e-flux podcast

A conversation with artists Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds, and Keith Christensen on the occasion of their exhibition and book project, In Union, on view at Open Source Gallery in New York. In Union highlights the native role in a union strike, union families, and environmental protests. The conversation is hosted by Matt Peterson. Read more about the project here.

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds has worked as an artist, activist, and teacher. Heap of Birds's artwork confronts unacknowledged histories of state and settler violence against Native communities in the United States. His piece “Our Red Nations Were Always Green” was published by e-flux Architecture in May 2021.

Keith Christensen is an artist and designer. His work includes a focus on social justice issues. He created Game Turn, Learning from the Minneapolis Truckers’ Strike of 1934, a book and board game installation. He recently authored the book See & Say Time on his paintings. 

Matt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine, an experimental space in New York City. He co-directed the film Spaces of Exception (2018), and co edited the book The Mohawk Warrior Society (2022).

Sanna Almajedi speaks to Maria Chávez on the occasion of Topography of Sound (2007–now) at e-flux. The conversation is followed by an excerpt from the performance, Maria’s first public live show since a medically induced sabbatical. 

Maria Chávez is an abstract turntablist, conceptual sound artist, and DJ based in New York and born in Lima, Peru. Coincidence, chance, and failures are themes that are at the heart of her practice, which expands from the world of sound to sculpture and other disciplines. Chávez is one of the only people, if not the only person, in the world that uses the double-headed RAKE turntable needles in her live performances. She uses broken needles that bounce and scratch in their attempt to play a groove. Sometimes she breaks the record itself and stacks broken shards of vinyl on the turntable. Through these experimentations, Chávez utilizes destruction as a method to discover new sonic worlds. Chávez’s influences stem from improvised contemporary music; she is an avid practitioner of deep listening and was mentored by the composer Pauline Oliveros. Chávez describes her turntablism technique as taking the detritus of vinyl and repurposing it into sonic sculptures that can be compared to improvised musique concrète pieces. Her latest body of work, a series of white Carrara marble sculptures, handmade in her studio in Carrara, Italy, has revealed a parallel with her vinyl practice. 

Chávez is on the cover of Thom Holmes’s book Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture (Routledge, 2020). She was a David Tudor and Robert Rauschenberg arts fellow and research fellow for Goldsmith's Sound Practice Research Department. Her large-scale sound and multi-media installations along with other works have been shown at the Getty Museum, the Judd Foundation, Documenta 14, and HeK (Haus der Elektronischen Künste Basel) among others. She is also part of Don’t Blame it on Zen: The Way of John Cage & Friends, currently on view at MoCA Jacksonville. Chávez is the author of Of Technique: Chance Procedures on Turntable (2012), which is the first book about abstract turntablism. This book has developed a reputation as both an academic resource and a foundational text for a new generation of turntablists. She has contributed to many other publications including e-flux Architecture with “Too Much Reality”—a text about neuroplasticity and its place in the arts.

In 2023, Chávez will be an artist-in-residence at the Counterflows Festival in Glasgow, Scotland and at the Rewire Festival in the Hague, the Netherlands. 

This episode was recorded live during the launch of e-flux journal issue #131 on December 7, 2022. The evening was introduced and moderated by the journal editors, and featured authors Martin Guinard, Sabu Kohso, Matt Peterson, Leon Dische Becker, and Cosmo Bjorkenheim.

Martin Guinard expands on his “Homage to Bruno Latour” with a message on diplomacy between different worlds that are no longer commoning together. In connection to Dische Becker and Bjorkenheim's later conversation, Guinard also touches on Latour's (non-)relationship to science fiction. 

Sabu Kohso and Matt Peterson discuss their conversation “The Catastrophe Revealed: On Radiation and Revolution,” which traces deep, interconnected fault lines between the ongoing aftermaths of the Fukushima disaster and the Covid pandemic, as well as the imperial and also liberatory history of activist movements in Tokyo, New York, and all places where people rise up against a disintegrating world. 

Leon Dische Becker and Cosmo Bjorkenheim discuss their essay “A Cursed Franchise: Reliving Colonial Nightmares Through Endless Sci-fi Remakes,” which, among other things, recommends against Hollywood directors mounting a fourth remake of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, arguing that its curses and racist colonial critiques are better left in the past.

e-flux journal is a monthly art publication featuring writings by some of the most engaged artists and thinkers working today. Its Issue #131 (November 2022) features contributions by Mi You, Sabu Kohso, Matt Peterson, Martin Guinard, Leon Dische Becker, Cosmo Bjorkenheim, Nicola Perugini, Tommaso Fiscaletti, Su Wei, Pelin Tan, Olga Olina, Hallie Ayres, and Anton Vidokle. Read or download the issue here.

Martin Guinard has been a curator at LUMA Arles since 2021. Before this, he worked on several interdisciplinary projects dealing with ecological mutation in close collaboration with Bruno Latour. He was a curator of the 2020 Taipei Biennial, titled “You and I Don't Live on the Same Planet,” as well as a guest-editor of the e-flux journal issue of the same name. 

Sabu Kohso is a political and social critic, translator, and a long-time activist in the global and anti-capitalist struggle. He has published several books on urban space and struggle in Japan, and has translated books by Kojin Karatani and David Graeber. His most recent book is Radiation and Revolution (Duke University Press, 2020).

Matt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine, an experimental space in New York City. He codirected the film Spaces of Exception (2018), and coedited the books In the Name of the People (2018) and The Mohawk Warrior Society (forthcoming 2022).

Leon Dische Becker is a writer, editor, and translator (Ger-to-Eng) from Berlin currently living between Los Angeles and New York City. He is trying to write more again. 

Cosmo Bjorkenheim is a filmmaker and writer who lives in New York City. His work has been screened at Anthology Film Archives, Maysles Documentary Center, and the Museum of the Moving Image. He is a contributing editor at Screen Slate.

Lukas Brasiskis, associate curator of e-flux Video & Film, talks to Erika Balsom about the book and exhibition co-curated with Hila Peleg, Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image. 

The episode was recorded at e-flux Screening Room before “No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image,” a talk by Erika Balsom preceded by a screening of Han Ok-hee’s Untitled 77A (1977, 6 minutes) and Grupo Chaski’s Miss Universo en el Perú (1982, 32 minutes).

Erika Balsom is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of four books, including After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (Columbia University Press, 2017) and TEN SKIES (Fireflies Press, 2021, shortlisted for the Kraszna Krausz prize). Her criticism appears regularly in venues such as Artforum, Cinema Scope, e-flux, and 4Columns. With Hila Peleg, she is the co-curator of the exhibition No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (HKW Berlin, 2022) and co-editor of the books Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (2022) and Documentary Across Disciplines (2016), both published by MIT Press. In 2018, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize and the Katherine Singer Kovacs essay award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Sanna Almajedi talks to Jad and Tarek Atoui about their experimental music duo, Through Rust and Dusk. The conversation is followed by an excerpt of their performance at e-flux on September 26, 2022 that incorporated improvisation, custom made instruments, field recordings, and electronic sounds. 

Read more about Tarek Atoui‘s The Whisperers (October 1–December 10, 2022) at Flag Art Foundation here.

Jad Atoui is a Beirut-based sound artist and improviser. He composes and performs electronicand electro-acoustic music and has worked with musicians like John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Anderson, Chuck Bettis, and Anthony Sahyoun. During his formative years in New York, Atoui found interest in the New York avant-garde scene. He began working closely with NYC downtown musicians and learning improvised music techniques, while also working at the Stone and the Guggenheim Museum. In 2015, Atoui spearheaded the “Biosonics” project in collaboration with scientist Ivan Marazzi where they used bio-sonification of behaviors as compositional tools. The project was later published in John Zorn’s Arcana Book Vol. XVIII and premiered at National Sawdust as part of The Stone’s commissioning series. Atoui has given and co-directed workshops at Marfa Sounding, Ashkal Alwan, and Beirut Synth Center, and has been a resident at The Stone, The National Sawdust, Beirut Art Center, Arab Image Foundation, and Sharjah Art Foundation.

Tarek Atoui is an artist and composer born in Beirut. His work stems from performance and looks into how sound can be perceived with sensory organs other than the ear, how sound acts as a catalyst for human interaction, and how it relates to social, historical, and spatial parameters. The point of departure for his works is usually extensive anthropological, ethnological, musicological, or technical research, which results in the realization of instruments, listening rooms, performances, or workshops. Atoui has presented his work internationally at the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates (2009 and 2013); dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel, Germany (2012); the 8th Berlin Biennial (2014); Tate Modern, London (2016); CCA NTU, Singapore (2017); Garage Moscow (2018); the 58th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia (2019); the Okayama Art Summit 2019; the Sharjah Art Foundation (2020); The Fridericianum (2020); And Pinault Collection (2021).  He was appointed co-artistic director of STEIM studios in 2007, and of the Bergen Assembly, a triennial for contemporary art in Norway in 2016. He is the recipient of the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize 2020. Tarek Atoui currently lives and works in Paris, France.

e-flux music is curated by Sanna Almajedi. 

Ben Eastham talks with authors Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams about their novel, Diego Garcia (Fitzcarraldo Editions, Semiotext(e) / Native Agents).

