“We are post-purity,” observes Arushi Vats, a Delhi-based writer and inaugural fellow of the Momus/Eyebeam Critical Writing Fellowship. Rooted in field research and expanded through poetics, Vat’s text Exit the Rehearsal: A Body in Delhi, published by Runway Journal, is a precise yet capacious meditation on our “epoch of waste”— ecocide, legacy waste, and the Anthropocene in which Vats suggests that what we waste is “highly proximate, right under your skin, in your gut, and there is something radical in accepting that this is a part of your lifecycle.” In this interview with Lauren Wetmore, Vats discusses building a text ...

Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski listen to the post-colonial loudreaders of Puerto Rico; Louise Hickman takes stock of the devices and affective labor involved in flying while disabled; Evan Kleekamp browses the “impaired commodities” of Emily Barker’s art; Jen Rose Smith traces Native resistance to seasonal salmon fisheries in coastal Alaska in the summer of COVID-19; and Francisco Quiñones looks behind Luis Barragán’s walls to consider the role of domestic labor in shaping Mexican modernism.

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 How To Sleep Faster we were looking for contributions that focused on The Body in Pain. The title is taken from the book by Elaine Scarry, which examines pain with regard to ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’ the world. Thinking about Guantanamo Bay as the emblem of the time we’ve come of age, thinking about the political use and the political meaning of pain inflicted: war, torture, natural disaster and disaster capitalism, shock therapy economics and shock therapy for uncooperative or dysfunctional subjects. Institutional violence and the violence of institutions Pain is what we know and the limit of what we know: ...

Border Thinking: Disassembling Histories of Racialized Violence aims to question and provide answers to current border issues in Europe. Central to this investigation is a refugee crisis that is primarily a crisis of global Western capitalism and its components: modernization, nationalism, structural racism, dispossession, and social, political, and economic violence. In this volume, these notions and conditions are connected with the concept of borders, which seems to have disappeared as a function of the global neoliberal economy but is palpably reappearing again and again through deportations, segregations, and war. How can we think about these relations in an open way, ...

The (political) power of memes has moved beyond virtual images. The distinction between the virtual and ‘real life’ no longer applies, or perhaps was never really there. Their effects (or should we say affects?) are moving through digital infrastructures, policy, regulations and bodies. If memes are used as a tool by the alt-right to mobilize people to storm the Capitol and play a substantial role in the Ukrainian war, can they also be used by the left to spark a revolution, as memetic warfare is more immediate and accessible than real-life demonstrations? What kind of labor would that require? What ...

This interview of Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese is meant as a complement to the conversation with Jan Turner in our 44th issue (Nov-Dec 2022), The Desert. Entitled “The Impact of a Life (and a Death): Colonial Encounters and Aboriginal Desert Practices,” this conversation revolves around the life and death of Aboriginal leader and artist Mr. Ward, whose death was investigated by the project founded by Suvendrini and Joseph: Deathscapes. Together we discuss the various methodologies they use in this project that documents Indigenous and migrant deaths in detention by settler states (in particular Australia), as well as the crucial need to practice ...

In 2018 [NAME] Publications launched dispatches, an online journal that explores the cross-cutting relations between everyday and formalized cultural production and the enduring colonial logic of capitalism. Published in Spanish and English, each issue of the journal offers a variety of contributions that analyze emergent tendencies that cast their lot with anti-extractivist and climate struggles, alert us to cultural and territorial dispossession, highlight new forms of resistance and epistemological reconfigurations, and in the process offer a prism through which to read the complex configurations that define our contemporary moment.

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.

We cannot meaningfully criticize the destruction of cultural heritage in the Middle East if we do not question the apparatuses, institutions, and mindsets that lead to terror and destruction in the first place. Just as state apparatuses can make the deaths of enemies ungrievable, cultural and educational institutions can make demolished buildings into something un-memorable.

In their 2018 paper Preference for realistic art predicts support for Brexit sociologists Noah Carl, Lindsay Richard and Anthony Heath presented evidence that research participants who voted Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum were 15 – 20% more likely to exhibit a preference for ‘realistic’ painting. On the face of things this makes perfect sense; many Brexit voters are ‘small-c’ conservatives, committed to ‘traditional’ conservative values and therefore, one would assume, ‘traditional’ painting. Historically or traditionally, what has been celebrated as ‘Art’ until the 20th century was broadly realistic, figurative or representational art. The development of Western culture has historically been ...

Stop and Go: Nodes of Transformation and Transition is the result of an eponymous research project by architect and artist Michael Hieslmair and cultural historian Michael Zinganel, in collaboration with the geographer Tarmo Pikner the historian and anthropologist Emiliya Karaboeva. The immersive, mobile, and multi-local project focused on the transformation of important road-traffic corridors connecting the former East and West of Europe, which are now used frequently by lorry drivers, commuters, migrants, and tourists. A number of case studies and contributions in this book examine locations (such as terminals, service stations, and distribution centers) that are situated between Vienna, Tallinn ...