise allows Nina ...

Each architecture that was thought as a physical implementation of private property contains already in itself the potential for containment in a legal situation like the one of quarantine. David Garcia talks about the origins of such a situation, its territorialization (lazaretto, Ellis Island etc.) as well as its application on bodies, but also on entire landscapes like in Chernobyl and Fukushima. We discuss about Michel Foucault’s definition of biopolitics through the historical example of the quarantined city that suffers from the plague, as well as David’s own architectural projects in response to the various problems tackle by quarantine. David Garcia ...

In this podcast, Renisa Mawani introduces her current work that uses the migrant ship Komagata Maru to address migration within its legal and temporal dimensions. We then continue this conversation by examining the arguments she made in the 2012 article “Law’s Archive,” which examines the available means to archive law within the collective narrative that the archive constitutes. The archive’s means are politically and physically determined in such a way that indigenous contributions—not always textual for instance—to this collective narrative cannot fully take part in it. This conversation therefore has a goal to challenge the way we commonly understand the notion of ...

Shortly before his death in 2002, Kazakh artist Sergey Maslov started to write a novel titled Astral Nomads, from which I derive the name of the project, since its content was dedicated to the lives of a large number of contemporary Central Asian artists. Given that he had no heirs, these same artists and other friends and colleagues became the keepers of his paintings, notebooks, sketchbooks, and self- published magazines, which they are currently storing in their homes. This mode of preservation, however, does not do justice to the significance of Maslov’s legacy, and these materials require cataloguing, organizing, and ...

Becoming Istanbul is a critical dictionary exploring the problematics of Istanbul. Made up of 152 entries focusing on transformations to the city, clichés used by observers to evaluate these transformations, and commonplace complaints and conditions, Becoming Istanbul invites the reader to question and critique popular discourses. This collection of original writings, seeking to examine Istanbul from different perspectives, has brought together a diverse selection of writers, including architects, musicians, urban planners, orchestral conductors, activists, sociologists, economists, film critics, authors, museum directors, geographers, reporters, anthropologists and historians.