“Through the intricately woven histories and the corresponding fictions within fictions, the compassion expressed in Diego Garcia highlights the absence of it in those who, forsaking their obligations towards other human beings, exiled the Chagossians from their home. We see that until the Chagossian people are home, nobody is home.” –Vanessa Onwuemezi, author of Dark Neighbourhood

About the book:

August 2014. Two friends, writers Damaris Caleemootoo and Oliver Pablo Herzberg, arrive in Edinburgh from London, the city that killed Daniel—his brother, her frenemy and loved by them both. Every day is different but the same. Trying to get to the library, they get distracted by bickering—will it rain or not and what should they do about their tanking bitcoin?—in the end failing to write or resist the sadness which follows them as they drift around the city.

On such a day they meet Diego, a poet. They learn that Diego's mother was from the Chagos Archipelago, that she and her community were forced to leave their ancestral islands by soldiers in 1973 to make way for a military base. They become obsessed with this notorious episode in British history and the continuing resistance of the Chagossian people, and feel urged to write in solidarity. But how to share a story that is not theirs to tell?

Natasha Soobramanien is based in Brussels. She is a writing tutor on the Lens-Based Media Masters Programme at Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam.

Luke Williams is based in Cove, west Scotland. He teaches creative and critical writing at Birkbeck University of London. 

More information on the Chagos Refugees Group can be found at thechagosrefugeesgroup.com.

Hallie Ayres talks to Miriam Hillawi Abraham and Nasra Abdullahi about their text, “The Afro-Cosmologist's Treatise on the Astrolabe,” published in the Cosmic Bulletin 2021. 

Miriam Hillawi Abraham is a multi-disciplinary designer from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With a background in Architecture, she works with digital media and spatial design to interrogate themes of equitable futurism and intersectionality. She holds an MFA in Interaction Design from the California College of the Arts and a BArch in Architecture from the Glasgow School of Art. She is a CCA-Mellon researcher for the Digital Now multidisciplinary project, a 2020 fellow of Gray Area’s Zachary Watson Education Fund and a Graham Foundation 2020 grantee.

Nasra Abdullahi is a designer, writer, and editor based in London. She is currently a junior writer at Wallpaper* magazine, the 2021 guest editor of The Avery Review and a member of the second cohort of New Architecture Writers. A student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, she is interested in ways we can seek equitable futures through material cultures away from projected architectural and urban desires. Seeking a multiplicity in spatial practice, she is interested in what modern architectural technology can look like when innovated and reappropriated through and in relation with various knowledge systems. Currently her work is centered around exploring the possibilities of using analytical tools from black and indigenous radical traditions to inform us about design and technological practice.

Andreas Petrossiants discusses We Are “Nature” Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones (Pluto Press/Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, 2021) with authors Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan. An excerpt from the book was published in e-flux journal issue 124. 

“Since 2004, through the work of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, we have questioned how to radically transform and entangle art, activism, and everyday life amidst the horrors of the Capitalocene. A decade ago, we deserted our metropolitan London lives, rooting our art activism in a place that French politicians had declared “lost to the republic,” known by those who inhabited it as la ZAD (the “zone to defend”). On these four thousand acres of wetlands, turned into a messy but extraordinary canvas of commoning, an international airport project was defeated through disobedience and occupation. This is an extract from our latest book, where an art of life is populated by rebel farmers and salamanders, barricades and bakeries, riots and rituals.”

—Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan

Isabelle Fremeaux is an educator and action researcher. She was formerly Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College London.

Jay Jordan is an art activist and author, cofounder of Reclaim the Streets and the Clandestine Insurgent Clown Army.

Hallie Ayres talks with Shimrit Lee about her forthcoming book, Decolonize Museums.  

Shimrit Lee is a writer, educator, and curator based in Philadelphia. An interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of visual culture, performance, and critical security studies, Shimrit’s research interests relate to the cultural production of security narratives in Israel and the US. She holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from NYU, and currently teaches high school history as well as community-based adult education at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her book, Decolonize Museums, will be published as part of the series “Decolonize That” by Warscapes and O/R Books in 2021.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll, with sound design by Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 9: Lubricating. With two independent sound pieces by artists Tabita Rezaire and Yin Aiwen Smoothness drives contemporary technological regimes: frictionless experiences, immediate gratifications, a promise of a world of flows without disruption. We are enchanted by a slippery seamlessness, mediated by sleek surfaces. A visual order accommodating the idea that the world, and capital, run painlessly. An order enabling control over collective imaginations, bodies, and natural resources. One that oils the relentless infrastructural libido.

Tabita Rezaire sends her blessings and wishes for a New Moon day. A new life cycle. An opportunity to create anew. A time for identity seeking and becoming a seeker of the depths of existence. The New Moon meddles to remind us that the possibilities for change are infinite.

Aiwen Yin is member of the ReUnion Network collective, a group of people operating from different modes of engagement to both promote and speculate with non-familiar forms of kinship. In Yin’s words, support, mutual care, grief, healing, and affection are not exclusively allocated among blood-related beings, but instead become a fundamental feature of human associability and of social-making at large. Aligned with ReUnion Network’s engagement with the daily formation of social bonding, Aiwen Yin imagines her practice as providing a frame where non-normative forms of inclusivity can be nurtured.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll, with sound design by Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 8: Discharging. With a sound piece by researchers and designers Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Marco Ferrari, and Elise Hunchuck (in collaboration) Rainmaking is a long-lasting human dream. Triggering water precipitation in air to combat water scarcity, drought, and global warming has driven spiritual cultural practices, scientific studies, and territorial conflicts. It has materialized in countless ceremonies, rituals, and other technologically enabled practices. Human ambition to tame the environment drives the proliferation of contemporary cloud seeding programs, which speaks about the political, ecological, and social consequences of the extraction of what is common.

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Marco Ferrari, and Elise Hunchuck talk about Sky River, a project supported by the Chinese government to work on the watershed of the Huang He (Yellow River) through weather engineering and aimed at mitigating the territory’s increasing drought conditions. Articulating a new planetary and atmospheric imaginary, Sky River positions the water that circulates in the upper atmosphere not as a natural occurrence but as an asset that can be secured through infrastructure. Precipitation is, in this context, a readily available water source that could be managed through a distributed network of cloud-seeding devices, while the tracking of weather patterns can be done via sophisticated remote-sensing technologies.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll, with sound design by Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 7: Clogging. With two independent sound pieces by artists Vera Frenkel and Ibiye CampMaterial power resides in the containment and control of flows. Far from avoiding friction, it is precisely the disruptions and systemic imbalances in flow itself that keeps the system running and allows for uneven forms of distribution, accumulation, and advantage. Latency, clogging, inertia, and slowness are instruments to both enact and challenge power.

When artist Vera Frenkel was working on A Challenging Word and a Prescient Work, her sound piece, she heard the unexpected news that a neighbourhood “developer” was demanding that her city cancel its heritage by-law in order to give space for redevelopment, threatening to force her out of her home and studio. Under these painful circumstances, Frenkel wrote a letter to Andrés Jaque, in which she reflected on how neoliberal approaches to hydrocommons, such as Toronto’s coastal line, have manifested polarized economic, social, and political divides. Since the 1980s, and accelerated in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberalism operates through the redevelopment of cities’ waterfronts, disarticulating through violence the social, architectural, ecological, and productive practices and associations that historically grew there. These waterfronts become sites for money placement, tax evasion, and capital laundering. Citizens who live in these areas encounter segregation, victimhood, and vulnerability. Frenkel’s monumental work ONCE NEAR WATER: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive traces the grief that late neoliberalism and architectural complicity produce in citizens dispossessed of visual and physical access to water. In this related sound piece, Frenkel ultimately reflects on how an economic system that claims universal dynamization operates, in fact, by dispossessing citizens of their mobility and communal relationships.

Ibiye Camp uses Injiri fabric to reflect on how automation forcefully transforms our bodies. Injiri has its origins in another fabric, the Madras, which circulated through the world during the transatlantic slave trade. In Buguma, Nigeria, where part of Ibiye’s family is from, Kalabari craftwomen recondition and re-imagine the cloth by cutting and removing threads to reveal new patterns. The resulting Injiri fabric is worn as wrappers in Kalabari ceremonies. In recent years, the pulled cloth is no longer made by Kalabari women, but by factory machines in China. The female creative position has been displaced by machines, triggering a shift in social roles and spaces in Buguma. In Ibiye’s piece we hear the sound of Kalabari drums communicating stories of goddesses, gods, and spiritual beings. We also hear the traces and ghostly presences resulting from this transformation in the manufacturing process.

You will first hear a letter from Vera Frenkel to Chief Curator Andrés Jaque. This is the full letter, replacing any previous version. It is followed by a sound piece on the same word by Ibiye Camp.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll, with sound design by Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 6. Transfusing: With three sound pieces by scholar Iván L. Munuera and artists P. Staff and Himali Singh Soin Bodies are permeable. They exist in continuous fluid exchange with other bodies. Yet fluids circulate differently than the bodies to which they once belonged. They pass from one body to another body, merging stories, fates, futures. They fuse health, life, or their opposite. Fluids replace components; they add something that is lacking or is desired. Fluids are given, passed onto, injected, poured, infiltrated in a sometimes unavowed hydro commons.

Iván L. Munuera talks about blood transfusion. Blood transfusion carries a notion of “body” far from the definition of a discrete and autonomous being. It states an environmental recomposition that pushes for interdependent, interconnected, and not zipped-up embodiments.

In their work, P. Staff interrogates the often uncomfortable interdependency and extraction of bio-commodities, both human and other, between body and institution, liquid, and solid. The material dimension of collective life becomes the site where structural violence, registers of harm, and the corrosive effects of acid, blood, and hormones can be explored and enacted.

