While attention paid to the Israeli geography of imagination, used to configure and dismantle Palestinian territory through the “separation barrier,” has been profoundly significant, what this text addresses is not only the physical border but the cultural and historical borders that [im]mobilize particular identities and social forms. “Why Didn’t You Knock?”. Securing the Self from Security presents the different notions around the “separation barrier” and how it reveals the Israeli geography of imagination, of territorial expansion, of cutting and crisscrossing through Palestinian villages and towns, among other relevant issues.

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. ...

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 eighth episode, with professor and anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, begins with her idea of axioms of existence, which put in crisis the abstract and universalist condition of Western philosophy. The ocean is not far from Western epistemologies and ontologies. In fact, it is totally entangled in them thanks to their intimate—and strategically invisible—relationship with colonial history and violence. The notion of geontopower, coined by Povinelli, critically revises the Foucauldian notion of biopower. The fictional but real frontier between life and non-life is a political frontier in continuous expansion, even beyond Earth. This podcast is the result of a conversation between ...

The seventh episode, with curator Camila Marambio is an approach to Tierra del Fuego from her personal experience with a part of the world with which she has a strong emotional connection. As she states, Tierra del Fuego, “despite its remoteness, is the center of the world”. Karokynka is the name by which this area of the world is known by the native Selk’nam people, a culture that still survives in its descendants despite its official death by the modern state of Chile. The fact of proclaiming as dead, a culture that is still very much alive, is part of ...

The chances are that you are reading these words on a mobile device. There is a good chance that you are spending a lot of time on that device every day. If that is the case, you are not alone. It is reported that in the US alone, the average adult spends two hours and 51 minutes on their smartphone every day. That is eight minutes longer than Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. But it is a good hour and ten minutes shorter than the average time that a French worker once spent watching TV. In China in 2018, the average daily time ...

The legend says that coffee was introduced in the Austrian Empire after the end of the Siege of Vienna in 1683. On that occasion, Turkish troops left behind several sacks of «strange» beans while leaving the city. It is said that the soldiers of the Austrian army were impressed as they smelled the fragrance of the beans thrown on a fire. In reality, this is nothing more than a legend, but it is interesting to note that in the story the fascination with coffee starts by chance, even though it is not by chance that coffee started ruling the world, ...

Artist residency on Extreme Lands. A dialog curated by Eleonora Castagna with Ramdom, Lia Cecchin, Carolina Valencia Caicedo + Riccardo Giacconi What are the Extreme Lands? Extreme compared to what? How can we narrate them? The first bilingual issue of Bulletin is dedicated to the artist residency Sino alla fine del Mare (Until the End of the Sea) and follows the dialog between residency curator Claudio Zecchi, artists Lia Cecchin, Carolina Valencia Caicedo + Riccardo Giacconi, and Droste Effect curator Eleonora Castagna.

Today one may complain that life has been reduced to points in a matrix of relations—cities, territories, and historical narratives prematurely refined into categories of known and unknown, real and virtual, concrete and abstract space. And yet, when we need to locate a crucial resource (or ourselves, for that matter) who can afford not to search the grid for what everybody knows to be there?—the Italian restaurant, the emergency room, the ancestor, the terrorist. This is not simply about seeing; by definition, navigation organizes timescales and orders of magnitude that cannot be visualized simultaneously. Furthermore, in attempting to map and ...

Masaccio painted his fresco of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden (c. 1424–28) just about 600 years before 2030, which is the current cutoff point for humans to curb global temperature rise, or risk quicker extinction. In Masaccio’s rendering, the expelled pair walk together from the green valley crying with open-mouthed agony. Caught in this moment during their walk of shame, their lips, especially Eve’s, surround gaping dark ovals: Where are their teeth?

Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times offers a critical exploration of the Anthropocene concept. It addresses the urgent geopolitical and environmental questions raised by the new geological epoch. How are we to rethink landscapes, such as river deltas, oceans, or outer space? How can we create spaces for resistance and utopic dreaming? This volume confronts these questions by charting how space and place are constructed, deconstructed, and negotiated by humans and non-humans under conditions of globally entangled consumption, movement, and contamination. The essays in this volume are complemented by artistic interventions that offer a poetics for a harmed planet and ...

Induction Burners interview with artist Peter Fend, with Leah Pires.

Solomon Benjamin and Wing Shing Tang, Hong Kong and Bangalore-based scholars of critical geography and urban studies led a set of workshops and walks in Framing Spatial Stories: Life Beyond the Plan, Survey, and Grid to consider the politics of contested urban settings through the lens of recent art of Asia.

Introduction to Comparative Planetology presents an intertwined analysis of visual cultures of imagining the Earth and geopolitics of climate emergency. It compares different “figures” of the planet – the Planetary, the Globe, the Terrestrial, Earth-without-us and Spectral Earth – in order to assess their geopolitical implications. These implications are then mapped on respective prospects of these figures in developing an infrastructural space for planetary coordination of our design interventions against runaway global heating, and ultimately against mass species extinction.

