User account

Other Topics
The Architecture of Disaster
The Architecture of Disaster

Ines Weizman, Eyal Weizman

Before & After

History is increasingly presented as a series of catastrophes. The most common mode of this presentation is the before-and-after image—a juxtaposition of two photographs of the same place, at different times, before and after an event has taken its toll. Buildings seen intact in a “before” photograph have been destroyed in the one “after.” Neighborhoods bustling with activity in one image are in ruins or under a layer of foulwater in the next. Deforestations, contaminations, melting icebergs and drying rivers...
  • History of photography
  • photography
  • war
  • forensic science
  • photographic images
Let’s find the stage of human affairs
Let’s find the stage of human affairs

Marion Muller-Colard, Clémence Pollet

Hannah Arendt's Little Theater

While about to finish her last book, the philosopher Hannah Arendt is disturbed by her stubborn alter ego, 9-year-old Little Hannah. Reluctantly, the old woman lets herself drag out onto the streets of New York and into constant conversation by the inquisitive little girl. They enter a little theatre, and together they watch mankind, society, politics, power evolve – and they also experience the role of Evil (in the person of a wolf and of numerous wooden puppets) and its...
  • Evil
  • acting
  • ethics
  • thinking
  • young readers
Fiction

Diane Williams

How about some string?

I said “Would you like a rope? You know that haul you have is not secured properly.”
“No,” he said, “but I see you have string!”
“If this comes into motion—” I said, “you should use a rope.”
“Any poison ivy on that? ” he asked me, and I told him my rope had been in the barn peacefully for years.
He took a length of it to the bedside table. He had no concept for what wood could endure.
“Table must have broken when I lashed it onto the truck,” he said.
And, when he was moving the sewing machine, he let the cast iron wheels—bang, bang on the stair.
I had settled down to pack up the flamingo cookie jar, the cutlery, and the cookware, but stopped briefly, for how many times do you catch sudden sight of something heartfelt?
I saw our milk cows in their slow...

ABO DE
Digital disrupture
Digital disrupture

Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result...
OPEN
ACCESS
DE
Discourse
Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

OPEN
ACCESS
DE
  • performance
  • ceremony
  • Africa
  • colonialism
  • body
  • feminism
  • ritual
  • spiritism
Discourse
About ‘how we treat the others’

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

OPEN
ACCESS
DE
  • contemporary art
  • concentration camp
  • documenta
  • ethics
  • National Socialism
  • Poland
  • migration
  • political aesthetics
  • gift
  • propaganda
Black Panther is an American, not an African story
Black Panther is an American, not an African story

A.K. Kaiza

An Annotated History of Wakanda

The movie Black Panther, which has become the most successful superhero movie of all time, imagines Wakanda in a very specific and maybe even slightly emancipatory way. Black Panther, now the king of the concealed super-state, faces his current archenemy Killmonger, who wants to distribute arms to the Global South for an uprising against neoliberal imperialism. The scene that introduces Erik “Killmonger” Stevens, the antagonist to Ryan Coogler’s newly imagined hero, takes place in a museum. Killmonger (played by a mesmeric...
OPEN
ACCESS
DE
Humanities

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

“So many egoists call themselves artists,” Rimbaud wrote to Paul Demeny on May 15, 1871. Even though that is not always obvious, ‘I’, the first person, is the most unknown person, a mystery that is constantly moving towards the other two, the second and third persons, a series of unfoldings and smatterings that eventually gelled as ‘Je est un autre’. That is why ‘apocryphal’ is a literarily irrelevant concept and ‘pseudo’ a symptom, the very proof that life, writing, is made up of echoes, which means that intrusions and thefts (Borges also discusses them) will always be the daily bread of those who write.

Words from others, words taken out of place and mutilated: here are the alms of time, that squanderer’s sole kindness. And so many others, mostly others who wrote, and many other pages, all of them apocryphal, all of them echoes, reflections. All this flows together into—two centuries...

OPEN
ACCESS
DE

 

We like !