Himali Singh Soin explores the elements of the earth, their reverberations in the body and the inter-scalar exchanges between them. Here she tells the story of a search for a lost bla, a subtle life force that runs through the world-body that has lost itself amid the crisis of the present moment.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll, with sound design by Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 5. Melting: With two sound pieces by the artists Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun (in collaboration) and Michael Wang It is precisely at the melting point of a pure substance that solid and liquid forms coexist and produce each other. Glaciers and seas. Mountains and rivers. Molten rocks, soils, and climates. Entire worlds—several hundred to several thousand years old—melt into other worlds, making unexpected currents, struggles, and living conditions emerge.

Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun reflect on the impact that local policies and post-disaster reconstruction plans had in the Minjiang River after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and the way they were mitigated and responded to by local traditions, ancient wisdom, and more-than-human intelligences.

Michael Wang’s sound piece is attuned to the complex territorial entanglements that connect Shanghai to the melting glaciers of the Tibetan plateau and to the course of the Yangtze River. Ultimately, this work interrogates the power and intrinsic violence of reversibility.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll with the sound design of Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 4. Breathing: Torkwase Dyson and Itziar OkarizSeemingly a banal act of taking air into the lungs and releasing it, breathing connects bodies to other bodies and bodies to the atmosphere. In breathing, bodies enact their existence and their interdependence across territories and identities. Yet breathing is too often unequally distributed, and the deprivation of air itself reminds us of the contentious, violent relations dictating the right to life.

Torkwase Dyson interrogates the violence contained in the way human bodies emerge through the infrastructures outside of them, and the forms of resistance and invented freedom enacted in the circulation, affirmation, and dissolution of bodies into the material exteriority they are to be part of.

Itziar Okariz focuses attention on breath understood as a zero degree of identity; and on how air enters and leaves the bodies, the flesh, and the fluids that compose them and their relationship with the atmosphere. Relations of fragility and interdependence.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists on 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll with the sound design of Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 3. Flushing: Hao Pei Chu and Liam Young Pipes connect our bodies with larger ecosystems. They help dispose of and relocate sewage while sustaining the image of its disappearance. Pipes enact the apparent separation between humans and their waste. They are part of the physiological trait, for they help us get rid of that which we no longer want to recognize as ours.

Image: Paula Vilaplana de Miguel.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll with the sound design of Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 2. Decomposing: Daisy Bisenieks and Royce Ng (Zheng Mahler) and Tuo Wang Organic bodies break down and decay, aided by other bodies. As microorganisms feed on dead plants, and animal and human remains, they deconstruct intricate life forms into their simplest components. Water, carbon dioxide and nutrients are building blocks of earth beings and their socio-natural collectives. We are in a continuous process of body breaking and making.

Image © Paula Vilaplana.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll with the sound design of Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 1. Menstruating: Cecilia Vicuña Menstrual fluids are carriers of taboos, gender stereotypes, social behaviours, notions of life and death, purity and uncleanliness. Their symbolism connects bodies to the moon, mountains, rivers, and goddesses. Menstruating involves both synchronicity with the cosmos and forms of earthly solidarity.

Image: Paula Vilaplana de Miguel.

Andreas Petrossiants speaks to Woodbine members Matt Peterson and Laura McAdams. Woodbine is a volunteer-run experimental hub in Ridgewood, Queens for developing the practices, skills, and tools needed to build autonomy. Since March 2020 they have run a food pantry in partnership with Hungry Monk that serves thousands of families per week.

“We came together out of our experiences in Occupy Wall Street and Hurricane Sandy, after having lived through a New York City forever changed by 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis. Trump and Covid are only the latest in a series of disasters we have had to face together, and community resilience and collective autonomy remain our answer and horizon. In the fall of 2013 Woodbine was conceived as an organizing framework to rethink how to inhabit a city and neighborhood together. Now it is time to begin a new chapter and phase, and expand our collective capacities.” Quote from Woodbine’s website.

Support the fundraiser discussed in this episode here.

Furqat Palvan-Zade, Nikita Yingqian Cai, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Carol Yinghua Lu, Keti Chukhrov, and Kasia Wolinska read excerpts from their Letters Against Separation correspondence. The letters were published in series on e-flux conversations as the Covid-19 pandemic spread around the world. Other contributors included Claire Fontaine in Italy, Bahar Noorizadeh in London, Hanmin Kim in Seoul, Oxana Timofeeva in rural Russia, and Pelin Tan on an Island.

The idea for the project was initiated by Hito Steyerl and developed by e-flux conversations editor Mike Andrews. The following announcement concluded the project:

Dear friends,

Our correspondence project “Letters against Separation,” hosted on e-flux conversations, was launched as the Covid-19 pandemic forced most of the world to retreat into isolation. The aim was to have writers from different parts of the globe, who were facing different phases and manifestations of the pandemic, reflect on what was going on around them, in the hope of creating connections amidst the new conditions of separation. From places like Guangzhou and Tashkent, Mexico City and Moscow, our writers have posted a series of open letters describing the acute anxieties and unexpected delights of self-isolation, the structural injustices revealed by the pandemic, and the slow, fraught return to something resembling “normal” life. We hope these letters have brought some measure of relief from your own extended confinement—or at least some distraction from the constant nagging of your dog wanting to play (...)

Excerpts in this episode from:Furqat Palvan-Zade in Tashkent—August 17, 2020Nikita Yingqian Cai in Guangzhou—July 6Irmgard Emmelhainz in Mexico City—June 18Liu Ding, Liu Qingshuo, and Carol Yinghua Lu as a family in Beijing—June 7Keti Chukhrov in Moscow—May 1 Kasia Wolinska in Berlin—April 13

Elvia Wilk talks to artist Stephanie Dinkins about her ongoing projects involving AI, and recent text, “Afro-now-ism,” published in Noema magazine.

Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist and professor at Stony Brook University where she holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art. She creates platforms for dialog about artificial intelligence (AI) as it intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to co-create more equitable, values grounded artificial intelligent ecosystems. Dinkins’ art practice employs lens-based practices, emerging technologies, and community engagement to confront questions of bias in AI, data sovereignty and social equity. Investigations into the contradictory histories, traditions, knowledge bases, and philosophies that form/in-form society at large underpin her thought and art production.

Luis Camnitzer and editor Ben Eastham have a conversation following the June 2020 publication of One Number Is Worth One Word, the latest in the e-flux journal book series with Sternberg Press. 

For nearly 60 years, Luis Camnitzer has been obsessing about the same things. As an art student in Uruguay in 1960, Camnitzer was part of a collective of artists, students, and educators who reformed the School of Fine Arts in Montevideo. Today, he is still an “ethical anarchist” preoccupied with the role of education in redistributing power in society. “If we keep digging,” he writes, “it becomes clear that these ideas existed way before us, will persist long after we are gone, and will do so regardless of who speaks or writes of them... The important question is whether they will ever be absorbed.”

At the vanguard of 1960s Conceptualism, Camnitzer has worked primarily in printmaking, sculpture, and installations. His humorous, biting, and often politically charged use of language as an art medium has distinguished his practice, influencing generations of socially engaged artists. Though based in New York since 1964, his practice remains intrinsically connected to Uruguay and Latin America, and he represented Uruguay in the 43rd Venice Biennale in 1988. As well as many solo exhibitions, his work has featured in biennials including the Bienal de la Habana, Cuba; Whitney Biennial, New York; and documenta 11, Kassel. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Tate, London; the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo; and the Museo de Arte Latino Americano de Buenos Aires, among others.

Edited by Ben Eastham, One Number Is Worth One Word spans over half a century of the artist’s radical engagement with art education and its institutions, and includes many texts published for the first time. This is a singularly authoritative, antiauthoritarian gathering of a life’s work in art, education, and activism. With mischievous wit and wisdom, Camnitzer’s writings summon an inherent utopianism in egalitarian, participatory models of art education to identify how meaning is made.

 Available from Sternberg Press (distributed by MIT Press).

Charles Mudede joins us from Seattle to read “White Knee, Black Neck,” published in the June 2020 issue of e-flux journal. 

Charles Mudede is a Zimbabwean-born cultural critic, urbanist, filmmaker, and writer. Mudede, who teaches at Cornish College of the Arts, collaborated with the director Robinson Devor on two films, Police Beat and Zoo, both of which premiered at Sundance. Zoo was also screened at Cannes. Mudede is also associate editor for The Stranger, a Seattle weekly, and directed the 2020 film Thin Skin. 

Andreas Petrossiants speaks with Marina Vishmidt about her book, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital. 

Marina Vishmidt is a writer and editor. She teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Ephemera, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, Australian Feminist Studies, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes. She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill 2018 / Haymarket 2019). She is one of the organisers of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, a member of the Marxism in Culture collective and is on the board of the New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society series (Bloomsbury Academic).

Hallie Ayres speaks to Emily Apter and Aliza Shvarts. The conversation was scheduled following the opening of Aliza Shvarts: Purported at Art In General on February 20, 2020.

Aliza Shvarts is an artist and theorist who takes a queer and feminist approach to reproductive labor and language. Her current work focuses on testimony and the circulation of speech in the digital age. She received her BA from Yale University and PhD in Performance Studies from NYU. Shvarts was a 2014 recipient of the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a 2014–15 Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, a 2017 Critical Writing Fellow at Recess Art, and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015–19). Current and upcoming solo exhibitions include Purported at Art in General, which surveys the last decade of her practice; and Potfuch, a new commission on view later this year at A.I.R.

