A Radical Vision of Freedom

Sunaina Maira

2015 was the tenth anniversary of the official launching of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement by Palestinian civil society organizations, including over 170 political parties, activist organizations, trade unions, women’s groups, and other segments of the Palestinian national movement, … Continue reading “A Radical Vision of Freedom”

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An Anti-Racist Movement

Robin D. G. Kelley

The summer of 2014 was a crucial historical conjuncture in which Palestinian-Black solidarity both deepened and became more complex, as Angela Davis’s latest book, Freedom is a Constant Struggle (2015) was absolutely right to identify. The killings of Eric Garner, … Continue reading “An Anti-Racist Movement”

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Earth Seeing

Emily Eliza Scott

  Among the most widely circulated photographs of all time is one snapped by astronauts aboard the Apollo 17 spacecraft, just hours after its launch toward the moon, in December 1972. This image, often referred to as the “Blue Marble,” … Continue reading “Earth Seeing”

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Decolonizing Nature: Making the World Matter

T. J. Demos

World of Matter defines a cutting-edge mode of collective artistic and interdisciplinary research, mediated through constellations of texts, images, and videos, which shares the imperative to explore how the world matters — how it enters into both materialization and conflicted forms of valuation.

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Metachemistry

Ursula Biemann

Many of my video essays have elaborated the convergence of the movement of people, resources, and capital in a globalized world, building the video material into complex human geographies. Deep Weather (2013), by exploring the ecologies of oil and water, … Continue reading “Metachemistry”

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The Artist as Coauthor

Siebren de Haan and Lonnie van Brummelen

  In the essay “The Author as Producer,” which was written as a speech but never delivered to an actual audience, Walter Benjamin distinguishes two types of authors: the writer who informs, and the “operative writer.” Both are engaged in the … Continue reading “The Artist as Coauthor”

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Of Seed and Land

Uwe H. Martin

o “Cotton is in our clothes, in banknotes, cattle feed, gauze, toothpaste, and film rolls. All the while, cotton is traded more unfairly than any other commodity, and its reputation as a natural product is easily exposed as an illusion: cotton uses up more pesticides than any other plant, devastates entire regions such as the Aral Sea due to its excessive thirst, acts as the Trojan horse of genetic engineering, and drives the global industrialization of agriculture.”

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