Priority to Indigenous Pleasures Léuli Eshrāghi, Sāmoan is an artist, a curator and a researcher, who intervenes in display territories to centre Indigenous presence and power, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices. Through performance, moving image, writing and installation, ia engages with Indigenous possibility as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that erase faʻafafine-faʻatama from kinship structures. Ia contributes to growing international critical practice across the Great Ocean and North America through residencies, exhibitions, publications, teaching and rights advocacy.

The foreseeable future of planet earth will unfold in responsability not only to cool its surface but to design and embrace life beyond a countdown to ecological collapse. Atmospheric insulation is accumulating in response to the energy infrastructures of human activity, calling for a re-composition of instruments already in place. The Lexicon of Climate Intervention assembles seemingly unrelated instruments that collectively demonstrate how to bring these challenges back down to earth, mitigating future emissions and rewriting historical ones.The unifying factor of all lexicon entries, what renders them comparable to and interactive with one another is their contribution to a scale ...

In this conversation, Derek Gregory shares with us a few aspects of his simultaneously broad and precise knowledge of the ways war function. We examine together the current so-called “war on terror” in which the United States and their allies have engaged since 2001. Derek distinguishes three spaces that need to be produced in order for war to operate physically and apparently legitimately. We first consider a drone as an object crystalizing both the paradigm of contemporary war, but also the vessel of all wrongly posed questions that perpetuate the status quo. All disciplines are mobilized for war: geography, technology, architecture, law, ...

JAMES HIGHAM talks about the evolution and ecology of nonhuman primates, as well as the ethics and politics involved in long-term fieldwork with: rhesus and macaques at Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico, which was wiped out by Hurricane Maria in 2017; and the movements of people and cattle at Gashaka Gumti in Nigeria. He is interested in variation and sexual selection, and the urgent questions around conservation. Higham works across fields of primatology and anthropology. He is professor of Anthropology at New York University where he also leads the Primate Reproductive Ecology and Evolution Group.

JULIE GUTHMAN talks about strawberries, soil fumigants, pathogenic fungi, farmers, and scientists — a dynamic more-than-human assemblage that has remade California agriculture. Her rigorous and expansive study warns against the technoscientific fix, as well as the challenges of acknowledging that there is no easy way out. Guthman is a geographer and social scientist who has written extensively about California farms. She is professor of Social Sciences at University of California Santa Cruz and a Guggenheim fellow.

Climate change is one of the key societal challenges of our times, and its debate takes place across scientific disciplines and into the public realm, traversing platforms, sources, and fields of study. The analysis of such mediated debates has a strong tradition, which started in communication science and has since then been applied across a wide range of academic disciplines. So-called ‘content analysis’ provides a means to study (mass) media content in many media shapes and formats to retrieve signs of the zeitgeist, such as cultural phenomena, representation of certain groups, and the resonance of political viewpoints. In the era of ...

First a caveat: the story of the delta is tricky. One fraught with a rigmarole of details and bilious emotions, but must still be told nonetheless. We owe it to ourselves, to literature and, most of all, to humanity. And what is the best way to dispel this ambiguity: to begin by saying that the tale is rather a simple one. The details are numerous, disorganised, recurring. The Delta is the nexus of the Nigerian economy and the fulcrum of our existence. The Niger Delta is a gift as well as a curse, our plague as much as our pride. The game ...

Modernity’s great promise – the freedom from fear, now lies in ruins. One can argue that this vision was always compromised – modernity (especially in the form that emerged in the West, under Capitalism) always hid its own fears, and hid from its own fears – the fear of epidemics, of urban panic, of the homeless multitude and of criminal activity. This led to a drive for transparency: for separating the civic from the criminal, the civilised and the barbaric peoples, the human from the non human, life from the machine. With the advent of the mass slaughters of the ...

Constructing the Tamil Eelam State Sinthujan Varatharajah is a political geographer, essayist and researcher based in Berlin. His work focuses on geographies of displacement and statelessness. His exhibition “How to Move an Archive” is currently part of the 11th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art. He is a recurrent contributor to The Funambulist.

Lucia Jalón Oyarzun and I share a fascination for the act of cartographying. In this conversation, we establish the impossibility for a map to live by the status of objectivity that the common understanding of it comprises. We look at cartographies accomplished by her students or by Peter Greenaway in his film A Walk Through H. (1978), which, on the contrary, embrace their subjectivity. This embrace is often characterized by their modus operandi that creates these maps through a dimensioning accomplished directly by the body, the body being what is subjected by the spaces that these cartographies describe. Lucia Jalón Oyarzun is an architect by the ...

Peder Anker and Nina Edwards Anker review Design Earth’s Geostories; Amelia Borg and Timothy Moore follow grey nomads in Australia; Shaka McGlotten takes their turn at intergenerational queer pedagogies; and Hamed Khosravi broadcasts from the world’s smallest micro-nation.