Emily Apter is Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her books include: Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018), Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013), Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). She is currently working on a project (What is Just Translation?) which takes up questions of translation and law, sexual safety, and transmediality. Her essays have appeared in October, Third Text, Paragraph, boundary 2, Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Comparative Literature and Art Journal. 

Conversation with editors Maria Lind, Michele Masucci, and Joanna Warsza following a postponed book launch at e-flux for Red Love: a reader on Alexandra Kollontai, presented by CuratorLab at Konstfack University, Tensta konsthall, Cabinet and Sternberg Press.

The reader is accessible in open access on Konstfack’s website.

Maria Lind is a curator, writer, and educator based in Berlin and Stockholm. Her other book Seven Years: The Rematerialization of Art from 2011 to 2017 was published by Sternberg Press in 2019. She is a guest lecturer of CuratorLab.

Michele Masucci is an artist, researcher, and educator based in Stockholm. 

Joanna Warsza is a Program Director of CuratorLab at Konstfack University of Arts in Stockholm and an independent curator based in Berlin.

Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra KollontaiAlexandra Kollontai was a Bolshevik revolutionary, and after the 1917 October revolution the people’s commissar of social and one of the first female ambassadors in the world. She worked to introduce crucial reforms for women’s liberation: such as abortion rights, secularized marriage, and for paid maternity leave; and considered “comradely love” to be a political force. Red Love is the reader devoted to her legacy stemming from research by CuratorLab at Konstfack University in Stockholm and Tensta konsthall, accompanying Dora García’s exhibition back in 2018. The conversation presents this historical figure, her involvement in politics and some of her writings and asks how to read Kollontai’s vision of love today and relate it to current feminist struggles?

Edited by Maria Lind, Michele Masucci, Joanna Warsza with CuratorLab 2017/18 participants: Aly Grimes, Malin Hüber, Nicholas John Jones, Martyna Nowicka-Wojnowska, Alessandra Prandin, Dimitrina Sevova, Sophia Tabatadze, Federico Del Vecchio, and Hannah Zafiropoulos

Contributions by Bini Adamczak, Sara Ahmed, Giulia Andreani, Lise Haller Baggesen, Petra Bauer & Rebecka Thor, Dora García, Michael Hardt, Pontus Pettersson, Jonathan Brooks Platt, Agneta Pleijel, Nina Power, Paul B. Preciado, Alla Mitrofanova, Martyna Nowicka-Wojnowska, Michele Masucci, Maria Lind, Aaron Schuster, Oxana Timofeeva, Mohammad Salemy, Sally Schonfeldt, Sophia Tabatadze, Tomas Rafa, Alicja Rogalska, Joanna Warsza, and Hannah Zafiropoulos

Design by Jiri Novak

Amidst a climate of uncertainty and social distancing due to COVID-19, writer and e-flux journal contributing editor Elvia Wilk and artist Anicka Yi discuss various changing global ecologies, viral and otherwise. Their original in-person conversation was planned on the occasion of Tate Modern’s selection of Yi for the annual Hyundai / Turbine Hall commission. 

A symbiotic organism in its own right, Anicka Yi's work fuses multi-sensory experience with synthetic and evolutionary biology to form lush bio-fictional landscapes. Utilizing a “biopolitics of the senses,” Yi challenges traditional approaches to the human sensorium, emphasizing olfaction as well as microbial and embodied intelligence. Through her research and “techno-sensual” artistic exploration, Yi is opening new discourse in the realms of cognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning, introducing concepts of the sensorial ecology of intelligence, the machine microbiome, machine ecosystems, and “biologized” machines. Maintaining a practice focused on co-subjectivity, Yi’s projects include collaborations with engineers, robots, synthetic and microbiologists, computer scientists, perfumers, ant and bacterial colonies, algae, tempura-fried flowers, and snails. 

Anicka Yi lives and works in New York City. Her recent solo exhibitions include Gladstone Gallery, Brussels; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel; Kunsthalle Basel; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Kitchen, New York; and The Cleveland Museum of Art. Yi’s work was also featured in the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019. Yi has screened her film, The Flavor Genome, at the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, 2017. In 2016, she was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize for outstanding achievement in contemporary art. She is represented by Gladstone Gallery and 47 Canal, New York. 

Yi's Hyundai Commission at Tate’s Turbine Hall is scheduled to open in October 2020. It will be curated by Mark Godfrey, senior curator; Petra Schmidt, production manager; and Carly Whitefield, assistant curator.

e-flux journal editor Brian Kuan Wood speaks to iLiana Fokianaki and Laura Raicovich on the occasion of Rojava Film Commune: Forms of Freedom at e-flux. The exhibition is curated by Fokianaki and on view through April 4, 2020. 

iLiana Fokianaki is a Greek curator, researcher and writer based in Athens and Rotterdam. She is the founder and director of State of Concept, Athens, cofounder, with Antonia Alampi, of the research platform Future Climates, and lecturer at the Dutch Art Institute. Read her text, “Narcissistic Authoritarian Statism, Part 1: The Eso and Exo Axis of Contemporary Forms of Power,” in e-flux journal issue 103 (October 2019). 

Laura Raicovich is a curator and writer dedicated to art and artistic production that relies on complexity, poetics, and care to create a more engaged and equitable civic realm. She is currently working on a book about museums, cultural institutions, and the myth of neutrality (Verso, 2020), and is the recipient of both the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship and the inaugural Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators at Hyperallergic. 

Until early 2018, she served as President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum where she oversaw an inviting and vital commons for art, ideas, and engagement. Prior to the Queens Museum, Raicovich inaugurated Creative Time’s Global Initiatives, launched Creative Time Reports, and directed the Creative Time Summit. She arrived there after a decade at Dia Art Foundation, where she served as deputy director.

Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk of The Wooster Group speak with Peter Scott of Carriage Trade Gallery. 

The exhibition mentioned in this episode, The Wooster Group at Carriage Trade Gallery, is on view in New York through February 16, 2020. The exhibition features archival material, props, and performance documentation emphasizing the group’s significant contribution to both performative and visual culture over the last four and a half decades.

The production mentioned, A PINK CHAIR (in place of a fake antique) was at NYU Skirball Center for Performing Arts through February 2, 2020. A PINK CHAIR (In Place of a Fake Antique) references one of Polish stage director Tadeusz Kantor's (1915–90) manifestos. It describes a theater that gives the simplest, everyday objects—chairs—hallucinatory power to summon up forgotten history and memory.

The Wooster Group (originating in 1975) is a company of artists who make work for theater, dance, and media at The Performing Garage at 33 Wooster Street in New York. Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk are founding and original members of the group along with Spalding Gray (1941–2004), Jim Clayburgh, Ron Vawter (1948–94), Willem Dafoe, and Peyton Smith. Elizabeth LeCompte is director.

Live recording from the opening of Goldin+Senneby’s exhibition, Insurgency of Life, at e-flux. The exhibition is on view until February 8, 2020.

Goldin+Senneby is a Stockholm-based artist subject. Since 2004 their work has explored the structural correspondence between conceptual art and finance capital, drawn to its (il)logical conclusions. Recent works include a ghostwritten detective novel about an offshore company on the Bahamas (2007–15), a magic trick for the financial markets (2016), and a proposal for an eternal employment at a train station (2026–). Currently their practice is mutating: Drawing on bodily experiences of an autoimmune disease, they are staging a fiction with an “autoimmune tree” as the main protagonist.

Read more about the exhibition here. 

Andreas Petrossiants speaks with author Leigh Claire La Berge about Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art, published in November 2019 by Duke University Press. 

“The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. In Wages Against Artwork Leigh Claire La Berge shows how socially engaged art responds to and critiques what she calls decommodified labor—the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which socially engaged artists relate to work, labor, and wages, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own and others' financial precarity; why the increasing role of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor; and how the expansion of MFA programs and student debt helps create the conditions for decommodified labor. In showing how socially engaged art operates within and against the need to be paid for work, La Berge offers a new theorization of the relationship between art and contemporary capitalism.” Read more

Leigh Claire La Berge is associate professor of English at BMCC CUNY and author of Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s as well as co-editor of Reading Capitalist Realism. Her writing and journalism has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Post-45, the Los Angeles REview of Books and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She is  also a member of the Marx for Cats collective

Mariana Silva speaks to Sophie Lewis about her book, Full Surrogacy Now, on the occasion of her talk at e-flux, “Wages for Womb-Work, Polymaternalism, Critical Firestonianism.” The introduction from Full Surrogacy Now was also published in issue 99 of e-flux journal.

Sophie Lewis is a writer and part-time faculty member at the Philadelphia branch of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Sophie's interdisciplinary work tends to blend feminist theory and cultural criticism, interrogating work, nature, and reproduction in a queer utopian mode. Her essays have appeared in many journals (both academic and non-academic) including Signs, Feminist Review, Gender Place and Culture, Viewpoint, Boston Review, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, Mute, Salvage Quarterly, Logic, The New Inquiry, and Commune. She is also a member of the ecological writing collective Out of the Woods, and an editor at the journal Blind Field. As an occasional translator (to make ends meet), she has translated books from German including the popular Communism for Kids by Bini Adamczak, A Brief History of Feminism by Antje Schrupp, and Other and Rule by Paula Villa and Sabine Hark (forthcoming with Verso). Her PhD from the University of Manchester was in Geography, and she also holds two degrees from Oxford University—in English Literature and Nature, Society, and Environmental Policy respectively—as well as a Master's in Politics from the New School for Social Research. Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family is her first book.

