Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

Franco Berardi Bifo

So how can semiotic labor be valued if its products are immaterial? How can the relationship between work and salary be determined? How can we measure value in terms of time if the productivity of cognitive work (creative, affective, linguistic) cannot be quantified and standardized?

Hito Steyerl

An occupation keeps people busy instead of giving them paid labor. An occupation is not hinged on any result; it has no necessary conclusion. As such, it knows no traditional alienation, nor any corresponding idea of subjectivity. An occupation doesn't necessarily assume remuneration either, since the process is thought to contain its own gratification. It has no temporal framework except the passing of time itself.


Claire Tancons

While some commentators and journalists have dismissed Occupy Wall Street as carnival, lawmakers and police officers did not miss the point. They reached back to a mid-nineteenth century ban on masking to arrest occupiers wearing as little as a folded bandana on the forehead, leaving little doubt about their fear of Carnival as a potent form of political protest.

Grant Kester

During periods of political repression, the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and between private and public expression, undergoes both erosion and reconsolidation.

Paul Chan

By using the compositional struggle between what the artist wants and what the material is willing to be as the basis and principle for aesthetic development, art begins to follow another way. Over time, this internal tension transforms both the artist in mind and the matter at hand; it pushes and pulls the work toward becoming something neither fully intentional nor completely accidental. And yet by ending up being what it isn’t supposed to be, a work becomes something more.

Jalal Toufic

To be fully alive and then die physically, a state most people mistakenly view as being ours in general, a given, is actually an exceptional state. What would it take to achieve what we assume our condition to be?

Sotirios Bahtsetzis

The avant-garde is not something that occurred once, but something that must always be repeated, precisely because it has been incorporated into the forgetfulness of historicizing culture and its ideology of progress. In this regard, the very notion of repetition, or even “re-volutio” understood as the circular temporal movement enacted by a self-repeating gesture, is inherent to the avant-garde.