It has been a long time since as many people took to the streets in the cause of feminism as did for the Women’s March on Washington. Protesters wore the hand-knitted pussyhats in such large numbers that they colored the crowds pink. The hats became a striking visual signature feature of the protest against the Trump administration. They stand for a feminism that has majority appeal, albeit with questionable references.

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 ...

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 the face of climate chaos, post-truth politics, and growing tribalisms, it’s clear that liberalism’s old structures are unraveling. Drawing on resilience ecology, Stephanie Wakefield suggests we understand such phenomena to be indicators that we are entering the Anthropocene’s back loop, a time of release and collapse, confusion and reorientation, in which not only populations and climates are being upended but also physical and metaphysical grounds. Anthropocene Back Loop takes us on a journey though different responses and manifestations of the back loop, exploring urban resilience infrastructures, post-apocalyptic imaginaries in fiction and critical theory, and a range of everyday practices ...

“Police killings captured on cell-phone video or photographs have become the hallmark of United States visual culture in the twenty-first century. In this book, I examine this transformation of visual culture from the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in the summer of 2014 to the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017. As a person designated “white” by the color line in the United States, I do so from the perspective of anti-antiblackness. I study the formation of the space of appearance, that space where we catch a glimpse of the society that is to come—the future commons or communism. ...

This episode explores the creation of art during the political struggle that has shaped Sri Lanka and its capital Colombo since the start of 2022. Sound artist Isuru Kumarasinghe and journalist Devana Senanayake share the perspective of artists and musicians who either lived permanently or temporarily around the Gota Go Gama camp, one of the central sites of the protest. The Aragalaya Struggle: A Very Brief Introduction Since the start of 2022, Sri Lanka has been experiencing an economic crisis sparked by a lack of fuel and gas, electricity cuts, skyrocketing prices of food staples, and shortages of medicine. As the conditions ...

For Nikolaos Patsopoulos, the current situation in Europe is similar to the one in Russia right before the revolution and so should be the architecture that accompanies these shift of social paradigms. We discuss about the role of the architect in revolutionary movements, as (s)he has probably more to unlearn than to teach in this matter. For Nikolaos however, each body that modifies the way the built environment (in particular the street) operates politically can be called architect. We therefore spend the time to contrast these two figures sharing the same name of architect, one that contributes actively to the production of ...

It is the summer of 2013. Inside an empty news studio, a teleprompter rolls messages on its screen narrating the events that led to the closing of the Greek public television network (ERT) as a consequence of the European crisis and its austerity-ridden economy. It reads: “ERT may have been the last television channel to ever broadcast, the first and last television signal to be interrupted.” With the shutdown, 2,700 ERT employees were sacked. ERT’s ending was broadcast live, and its last report was an image of the people that had gathered outside the station, protesting against its closure. At the ...

This episode reflects on the current uncertainties experienced in Beirut and how they have influenced creative processes. The city of Beirut is a space that is constantly transforming. From the violent conflicts of the recent past to the social uncertainty of the present, Beirut has become synonymous with precariousness.

Inspired by the scholars, activists, and everyday citizens who spoke out, marched, and protested against police killings of African-Americans, we present this collection of short essays that put Black lives at the center of our thinking about architecture and its history. Note to new readers: This project was published in early 2015, as a rapid response to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. These articles are (sadly) sill relevant, and we hope they will be useful. We also wanted to direct readers to more recent texts that address the intersections of race, space, and activism.

In these last several days, I’ve been thinking about what to do on this channel. It persists that I feel like I have a responsibility to say something. It’s been in our mandate to include those unheard, underrepresented, marginalized voices from the beginning—not through some attempt at tokenism but because we felt good work and important voices were being overlooked and are necessary to the overall conversation. I have tried in both what I publish and broadcast to keep these voices in mind, to hold Talk as a platform that continues to boost these signals. Black Lives Matter. So not to ...

Italy’s iconic revolutionary author offers a requiem for the rebels of 1968, of the Hot Autumn and the Creeping May, imagining a blackout like New York City’s famous moment of chaos and in this framework trying to understand the political events that led to the brutal repression and destruction of a generation. Ferocious, despairing, beautiful line by line, this book captures the era we cannot stop leaving.