Curator Sohrab Mohebbi speaks to artist Christian Nyampeta on the occasion of his exhibition at SculptureCenter, École du soir (The Evening Academy), on view through December 16, 2019.

As part of the related public program, e-flux hosted an evening with philosopher Isaïe Nzeyimana, in dialogue with anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana and Christian Nyampeta on Wednesday, October 23 at e-flux. 

Excerpt from the press release:

Christian Nyampeta’s project consists of a scriptorium (a place for writing), an exhibition, and public programs concerned with “thinking Africa,” then and now. The program is resourced around the idea of an “evening school,” following the Senegalese writer and film director Sembène Ousmane, who saw cinema as “cours du soir” or “evening classes.” This concept was informed by the traditions of orality, sensuality, and conviviality within the realm of art learning and making in his region. Sembène saw cinema as a popular information system in the service of education, aesthetic experience, and public dissemination. His methodology concerned the use of cinema’s collective production, and investing in its viewing methods that draw from different uses of time, visual and textual histories, social struggles and hopes, in mutuality between his own locality and the world at large.

Read more here.

Christian Nyampeta’s ongoing activities in art, design, and theory include the convening of a scriptorium, a roaming program of exhibitions, screenings, and lyrical performances concerned with longing and belonging through monuments and translation. Forthcoming exhibitions include the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art in Ekaterinburg, Russia. Nyampeta runs Radius, an online and occasionally inhabitable radio station. He is completing a PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London and he was awarded The Art Prize Future of Europe 2019.

Sohrab Mohebbi is SculptureCenter's Curator and is responsible for organizing exhibitions, educational and public programs, publications, and for coordinating all aspects of program presentation. Before joining SculptureCenter in 2018, Mohebbi was the associate curator at REDCAT.

Rachel Ichniowski talks to three representatives from the New Museum Union’s Bargaining Committee—Dana Kopel, Francesca Altamura, and Gabe Gordon—about the decision by staff to form a union, and the details of their first five-year contract, which was agreed upon with the museum on October 1, 2019.

Staff at the New Museum voted to unionize in January 2019. The formation of the union, which is a part of UAW Local 2110, has been closely watched amid calls for greater transparency in art and culture sector workplaces.

The New Museum employs over 140 people, and counts over 70 staff members as part of the union.

New Museum Union’s Mission Statement:

“When Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum in 1977, she envisioned an institution that did away with hierarchies—not only in the art exhibited, but in the structure of the museum itself. Her aim, as she wrote in 1990, was to work toward “a collaborative, self-critical, and ‘transparent’ organizational model.” As the New Museum Union, we are committed to Tucker’s vision, and to the Museum’s mission today. We have organized as the Organizing Committee of the New Museum Union (NewMuU of UAW Local 2110) because we take great pride in the Museum’s legacy and we are committed to its success, its health, and its future growth.

As a museum and as a community, we have always championed diversity, equity, and progress. This distinguishes us as an art institution historically and, we hope, today as well—both in New York and globally. Our mission centers intersectional feminist concerns and cross-cultural dialogue, and our exhibitions, programs, and initiatives aim to model inclusivity and access. We ask, above all, that these ideals be mirrored in the Museum’s hiring and staffing. We believe that fair compensation for all workers throughout the museum is essential to ensuring its diversity: salaries, wages, and benefits at the museum must be sustainable for everyone, regardless of the privileges afforded them by race, class, or gender.” Read more here. 

Brian Kuan Wood talks to Daniel van der Velden of Metahaven (Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden) on the occasion of their exhibition at e-flux titled Turnarounds. Turnarounds consists of the film installation Hometown (2018), a new series of textile pieces, and an essay in e-flux journal.

Hometown focuses its ultra-wide, hypnotic gaze on two cities—Beirut and Kyiv—that merge into a fictional home for the film’s protagonists, Ghina Abboud and Lera Luchenko. Fluorescent, lava-like animations alternate between images of industrial estates and overgrown gardens as Ghina and Lera lyrically describe the town. A caterpillar gets killed, but while mourning the loss, both evade responsibility for the crime. With their monologue in Russian and Arabic colorfully subtitled in English and Ukrainian, they eat ice cream. Their laughter solves puzzles, and there is a sunken city inhabited by adults who forgot what children taught them.

The script of Hometown draws on a genre of Russian children poems called perevortyshi (“turnarounds,” or “twisters”). In perevortyshi, positive statements are provisionally joined with their opposites to the great joy of both narrator and listener. These poems are, in their playfulness, also fundamentally questioning our reliance on verbal statements in order to approach reality. In "Sleep walks the street," an essay for e-flux journal no. 102 that will go live when the exhibition opens, Metahaven interrogate our current tendency to aestheticize politics by relying on the cognitive guidance of metaphorical and allegorical construction. Examining figures of speech that normalize not just words but also entire semantic contexts and cognitive patterns, they reference the work of the German-Polish linguist Victor Klemperer (1881–1960) who studied the language of the Nazis. In searching for potential antidotes, Metahaven focus on the work of the Russian poets Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941) and Daniil Kharms (1905–1942), as well as the contemporary poets Eugene Ostashevsky, Jackie Wang, and Galina Rymbu.

In addition to the film installation and the essay, a new series of digitally created textile pieces is installed throughout the public and private spaces at e-flux. Bearing titles like Mise-en-Anthroposcene, Skyrofoam, and Now You Know You Now, Metahaven’s recent textile works draw on the thematic and affective tropes they have embraced since their documentary The Sprawl: Propaganda About Propaganda from 2015.

The work of Metahaven consists of filmmaking, writing, and design.

Hometown will be on view at e-flux through November 2, 2019.

Erin talks to Interference Archive volunteers Louise Barry and Rob Smith about the archive, and the exhibition Resistance Radio: The People’s Airwaves, on view through September 29, 2019. 

Resistance Radio: The People’s Airwaves focuses on the people, stations, and organizations that have battled to bring their defiant programming onto the airwaves, and particularly when these actions were in service of grassroots movements and/or community organizing.

The mission of Interference Archive is to explore the relationship between cultural production and social movements—through an open stacks archival collection, publications, a study center, and public programs. 

The archive consists of posters, flyers, zines, books, t-shirts, buttons, moving images, audio recordings, and more.

You can listen to Interference Archive’s podcast, Audio Interference, here. 

e-flux journal editorial assistant Andreas Petrossiants speaks to Franco “Bifo” Berardi following his recent texts “(Sensitive) Consciousness and Time: Against the Transhumanist Utopia” in issue 98, and “Game Over” in issue 100.

Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous Radio Alice in Bologna and an important figure in the Italian Autonomia movement, is a writer, media theorist, and social activist. His most recent books are Breathing: Chaos and Poetry (Semiotexte, 2018) and The Second Coming (Polity, 2019).

Sanna Almajedi talks to composer and trombonist Peter Zummo, and Eve Essex, a musician who performs with alto saxophone, piccolo, voice and electronics.

The music heard in this episode was recorded live during the fifth edition of Satellite at Bar Laika on March 12, 2019, featuring Zummo and Essex. 

Peter Zummo is a composer and trombonist whose music encompasses both the contemporary-classical and vernacular genres. His work is informed by five decades of realizing the work of other composers, poets, bandleaders, choreographers, directors, and filmmakers. The way in which he maneuvers the contemporary trombone is genre non-conforming, and still finds a place in any genre. 

Zummo worked closely with Arthur Russell, appearing on many of his recordings. He has also collaborated with Pauline Oliveros, Phil Niblock, and Yasunao Tone. His music has been released by Foom, Optimo Music, and Experimental Intermedia Foundation.

Eve Essex is a Brooklyn-based musician who performs with alto saxophone, piccolo, voice and electronics, harnessing elements of classical, drone, free jazz, and distorted pop. She has performed as Das Audit (with guitarist Craig Kalpakjian), as well as in trios Hesper (with James K and Via App), and HEVM (with MV Carbon and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix). She has also collaborated extensively with Juan Antonio Olivares as installation/performance-art duo Essex Olivares.

Her first solo album, Here Appear, was released by Soap Library (cassette) and Sky Walking (LP) in 2018. She also appears on Pan’s compilation Mono No Aware. Select solo performances include Artists Space, Outpost Artists Resources, Safe Gallery, and Meakusma Festival.

Satellite is a monthly experimental music series curated by Sanna Almajedi.

Andreas Petrossiants, Editorial Assistant for e-flux journal, speaks to artist Fiona Connor starting from her exhibition at SculptureCenter, Closed for installation, Fiona Connor, SculptureCenter, #4. 

As the show's press release describes:

"Los Angeles-based artist Fiona Connor remakes overlooked everyday objects, including bulletin boards, park benches, community noticeboards, doors of closed down clubs, real estate signs, municipal water fountains, and so on. She is interested in where these objects come from, what they are made out of, who makes them and for whom, as well as the relationships that the artist initiates and maintains in order to reproduce and re-present the objects as works of art.

For her new commission at SculptureCenter, Connor is producing a set of intersecting works that bring together the artist’s investment in the various operations of sculpture in an expansive field of production, maintenance, and display. In the gallery, she shows a number of bronze pieces that replicate tools required to install an exhibition, such as a measuring tape, a paint tray, a dolly, and scraps of cardboard. Nearby in an apartment in Long Island City, the artist arranges for an annual window cleaning, in perpetuity.

