e-flux Notes
From the politics of culture to the cultural dimension of politics, this January e-flux Notes returned with a steady rhythm of essays, raising questions about resisting managerialism in the arts, a filmmaker’s radical anti-careerism, and how to liberate our cybernetically captured attention, while proposing strategies to support endangered cultural initiatives and bearing witness to the vital persistence of revolt.
In “The Fifth Estate: On Museums, Public Imagination, and the Vanishing Space for Collectivity (A Report from Flanders, Belgium),” Philippe Pirotte and Els Silvrants-Barclay examine the politics behind the planned demotion of the Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA) in Antwerp to an art center and the transfer of its collection, and advocate for a renewed commitment to pubic institutions. “Machinic Attention and Its Adversaries: A Manifesto,” by the Friends of Attention coalition, calls for a radical revaluation of the notion of attention, against the mechanistic and cybernetic research paradigm that has dominated it. And Emiliano Battista examines the oft-repeated imbrication of theory and artistic practice, making a plea for more specific, case-oriented investigations, in “Art and Theory: What Relationship?”
In Film Notes: Greg de Cuir Jr.’s essay examines the politics and aesthetics of films by artist duos, reframing relationality through collective labor, coauthorship, and the ethics of making films together. Abbas Kiarostami’s text proposes a cinema of openness, where narrative gaps invite the audience to complete the film through individual interpretation rather than passive consumption. In an interview, Alexandre Koberidze reflects on Dry Leaf, his stunning phone-shot film from last year, focusing on intuitive aesthetics, trust in the spectator, and the potential of material limits. A 1979 conversation between Richard Serra and Annette Michelson traces Serra’s early engagement with film and video, emphasizing his rejection of sculptural analogies and his pursuit of filmmaking as a medium for structural and perceptual inquiry.
Shot and killed by ICE in Minneapolis, we republished Renée Nicole Macklin Good’s poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.” In “Rojava Revisited: A Call for Support,” Zehra Doğan and Duygu Örs report on the escalating political situation, and provide different resources and strategies to support cultural institutions connected to the Rojava Revolution. And, in light of the mass protests and their violent repression in Iran, we republished Nahal Nikan’s “To Summon Life in a Cemetery,” from 2024, on “the life-affirming, death-defying nature of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.”
To commemorate the passing of Béla Tarr on January 6, Lukas Brasiskis pens a beautiful tribute to Tarr’s “art of refusal,” including his refusal of the label “director”: “Tarr affirmed a belief that cinema, and by extension any art, can teach us how to reclaim and respect our lived time and search for meaning within it, not beyond it.”
—The Editors
