Issue 160

It would have been great if the Cold War had actually been cold. But instead of any mutually assured destruction of world powers, conflicts were simply outsourced to searing hot proxy wars, many of which still burn today. In a deeply researched piece in this issue, artist Charles Stankievech notes that the great-power thaw of the Cold War also coincided with a more general radiating logic of war in all directions, to be found in the warming of the earth’s atmosphere and a growing awareness of climate crisis. Stankievech’s essay “Warm War” crystallizes the ambient and general environment of militarization as the weaponization of the environment itself. But how to master such awesome thermodynamic contingencies as weather and the atmosphere if not by the predictive powers of computing platforms—which consume such vast resources that they might be analyzing the heat that they themselves generate?

Also in this issue, Bogna Konior asks whether synthetic images can reveal something about war that photography no longer can. Examining artist Alexey Yurenev’s Silent Hero, which uses AI to generate composite images from WWII photographs, Konior considers how they reveal a different kind of truth about the distorted trauma of war and how violence resists coherent perception.

Silvia Federici shares her memories about the postwar years in Italy and her radicalization, as she worked to build internationalist feminist movements. Though she is perhaps best known as a key contributor to postwar Italian feminist theory, she left Italy for the US in 1967. In a conversation with Andreas Petrossiants, Federici shares her impressions of wartime and postwar struggle in Italy from her unique perspective. 

For the last installment of the After Okwui series, Patrick Flores also draws connections across borders by revisiting Enwezor’s concept of the postcolonial “constellation,” supplementing it with related concepts of his own: “concatenation” (links in a chain) and “effervescence” (vitality). Drawing from Southeast Asian artist-curators such as David Medalla, Jim Supangkat, and Redza Piyadasa, Flores examines how their practices build on Enwezor’s methodology of expanding dominant curatorial models through creative social experimentation.

Noting the fraught interpretations of the notion of accountability, Josephine Berry offers responsibility as a framework for thinking about social movements and ecological struggle. While “accountability’s logic is also one of immunization,” responsibility “offers a more informal, yet essential, way of maintaining communal relations.” Berry inquires into how we might conceive of a collective, nonpunitive, and solidaristic notion of planetary responsibility. 

The philosopher Vilém Flusser pushed back against the notion that Brazil suffers from historical “delay”; Brazilians, he argued, think outside of linear concepts of historical development entirely. Common readings of underdevelopment mistakenly assert that Brazil must “catch up” to Europe, which promotes mimicry rather than genuine culture. This issue features a chapter from Flusser’s Fenomenologia do Brasileiro: Em Busca de Um Novo Homem (Phenomenology of the Brazilian: In search of a new man), translated into English for the first time by Rômulo Moraes. In an accompanying essay, Moraes argues that Flusser’s early writings are essential for understanding his “phenomenology of underdevelopment,” and how his theories of nonlinear history tie into his works on cultures of radical synthesis in Brazil.

—Editors

Andreas Petrossiants—Looking Back with Silvia Federici: A Conversation
I think that the source of my radicalization was the stories told in my family. Even though we weren’t a leftist family, hearing all their stories was nonetheless radicalizing. My parents talked a lot about the war and about fascism. My father was a classical liberal, but he hated the Fascists. So even as a child, I could tell that something was wrong in the world. My mother would recount all the times that we could have been killed, that my father could have been killed.

Charles Stankievech—Warm War
While weather modeling was historically an observational practice, the computational acceleration in meteorology driven by military imperatives marked a shift from understanding the atmosphere to actively intervening in it. We do not create models only to measure the world, but also to modify the world. This trajectory has only intensified as we now confront an environmental crisis born of human activity, which is met with an urgent desire to repair and reengineer the atmosphere. 

Bogna Konior—War in the Age of Infinite Evidence: On AI-Generated War Photography
On social media, new evidence of war crimes unfolds in a manner both casual and horrific, among adverts, spam, pornography, memes, and cute pet videos. Online, at a speed that prohibits us from fully understanding what we are seeing, posts about someone’s latest career achievements and personal joys appear on our screens interchangeably with someone else live-streaming their own death. Whole channels, fora, and group chats are devoted exclusively to circulating war materials, with graphic footage accessible openly and daily.

Josephine Berry—Planetary Aesthesis, Not Animal Citizens
If self-instituted or even abolitionist forms of accountability refer solely to the free will of the human being, how then do we account for the communal being or contingent and ecological dependencies of individuals, or rather “dividuals” (per Deleuze), in such a moral accountancy? How do we square this logic with an ecological one?

Patrick Flores—Besides Constellation: Concatenation and Effervescence
The hyphenated personage of the artist-curator seeks to overcome the binarism of the artist and the curator, instead redistributing the talents of the artist and the curator across each other. In a context in which the artist and the curator have become polytropic, where art is being shaped by a vast matrix of sensible species (persons, things, spirits), and the curatorial has radically complexified beyond the custodianship and display of precious objects, the contradictions arising from creative choices can no longer be reduced to either the artist or the curator.

Vilém Flusser—Delays
The migrant who visits this supposedly baroque city, especially if he is a native of a European baroque city, is tempted to laugh again, because the touching naivety of Minas Gerais contrasts violently with the refined illusionist technique of the baroque. But the laughter subsides into admiration as soon as the migrant frees himself from the label of the baroque. Because then he discovers an unparalleled phenomenon, in which elements of Portuguese, Oriental (Hindu and Chinese), and Black cultures manage to form a synthesis in which it is possible to discover the germination of a new human type.

Rômulo Moraes—On Vilém Flusser’s Phenomenology of Underdevelopment
For Flusser, the future is destined for creolization, since globalization is for him the creolization of everything, a series of encounters, clashes, and adaptations between people. In this regard, creolized cultures like Brazil are ontologically futural. They anticipate future social and cultural practices because their very core, their foundation, lies in those practices.