Later in the course of the exhibition, Connor convenes a series of workshops, using pulped institutional printed material to make a set of catalog-sized blocks that will function as the exhibition’s publication."

Read the full text here. 

Closed for installation, Fiona Connor, SculptureCenter, #4 is on view through July 29, 2019.

Artist Karl Holmqvist reads “ANOTHER WAR IS POSSIBLE” and “NUMBERS,” and speaks with artist and e-flux founder Anton Vidokle.

Karl Holmqvist is known for using a wide range of formats—poetry readings, installation, and sculpture–to bring out the primal qualities of language. He is one of a current generation of artists working with language and text as sculptural or performative material. Holmqvist says his work is meant to spark the creative process in the viewer, seeing his art and poetry as a translation of the complexities of contemporary life. He blends poetry with pop music and his texts, composed of anecdotes as famous as they are diverse, explore the themes of communication and language. Together, the works unpack the many operations of language, how it can occupy space and provoke “invisible images” within memory and imagination.

In February 2019, e-flux’s Bar Laika presented a new work by Karl Holmqvist: #FLU$$CH (29 minutes, 2017), with an introduction by and Q&A with Pati Hertling.

You can read “GORILLAZ GRRLZ,” Holmqvist’s contribution to e-flux journal’s SUPERCOMMUNITY project at the 56th Venice Biennale, here.

e-flux journal editor Brian Kuan Wood speaks to Kader Attia, artist and founder of La Colonie, a space in Paris for sharing ideas and discussion. Focussing on decolonialisation not only of people but also of knowledge, attitudes and practices, it aspires to de-compartmentalise knowledge by a trans-cultural, trans-disciplinary and trans-generational approach. Driven by the urgency of social and cultural reparations, it aims to reunite which has been shattered, or drift apart.

Kader Attia (b. 1970, France), grew up in Paris and in Algeria. Preceding his studies at the École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués Duperré and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and at Escola Massana, Centre d’Art i Disseny in Barcelona, he spent several years in Congo and in South America.

The experience with these different cultures, the histories of which over centuries have been characterised by rich trading traditions, colonialism and multi-ethnic societies, has fostered Kader Attia’s intercultural and interdisciplinary approach of research. For many years, he has been exploring the perspective that societies have on their history, especially as regards experiences of deprivation and suppression, violence and loss, and how this affects the evolving of nations and individuals—each of them being connected to collective memory.

His socio-cultural research has led Kader Attia to the notion of Repair, a concept he has been developing philosophically in his writings and symbolically in his oeuvre as a visual artist. With the principle of Repair being a constant in nature—thus also in humanity—, any system, social institution or cultural tradition can be considered as an infinite process of Repair, which is closely linked to loss and wounds, to recuperation and re-appropriation. Repair reaches far beyond the subject and connects the individual to gender, philosophy, science, and architecture, and also involves it in evolutionary processes in nature, culture, myth and history.

Attia's solo exhibition The Museum of Emotion at The Hayward Gallery, London recently closed. Upcoming 2019 exhibitions include a solo show opening in September at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and group shows at Rubin Museum of Art, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and The Phillips Collection.

Following a recently published text in e-flux journal issue 98 (March 2019), Tyler Coburn joins Contributing Editor Elvia Wilk to discuss the project Ergonomic Futures.

Tyler Coburn is an artist and writer based in New York. His most recent book, Richard Roe, was published by Sternberg Press in March 2019.

–Watch a performance delivered at e-flux in 2016 as part of Ergonomic Futures on e-flux Video & Film. 

–Read "Ergonomic Futures," published in e-flux journal issue 98 (March 2019).

Sanna Almajedi and Andreas Petrossiants speak with Lucie Vítková following her Satellite music series performance at Bar Laika.

Lucie Vítková is a composer, improviser, and performer (accordion, hichiriki, synthesizer, voice, and tap dance) from the Czech Republic. She recently organized a performance with OPERA Ensemble on climate change. For Satellite, Vítková performed two pieces, one from “Music Domestic,” and another from her “Post-Apocalyptic” series.

In 2017 Vítková was nominated to the Herb Alpert Awards in Arts in the category of Music, and was a resident artist at Roulette in 2018. She has put together two ensembles—the NYC Constellation Ensemble (focused on music behavior) and the OPERA Ensemble (for singing instrumentalists). During her 2017 Mentor/Protégé Residency in Tokyo, she studied hichiriki with Hitomi Nakamura and has been a member of the Columbia University Gagaku Ensemble. As an accordion player, she collaborated with the New York-based TAK Ensemble, S.E.M. ensemble, String Noise, Du.0, Argento Ensemble, CU Raaga, Ghost Ensemble, and Wet.

Satellite is a monthly experimental music series organized by Sanna Almajedi at Bar Laika by e-flux.

Music clips in order heard:

(1) Lucie Vítková, “Music Domestic” (excerpt). Released by Bánh Mì Verlag, 2017.

(2) Lucie Vítková, “Post-Apocalyptic Piece” with water, live performance (excerpt).

Tony Wood and Brian Kuan Wood discuss “Intrusions: Or, The Golden Age Is Not in Us” published in e-flux journal #98, March 2019. The text examines three science-fiction scenarios that for Tony illustrate three collapses of orders of magnitude or scale—Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, written in the US in the 1970s; Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, filmed in the USSR in the same decade; and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, published in the US in the 2010s.

Tony Wood lives in New York and writes about Latin America and Russia. He is the author of Russia without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War (2018), and is currently working on a PhD about the Latin American radical left in the 1920s and 1930s.

Sanna Almajedi speaks with C. Spencer Yeh following his Satellite music series performance at Bar Laika. 

C. Spencer Yeh is recognized for his interdisciplinary activities and collaborations as an artist, improviser, and composer, as well his music project Burning Star Core. Originally conceived in 1993 in Cincinnati, the project was known for its unique blend of musique concrète, ambient, drone, and psychedelic music. His recent solo albums Solo Voice I-X (2015) and The RCA Mark II (2018) were published by Primary Information. His video works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. Recent exhibitions and presentations of his work include Shocking Asia at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; Two Workaround Works Around Calder at the Whitney Museum, New York; Modern Mondays at MoMA, New York; and Tony Conrad Tribute at Atelier Nord/Ultima Festival, Oslo. 

Satellite is a monthly experimental music series organized by Sanna Almajedi at Bar Laika by e-flux.

Music clips in order heard:

(1) C. Spencer Yeh, "SOLO VOICE LIVE," from a performance of the album, December 2015 in Chicago at the Option series, Experimental Sound Studios.

(2) CS Yeh, "I Can Read Your Mind," from the album "Transitions" (on De Stijl label).

(3) Burning Star Core, "Benjamin," from the album "The Very Heart of the World."

Also mentioned: 

Spectacle Theatre, a collectively run screening space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA)'s exhibition, The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory and Belonging, is on view May 2–September 15, 2019 in New York.

Sanna Almajedi speaks with Keith Fullerton Whitman following his Satellite music series performance at Bar Laika. 

A composer and performer living in Brooklyn, Keith Fullerton Whitman is currently in the process of realizing geographically and thematically relevant live electronic music under the “Redactions” banner, as well as performing contemporary revisions of his classic “Generators” and “Playthroughs” frameworks. He recently performed at the GRM's Immersion festival in Paris, Documenta 14 in Athens, The Labyrinth in Niigata, MaerzMusik's The Long Now in Berlin, Semibreve in Braga, Send + Receive in Winnipeg, The Geometry of Now in Moscow, and the Don Buchla Memorial Concerts in San Francisco.

Satellite is a monthly experimental music series organized by Sanna Almajedi at Bar Laika by e-flux.

Artist Agnieszka Kurant and researcher Tobias Rees in conversation with e-flux journal Contributing Editor Elvia Wilk.

Agnieszka Kurant explores how complex social, economic and ecological systems can operate in ways that confuse distinctions between fiction and reality or nature and culture. Probing collective intelligence, surveillance capitalism, AI and the evolution of culture, labor and creativity, she investigates automation, crowdsourcing and data exploitation in the context of art production. Her works often behave like living organisms, self-organized complex systems or bachelor machines. Her past projects include a commission for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum (2015) and a solo exhibition at the Sculpture Center, New York (2013). In 2010 she co-represented Poland at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Her work was featured in exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Guggenheim Bilbao, Tate Modern, Witte de With, Moderna Museet, MUMOK, Bonner Kunstverein, The Kitchen, Frieze Projects and Performa Biennial. She is an artist in residence at MIT CAST and a fellow of the Smithsonian Institute and the Berggruen Institute.

Artist Agnieszka Kurant and researcher Tobias Rees in conversation with e-flux journal Contributing Editor Elvia Wilk.

Agnieszka Kurant explores how complex social, economic and ecological systems can operate in ways that confuse distinctions between fiction and reality or nature and culture. Probing collective intelligence, surveillance capitalism, AI and the evolution of culture, labor and creativity, she investigates automation, crowdsourcing and data exploitation in the context of art production. Her works often behave like living organisms, self-organized complex systems or bachelor machines. Her past projects include a commission for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum (2015) and a solo exhibition at the Sculpture Center, New York (2013). In 2010 she co-represented Poland at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Her work was featured in exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Guggenheim Bilbao, Tate Modern, Witte de With, Moderna Museet, MUMOK, Bonner Kunstverein, The Kitchen, Frieze Projects and Performa Biennial. She is an artist in residence at MIT CAST and a fellow of the Smithsonian Institute and the Berggruen Institute.

