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Editorial:
Dear readers, think of reading as a chance to ponder how language, when it moves past the compulsive binaries that violence imposes upon it, can hold multiverses together. “Language,” “otherness,” “hope,” “desire,” and “exile” are recursive words in this issue.
Survey: Lin May Saeed
A Thousand Other Worlds Exist
Fahim Amir, Melanie Bujok, Lorenzo Giusti, and Jochen Lempert, in conversation, discuss Lin May Saeed’s (1973–2023) vision of a serene interspecies community where every being is equal in rights and freedoms. In Saeed’s fables, creatures shift the narrative toward different planes of existence, encouraging us to consider a possible zoomorphization of human animals.
How Do You Live?
In her essay, Laura McLean-Ferris describes the ways in which Lin May Saeed persistently explored how animality is so often intertwined with concepts of otherness, providing a space for dialogue about empathy and coexistence.
Fiction: Chuquicamata
“At 7 am, the shuttle bus let her and a dozen miners off at the entrance hall marked ‘For Men Only.’ Reading the sign, she felt like an extranjera. An exile returnee. An alien with no return address.” An excerpt from Macarena Gómez-Barris’s upcoming novel Atacama.
Opinion: Addicted to Innocence
Following up on her previous column, Chus Martínez unpacks the rapid transformation of art’s systems, as well as our moods and responses thereto, reflecting on the importance of reintroducing traits like spontaneity and “childness” into our practices and languages.
Monograph: Suggestures
Olamiju Fajemisin examines Simnikiwe Buhlungu’s concept of the “suggesture” as indicative of a moment of attentional focus capable of eclipsing the violence of conventional systems of representation. She finds in Buhlungu’s sculptural, textual, and sonic suggestures that the absence of the artist does not impede the production or dissemination of knowledge.
Thinkers: On Frantz Fanon and the Manichean World
Historian Samia Henni analyzes the enduring arguments of one of the most influential anti-imperialist activists and thinkers of the twentieth century, Frantz Fanon, who theorized and treated the psychological agony of colonial rule.
Criticism: The Women Who Helped Me
Thinking through the radical physicality of Trisha Donnelly’s photographs, poet Simone White asks what it means to make work that breaks with archival intelligibility, closing the cycle of the yearlong criticism column edited by Kerstin Stakemeier.
Curators: On Natasha Ginwala’s Communal Horizons
Building on a recent conversation in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Anna Arabindan-Kesson examines Natasha Ginwala’s polyvalent and navigational curatorial practice.
Reprint: “Prologue That Feels Like a Novel” from The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) by Macedonio Fernández
Artist Dora García pens an intimate annotation of Argentinian avant-garde writer Macedonio Fernández’s revolutionary text Museo de la Novela de la Eterna (1967): “Macedonio understood the novel—or, rather, the Novel, as the book itself is regarded as a character—as a dwelling (museum, estancia) where characters live together.”
Monograph: We Can Refuse to Abdicate in a Number of Ways
Claire Fontaine, in conversation with Marina Vishmidt, considers how we’re witnessing a strike against humanity and the rest of the living world—a permanent lockout of reality pursued by capital, the state, and too many individuals.
Monograph: They Listen
Eva Barois De Caevel looks at the intuitive, collaborative methods that guide multidisciplinary artist Vir Andres Hera as they navigate displacement and trans-temporality within their films.
Visual: Milk, 2024
“‘Milk’ as a noun suggests fertility and nourishment, while as a verb, it denotes an activity with negative connotations—as in, milking, sucking, exploiting someone. I love words with double meanings.”A visual essay by Gina Folly, featuring an interview between the artist and Anna Goetz.
Tidbits: Xavier Robles de Medina by Gabriela Acha; Monia Ben Hamouda by Emanuele Guidi; Lenio Kaklea by Jennifer Teets; Cihad Caner by Edwin Nasr; Joyce Joumaa by Minh Nguyen; Mila Panić by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu; Latai Taumoepeau by Lara Stevens.