Afghanistan: A Lexicon uses the form of a lexicon to present a nonlinear narrative of twentieth-century Afghan history as a recursive loop of modernization attempts, revolts, collapses, and recoveries.The lexicon covers seventy-one terms, most illustrated by archival and original images, including: vocabulary unique to Afghan politics, like bi-tarafi, jirga, and nizamnamah; terms that have specific meanings or resonances in the Afghan context, like “infidel,” “martyr,” and spetsnaz; key players and places, from Bacha-i-Saqqao to Hizb-i-Islami and from the Bala Hissar to the Microrayan; and special entries on recurrent events and themes that form the weft and warp of the century, ...

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 ...

Bifurcating means: reconstituting a political economy that reconnects local knowledge and practices with macroeconomic circulation and rethinks territoriality at its different scales of locality; developing an economy of contribution on the basis of a contributory income no longer tied to employment and once again valuing work as a knowledge activity; overhauling law, and government and corporate accounting, via economic and social experiments, including in laboratory territories, and in relation to cooperative, local market economies formed into networks and linked to international trade; revaluing research from a long-term perspective, independent of the short-term interests of political and economic powers; reorienting digital ...

Daniel and I had this conversation the day after the 2013 Goldsmiths Graduate Conference, where we were both participating in a panel suitably entitled “The Sea, Shores, Islands – Territory, Sovereignty and the State.” His paper “The Construction of the End,” given that day is the starting point of our discussion, in which we discuss the legal debates about the location of the shore line in Spain, the national claims of sovereignty of a given territory based on scientific and technological criteria, as well as the various circumventions of the law that provide a form of cabinet of architectural curiosities of which ...

This conversation with Francesca Russello Ammon is built around her book, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (2016), which retraces the political history of the bulldozer by the United States during World War II (used in the Pacific War by the SeaBees) and immediately following it in the massive engineering of the U.S. territory in cities and between them. This discussion can act as an addition to the contents featured in The Funambulist 17 (May-June 2018) “Weaponized Infrastructure.” Francesca Russello Ammon is a cultural historian of urban planning and the built environment. Her research focuses on the social, material, and cultural ...

Through sorcery and extraction, the EURO–VISION series begins with Prof Adekeye Adebajo, Director of the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg. The conversation focuses on the history of extraction between the European and the African continent, which has laid the groundwork for the Critical Raw Materials Initiative to take shape. A key event in this genealogy is the Berlin Conference (1884-85), led by the Chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, during which plenipotentiaries of fourteen states — none of which were from Africa — assembled to discuss the partition of the African continent. After a ...

Dear Readers, welcome to the fiftieth issue of e-flux journal. It marks our official five-year anniversary. It’s hard to believe. To celebrate this, we invite all of you who happen to be in New York next Tuesday, December 17, to a party we are organizing at China Chalet. Join us for drinks and music, we will be there from 9pm until the night ends… Editorial Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle From the Blue Planet to Google Earth Ursula K. Heise Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk Boris Groys Towards the Possible Film (A Script with Some Notable Interruptions) Shezad Dawood If You Prick Us, Do We Not Bleed? No Jalal Toufic Captives ...

The modern arrives when the boundaries dividing old and new become sites of struggle in the way that the divide between the sacred and the profane was previously. These distinctions—old/new, sacred/profane—are strategic: they refer to one embedded position in the life-world relative to another. In the October 2017 issue of e-flux journal, Noemi Smolik shows how, within Russia, the deployment of modernizing iconoclasm against the belief systems of Russia’s rural poor confounded distinctions between old and new, sacred and profane, even before the October Revolution and the Russian avant-garde. Aleksandra Shatskikh diagnoses a contemporary symptom of this misrecognition in the attribution ...

Imagine a big roll call. Names of nations, creeds, and genders are called out. Everyone is supposed to join their kin. Several hours later the crowd is all divided up into groups and subgroups, all neatly arranged on a large grid. There is just one person left. And this person says, “Sorry guys, I’m with the universe. Where do I go?”… Editorial—“Strange Universalism” Hito Steyerl, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Stephen Squibb, and Anton Vidokle Only Intelligent Planning Can Save Us Boris Buden and Darko Suvin The Color of Women: An Interview with YPJ Commanders Dilovan Kobani, Nirvana, Ruken, and Zerin Hito Steyerl and Rojava Film ...

The EURO—VISION booklet critically charts some of the affective modes of power entangled in surveillance technology and migrant flows. By collating a small portion of EU funded border surveillance technology it explores the extractivist gaze of the EU’s migration policy and its inscriptive operations on territories and bodies at its peripheries.

This second conversation with Alex Shams is entirely dedicated to the context in which it was recorded, Palestine. Through five significant fragments, we attempt to describe a non-exhaustive account of the Apartheid landscape created by the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The first fragment consists in the segregated roads, in particular the viaduct and tunnel of the Israeli settlement of Gilo, nearby the place of this conversation. The second and third fragments are the Palestinian villages of Nabi Samuel and Al Walaja that both became enclaves, surrounded by the apartheid wall built by the State of ...