A conversation with Yesomi Umolu, Diedrich Diederichsen, and Anselm Franke on the occasion of Journeys with the initiated, on view at e-flux and Participant Inc through January 13, 2019. The exhibition features artists Malik Gaines, Evan Ifekoya, Grada Kilomba, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Virginia de Medeiros, and is curated by Yesomi Umolu with Katja Rivera.

Journeys with the initiated is part of the project Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology, initiated by Goethe-Institut and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin with the support of S. Fischer Stiftung and the S. Fischer Verlag, and led by artistic directors Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke. The project runs from 2017 to 2019 in collaboration with numerous partners in Lisbon, Salvador de Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, Dakar, and New York, with the final station culminating in Berlin in 2019.

Excerpt from Journeys with the initiated:

Between 1978 and 1980, queer German novelist, poet, and self-taught ethnographer Hubert Fichte traveled to New York to engage with a city that he perceived to be a center of Afro-diasporic culture and tradition. From the early 1970s and into the following decade, Fichte attempted to create a new ethnology that would run counter to an academic and colonial model. This effort coalesced in Fichte’s development of a diaristic form of ethnographic writing that accounted for his own subjectivity and embeddedness within a given context. Fichte’s novel Die Schwarze Stadt. Glossen, 1990 (The Black City: Glosses) features several sprawling long-form texts and interviews related to his encounters with artists, scholars, activists, spiritualists, everyday citizens, and queer communities in New York.

e-flux journal editors Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, and Kaye Cain-Nielsen discuss 10 years of e-flux journal.

Excerpt from the editorial of e-flux journal issue #95—WONDERFLUX: In November 2008, the editorial for issue #00 said:

Historically, more than any single institution, art publications have been primary sites for discourse surrounding the artistic field. And yet most recently, the discourse has seemingly moved elsewhere—away from the formal vocabulary used to explain art production, away from traditional art capitals, and away from the printed page. At times, new discursive practices even replace traditional forms of art production. Given the current climate of disciplinary reconfiguration and geographic dispersal, it has become apparent that the urgent task has now become to engage the new intellectual territories in a way that can revitalize the critical vocabulary of contemporary art. We see a fresh approach to the function of an art journal to be perhaps the most productive way of doing this. With this first, inaugural issue of e-flux journal, we begin something of an experiment in developing both a discursive space and a site for actual art production, in which writers, artists, and thinkers are invited to write on topics of their choosing.

Reading this again ten years on makes us feel grateful for all the brilliant contributors and readers who have shaped the journal over the years. e-flux journal #95 marks a full decade into this strange experiment in contemporary art publishing. For our tenth birthday, a small group of longtime contributors have written short texts, which artists have illustrated and set to graphic format. Since 2008, the authors included here have continued to shape varied concerns and urgencies into certain consistencies and overarching emergent issues.

We hope you’ll enjoy issue #95: WONDERFLUX. Stay tuned for events we’re organizing in 2019 to mark the start of the next decade of e-flux journal.

e-flux journal editors Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, and Kaye Cain-Nielsen discuss 10 years of e-flux journal.

Excerpt from the editorial of e-flux journal issue #95—WONDERFLUX: In November 2008, the editorial for issue #00 said:

Historically, more than any single institution, art publications have been primary sites for discourse surrounding the artistic field. And yet most recently, the discourse has seemingly moved elsewhere—away from the formal vocabulary used to explain art production, away from traditional art capitals, and away from the printed page. At times, new discursive practices even replace traditional forms of art production. Given the current climate of disciplinary reconfiguration and geographic dispersal, it has become apparent that the urgent task has now become to engage the new intellectual territories in a way that can revitalize the critical vocabulary of contemporary art. We see a fresh approach to the function of an art journal to be perhaps the most productive way of doing this. With this first, inaugural issue of e-flux journal, we begin something of an experiment in developing both a discursive space and a site for actual art production, in which writers, artists, and thinkers are invited to write on topics of their choosing.

Reading this again ten years on makes us feel grateful for all the brilliant contributors and readers who have shaped the journal over the years. e-flux journal #95 marks a full decade into this strange experiment in contemporary art publishing. For our tenth birthday, a small group of longtime contributors have written short texts, which artists have illustrated and set to graphic format. Since 2008, the authors included here have continued to shape varied concerns and urgencies into certain consistencies and overarching emergent issues.

We hope you’ll enjoy issue #95: WONDERFLUX. Stay tuned for events we’re organizing in 2019 to mark the start of the next decade of e-flux journal.

Recorded after the publication of e-flux journal issue 81 in April 2017, Xin Wang reads and discusses her text “Asian Futurism and the Non-Other” with Stephen Squibb.

Xin Wang is a curator and art historian based in New York. She recently participated in e-flux journal’s feminism(s) double issue launch with Martha Rosler, McKenzie Wark, and Elvia Wilk. Past curatorial projects include Lu Yang: Arcade (2014, New York), THE BANK SHOW: Vive le Capital and THE BANK SHOW: Hito Steyerl (2015, Shanghai), chin(A)frica: an interface (2017, New York), and Life and Dreams: Photography and Media Art in China since the 1990s (2018, Ulm, Germany). Wang is currently building a discursive archive of Asian Futurisms at afuturism.tumblr.com, and is a PhD candidate in modern and contemporary art at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.

Read “Asian Futurism and the Non-Other”: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/81/126662/asian-futurism-and-the-non-other/

In this week's episode of the e-flux podcast, Brian Kuan Wood reads his piece, "The Story of Peter Green Peter Chang," published in February, 2017 as part of e-flux Architecture's Superhumanity project at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial.

Brian Kuan Wood is a writer and an editor of e-flux journal.

Following a symposium titled Technology is History, in association with the exhibition One Hand Clapping at the Guggenheim, curator Xiaoyu Weng and Brian Kuan Wood join Yuk Hui to discuss his work.

The conversation was followed by a talk by Yuk Hui at e-flux titled “What Begins After the End of Enlightenment?”

Text mentioned in the conversation: 30 Years after Les Immatériaux - Art, Science and Theory. 

Yuk Hui is a philosopher based in Berlin. He is the author of three monographs: On the Existence of Digital Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2016), and Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman and Littlefield International, Spring 2019). Read Yuk Hui in e-flux journal here.

Xiaoyu Weng is The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art at the Guggenheim.  

Brian Kuan Wood is a founding editor of e-flux journal.

Simone White and Judah Rubin discuss White’s recent text, “or, on being the other woman,” published in e-flux journal issue #92 on feminisms. The conversation followed a recent duo lecture at e-flux with Mirene Arsanios and Simone White.

Simone White's most recent book is Dear Angel of Death, published in spring 2018. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Judah Rubin is a poet living in Queens. He is the former Monday night coordinator at the Poetry Project and is currently working on texts concerning necropolitics, corruption, and all-you-can-eat buffets.

Julieta Aranda and Liam Gillick join Lawrence Weiner in his New York studio for a conversation spanning art education and cosmetic dentistry.

Julieta Aranda is an artist and Editor of e-flux journal. 

Liam Gillick is an artist living in New York. Read Liam Gillick in e-flux journal.

Lawrence Weiner is an artist born in 1942 in New York, NY, where he lives and works today.

Mary Walling Blackburn discusses her text, "Sticky Notes, 1-3," published in e-flux journal #92—"on feminisms" (Summer 2018), with editor-in-chief Kaye Cain-Nielsen.

"The video editing suite sat directly across from 1607 Broadway. My mother’s boyfriend was editing a sequence of two figures fighting with long sticks. They were aiming for one another’s heads. Each man, in turn, carefully swung his fragile skull away from a baton, and then a baton toward another fragile skull swinging away. To the right of the screen was a window. From a certain low angle, at a standing vantage point several feet from the sill, the video sequence and a spectacular outside the glass read as an operative split screen." Excerpt from "Sticky Notes, 1-3"

*Note from Mary: I should be very clear that when referring to dignity I am speaking about "white dignity"; I am trying to communicate that white dignity is bunk and wealthy dignity is bunk. Moreover, when I state that I don't know why 'anyone gets to keep their things with our status'...anyone, again means myself (who qualifies as the privileged poor) and those who operate in wealth within this amplified structure of riches.

Mary Walling Blackburn was born in Orange, California. Walling Blackburn's artistic work engages a wide spectrum of materials that probe and intensify the historic, ecological, and class-born brutalities of North American life. Recent publications include Quaestiones Perversas (Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, 2017), co-written with Beatriz E. Balanta; "Gina and the Stars," published by Tamawuj, an off-site publishing platform for the Sharjah Biennial 13; and "Slowness," a performance text in the sound-based web publication Ear│ Wave│Event. 

Mirene Arsanios discusses her text, "E Autobiography di un Idioma," published in e-flux journal #92—"on feminisms" (Summer 2018). In conversation with editor-in-chief Kaye Cain-Nielsen.

