e-flux Notes will follow a summer schedule through August, publishing one new essay each week. We’ll return to our regular rhythm of three texts per week in September.
We begin our roundup of summer readings with a conversation between Kinoki and the curators of the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale—Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis—on their curatorial concept of “exhibition as séance.” The interview explores how spiritual technologies, the moving image, and architectural design converge to create an immersive format “attuned to a different logic.”
From Brussels, Mathilde Villeneuve reports from the AFIELD Forum on “Transitional Justice”: “Over three intense days, I found myself immersed in multiple realities, each reflecting a different form of violence, resistance, and repair. What united them was the commitment to long-term engagement, to building new forms of collective life.”
In “Apocalypse Then,” Minh Nguyen reflects on Rithy Panh’s latest film, which reimagines Western journalists’ first meeting with the Khmer Rouge. Through Panh’s cinematic language of absence and repetition, the essay explores memory, trauma, and political witnessing.
We also republished Boris Groys’s 2017 essay “Towards a New Universalism,” a prescient meditation on internationalism, the politics of exclusion, and art’s role in global protest—perhaps more urgent today than when first published.
In the summer 2025 issues of e-flux Film Notes, filmmaker Raúl Ruiz and philosopher Jean-Louis Schefer explore cinema’s relationship to memory, dreams, and the metaphysics of perception through a series of imagined dialogues in “Image, Death, Memory.” In “The Sun Is Burning the Unspoken,” artists Joyce Joumaa and Danae Io, joined by curator Ariana Kalliga, discuss how solar imagery and the ongoing energy crises in Lebanon and Greece inform the conceptual scope of their films. Korean artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, in her poetic text “Diseuse,” reflects on the pain and difficulty of linguistic expression, offering resonances with her video practice. In “The Pleasures of Existence,” a 1973 interview with Aline Desjardins, Agnès Varda reflects on feminist consciousness and her rejection of narrative convention in favor of openness and creative freedom.
Artists Viktor Timofeev and Ericka Beckman engage in a dialogue on the role of the moving image in Timofeev’s practice, examining the abstraction of language systems and the philosophical questions posed by interactions between artificial and human agents. Filmmaker Ben Rivers and writer Mark von Schlegell present the full screenplay of their 2016 film Urth, a speculative narrative intertwining ecological and existential themes. And in her classic 1928 text “Visual and Anti-Visual Films,” Germaine Dulac passionately argues that cinema, as a fundamentally visual medium, should derive its expressive power from optical harmonies, rhythms, and movement—not borrowed literary structures.
Elsewhere, Konstantin Akinsha critiques “Kazimir Malevich: Outliving History” at Romania’s National Museum of Contemporary Art, exposing errors and historical distortions in its attempt to “revise” Malevich’s reception. Meanwhile, Thomas Waller reviews Jaleh Mansoor’s Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction, writing that the book “shows how artworks unmask the classed and gendered aspects of [our] topsy-turvy world in ways that other cultural objects cannot.”
In “Spa Noir,” Isabel Jacobs takes us to the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where Divia documents environmental devastation tied to war in Ukraine, and Better Go Mad in the Wild conjures a surreal, tragicomic Czech-Slovak fairy tale. In Kyiv, Sonya Vseliubska reports from the 22nd Docudays Human Rights Film Festival, analyzing how Ukrainian cinema’s “observational approach” counters both Russian propaganda and the image logic of social media.
Alenka Zupančič examines how the far right manipulates crisis and paranoia in “Paranoiac Power,” dissecting the fear of emasculation at the root of Trumpian fantasies of control. In a sharp interview, Giulia Sbaffi and Andreas Petrossiants speak with Italian feminist Leopoldina Fortunati about her landmark 1981 book The Arcana of Reproduction, reconnecting struggles of the 1970s with today’s feminist and anti-capitalist movements.
In response to the suspension of the Whitney Independent Study Program following the censorship of a performance on Palestinian resistance, we published statements from alumni, faculty, and friends calling for the reinstatement of Sara Nadal-Melsió and the reopening of the program. And in a searing essay entitled “Beneath the Howl of Hunger,” Alaa Alqaisi writes from Gaza under siege: “We sang, even with broken teeth. We prayed from fractured knees … We named the hunger. We bore it. We endured. Let that remain.”
Finally, three theoretical interventions reconceive what critical thought is and what it might be capable of today: Frank Ruda’s two-part “Scenes from a Conceptual History of Courage” outlines a renewal of the concept of courage in times of general disorientation. In “Power to the Symptoms!” Pietro Bianchi explains what’s at stake in listening to symptoms, in both psychoanalysis and Marxism. And Aaron Schuster’s “How to Research Like a Dog” offers the inquisitive canine from Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” as an inspiration for philosophical thought and research.
Wishing you a thoughtful, restorative August.
—e-flux Notes Editors
