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Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

Externalized memory had always proceeded by contractions, summaries, reductions, selections, breaks in flow, as well as by organization, classification, boiling down. Card catalogues reduced thousands of works to a few key notions; tables of contents contracted the hundreds of pages in a given book. The sign itself was the first abbreviation of experience. An epic stitched of words was an abbreviation of the war, the long years of which were reduced to a few nights of recitation; the written text that recorded the epic was a contraction of the oral narration which pushed aside its sensory richness, melody, life in a thousand details. In accumulating, every level of abbreviation reconstituted an infinite flow, a new dilation that would be contracted in its turn. From the plurality of pages to the index and the table of contents; from the plurality of books to card catalogues.

The abbreviated elements were further arranged, situated...

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Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back
Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Venice, Lagos, and the Spaces in between

Wandering down the Riva S. Biasio I gaze at the superyachts, thronged at the quay, and the African street vendors selling cheap knock-off handbags: poor immigrants trying to make a living contrasted with the absurdly wealthy visiting one of the great gatherings of the globalized art world. This image has become a sort of a cliché, especially during the last edition of the Biennale di Venezia, curated by Okwui Enwezor, with its emphasis on art from the global South and...
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  • body
  • Africa
  • feminism
  • performance
  • colonialism
Arts
About ‘how we treat the others’

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

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  • ethics
  • migration
  • documenta
  • contemporary art
  • political aesthetics
  • National Socialism
  • propaganda
  • gift
  • Poland
  • concentration camp
Yes, magic exists!
Yes, magic exists!

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

A Sinister Assassin

Antonin Artaud’s very last work, prior to his death in March 1948, is the most extraordinary element of his entire body of work – and is the element now most enduringly inspirational, for contemporary artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, choreographers, and others inspired by Artaud – through its fiercely exploratory, extreme and combative forms, along with its dissolutions and negations of forms, focused above all on the human anatomy, as well as on sonic experimentation and on provocations for innovation in...
  • autobiography
  • avant-garde
  • Modernism
  • poetry
  • literature
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...
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Discourse
On Gestational Communism

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

On Gestational Communism

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  • community
  • critique of neoliberalism
  • family
  • social movements
  • birth
  • motherhood
  • communism
Discourse
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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  • utopia
  • communication
  • science fiction
  • communication media
  • linguistics
  • semiotics and semiology
One plus one equals other
One plus one equals other

Dieter Mersch

Epistemologies of Aesthetics

We  identified ‘showing’—rather than ‘saying’—as the primary self-manifestation of the aesthetic. By ‘showing’ and ‘manifestation’ we do not mean expression, but exhibition and exposition. Wherever works work only with aisthēta and relevance is drawn from perceptions or things and their materiality—from every nuance of coloring, from the way in which objects are framed or combined, from the position of a detail, from the interval between two notes and their microtonal succession or arrhythmic placement, from any hesitation of physical feeling,...
  • artistic research
  • discourse analysis
  • epistemology
  • Think Art
  • aesthetics
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...

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