"I would have liked to come to you (abo) with something more reliable, like documents (akto), but I’m an oral language (idioma)—an Afro-Portuguese proto-creole developed on the western coast (kosta) of Africa and brought over to the Caribbean in the seventeen century. That’s one of the theories of my genesis. There are others (otronan). Dutch and Spanish tagged along at later stages, with a few Arawak words (palabranan). Initially, slave traders and slaves used me to 'communicate'; then I was just used (merka). The only document in my possession says I was born on the island of Curaçao, north of the Venezuelan shore. Linguists struggle to match my identity to a location. Words travel and land in places (luganan) that do not match their jurisdiction (a nation (nashon)-state)."—Mirene Arsanios, "E Autobiography di un Idioma" 

Other works mentioned:—Iman Mersal, الصوت في غير مكانه (The Displaced Voice); trans. Lisa White (New York: Belladonna* Collaborative, chaplet #232, 2018). Excerpt read by Belladonna editor Ana Paula.—Iman Mersal, "عن الأمومة والعنف، إيمان مرسال (On Motherhood and Violence)," trans. Anna Ziajka Stanton, Makhzin issue #2—FEMINISMS (Daisy Atterbury, Tarek El-Ariss and Mirene Arsanios, editors)—Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Macmillan, 1996).

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection The City Outside the Sentence (2015). She has contributed essays and short stories to Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Animated Reader, and The Outpost, among others. Arsanios cofounded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. On Friday nights, you can find her at the Poetry Project in New York, where she coordinates the Friday Night reading series with Rachel Valinsky.

Eva Díaz discusses her essay "We Are All Aliens" published in e-flux journal issue 91 (May 2018) with contributing editor Elvia Wilk.

"For some, contemporary art has become a kind of alt-science platform for research and development projects that offer alternatives to the corporate control and surveillance of outer space. Artists working on issues about access to space are at the front line of a critical investigation about the contours of the future, both in its material form and social organization. Many of these artists are challenging the current expansion of capitalist and colonial practices into outer space, particularly that of so-called 'primitive' accumulation: the taking of land and resources for private use. They recognize that much of the tremendous capital amassed in the early 2000s e-commerce and tech boom is now being funneled into astronomically costly 'New Space' projects such as SpaceX, a company funded by PayPal cofounder Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, the space enterprise of Amazon's Jeff Bezos."

–Excerpt from "We Are All Aliens"

Eva Díaz has taught at the Pratt Institute in New York since 2009. Her book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College was released in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press. She is currently at work on a new book titled After Spaceship Earth, analyzing the influence of R. Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art.

Journalist and author Masha Gessen discusses ways of surviving an autocracy. Rule #1? Believe the autocrat.

For this week’s episode of the e-flux podcast, we are featuring Masha Gessen’s lecture, "How We Survive an Autocracy," originally given on May 24, 2017 as part of an ongoing e-flux lectures series dedicated to discovering the protocols of twenty-first century truth, assuming that these still exist.

Launched in February 2017, most e-flux lectures are live streamed on e-flux.com/live and archived at e-flux.com/video.

Masha Gessen is a journalist and author, whose most recent book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Gessen is also the author of the national bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012). Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Elvia Wilk and Rachel Ichniowski discuss issues of power abuse in the artworld. The conversation references Elvia’s recent essays "The Grammar of Work" and "No More Excuses," both published by frieze.

Elvia Wilk is a writer and contributing editor to e-flux journal. You can read another essay published in April 2018, "Is Ornamenting Solar Panels a Crime?" in e-flux Architecture’s initiative Positions.

Rachel Ichniowski is Senior Manager, Digital Projects and Strategy at e-flux.

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) on the occasion of the launch of their book The Empire Remains Shop at e-flux. In conversation with e-flux journal Art Director and artist Mariana Silva.

"Empire shops" were first developed in London in the 1920s to teach the British to consume foodstuffs from the colonies and overseas territories. Although none of the stores ever opened, they were intended to make previously unfamiliar produce and products—sultanas from Australia, oranges from Palestine, cloves from Zanzibar, and rum from Jamaica—available in the British Isles. The Empire Remains Shop speculates on the possibility and implications of selling the remains of the British Empire in London today.

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners based out of London. It was born to explore the systems that organize the WORLD through FOOD. Using installation, performance, mapping, and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture, and geopolitics. Cooking Sections was part of the exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Their work has also been exhibited at Performa17; 13th Sharjah Biennial; Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin; Storefront for Art & Architecture New York; dOCUMENTA(13); CA2M, Madrid; The New Institute, Rotterdam; UTS, Sydney; HKW Berlin; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; among others, and have been residents in The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London, and Headlands Center for the Arts. The duo were part of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale and 2016 Brussels ParckDesign. Their work has been featured in a number of international publications (Lars Müller, Sternberg Press, Volume, and Frieze Magazine). The Empire Remains Shop is published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City–Columbia University Press. They currently lead a studio unit at the RCA, London.

David Kim and Yazan Khalili discuss Yazan's video, Hiding Our Faces Like a Dancing Wind, currently on view in the exhibition Being: New Photography 2018 at MoMA through August 19, 2018.

"How do we disappear in the digital age? This is a project that works with the facial recognition technologies in smart devices and its historical background in the colonial practices."

A segment of the video can be watched on Yazan's website.

You can find an additional conversation on the impossible legality of an artwork between David Kim, Yazan Khalili, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Jonathan Beller, and Vivian Ziherl in e-flux journal #90.

David Kim is a graduate of Yale Law School, at which he was the curator of JUNCTURE: Explorations in Art and Human Rights, an initiative sponsored by the Schell Center for International Human Rights. Kim is currently a principal at the management consultancy Incandescent. He also collaborates with curators and artists on projects in connection with property, contracts, finance, and human rights.

Yazan Khalili lives and works in and out of Palestine. He is an architect, visual artist, and a cultural activist. Khalili has woven together parallel stories over the years, forming both questions and paradoxes concerning scenery and the act of gazing, all of which are refracted through the prism of intimate politics and alienating poetics. He is the director of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah.

Artist Keren Cytter discusses past and future projects on the occasion of the premiere of her film Middle of Beyond at e-flux. In conversation with Josh Altman. 

Middle of Beyond blends fiction, news clips, and animation recounting ten days in the life of Malte Krumm, a month after the latest US elections. The film depicts the numbness of a world flooded by information and social media activity, where the borders between reality and illusion are crumbling and narcissism and self-promotion overshadow moral values. Based on a true story. 

Dena Yago discusses her essay "Content Industrial Complex," published in e-flux journal issue 89 (March 2018), with editor-in-chief Kaye Cain-Nielsen. "What is an artist to do? With an understanding of how our content, identities, and influence are valuable to and instrumentalized by brands and marketers, we can find space for resistance and refusal, or we can actively engage with existing models in an effort to ameliorate them." Dena Yago is an artist who was born in 1988. She has had numerous gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and at Bodega in New York.

Artists and filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh and Adam Khalil in conversation. 

Peggy Ahwesh is an American experimental filmmaker and video artist. She has produced a range of work since the 1980s challenging traditional forms of film and video, and investigating cultural identity and the role of the subject. Ahwesh's work has been the subject of several museum retrospectives and is screened worldwide, including at e-flux in 2015 as part of Corruption: Everybody Knows… curated by Natasha Ginwala. She has been a professor of Film & Electronic Arts at Bard College since 1990.

More information: Vimeo / EAI catalogue / overview of work by John David Rhodes (2003)

Adam Shingwak Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist. His practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of ethnography through humor, relation, and transgression. Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil’s film INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place/it flies. falls./] (2016) re-imagines an ancient Ojibway story, the Seven Fires Prophecy, which both predates and predicts first contact with Europeans. It was shown at e-flux on Wednesday, September 21, 2016. A trailer for the feature film co-directed with Bayley James Sweitzer Empty Metal will be out soon.

More information: INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place./it flies. falls./] / The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets co-directed with Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys  

Zach Blas in conversation with Laurel Ptak, Art in General's Executive Director & Curator, on the occasion of Blas's exhibition Contra-Internet at Art in General and his lecture-performance Metric Mysticism at e-flux.

Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice confronts technologies of capture, security, and control. Currently, he is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His recent works respond to biometric governmentality and network hegemony.

Read more about the exhibition, on view through April 21, 2018, at artingeneral.org

Read Zach Blas' essay in e-flux journal #74 (June 2016): "Contra-Internet"

e-flux founder, journal editor, and artist Anton Vidokle discusses cosmism with Kaye Cain-Nielsen, editor-in-chief of e-flux journal.

You can read more on cosmism in the 88th issue of e-flux journal (February 2018). Featuring texts by Robert Bird, Maria Chehonadskih, Keti Chukhrov, Boris Groys, Trevor Paglen, Alexei Penzin, Marina Simakova, Arseny Zhilyaev, and a Timeline of Russian Cosmism compiled by Anastasia Gacheva, Arseny Zhilyaev, and Anton Vidokle. 

Elizabeth A. Povinelli discusses four axioms of critical theory in response to her presentation, "Toxic Assets the the Extimacy of Existence," from Frontier Imaginaries Ed.No3 at e-flux. In conversation with journal editor Stephen Squibb.

Read Elizabeth A. Povinelli in e-flux journal:

"Geontologies: The Concept and Its Territories" from issue 81, April 2017

"Geontologies: The Figures and the Tactics" from issue 78, December 2016

Vivian Ziherl discusses her curatorial platform Frontier Imaginaries on the occasion of TOXIC ASSETS: Frontier Imaginaries Ed.No3 at e-flux, Columbia University, and UnionDocs in October 2017. In conversation with journal editor Brian Kuan Wood.

Watch day one of TOXIC ASSETS on e-flux film & video

Read Vivian Ziherl's essay "The Fourfold Articulation" in e-flux journal #81, April 2017

McKenzie Wark on her essay, "My Collectible Ass," published in the 85th issue of e-flux journal, October 2017. In conversation with journal editor Stephen Squibb.