This month’s e-flux Notes returns to leftist histories as unresolved terrain. From feminist revolt in Iran and anti-colonial struggle in Ethiopia, to contemporary forms of infrastructural critique, these texts trace how political conflict persists in the present. This includes a piece by Kerstin Stakemeier on Henrike Naumann, whose work stages fascism not as past but as something embedded in everyday domestic space.
Niloufar Nematollahi revisits International Women’s Day in Iran in 1979, which sparked a six-day nationwide protest where “thousands of women marched through the streets of Tehran and other major Iranian cities.” Pietro Bianchi reviews Haile Gerima’s expansive film Black Lions—Roman Wolves: The Children of Adwa, about Ethiopian resistance to colonialism during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Bianchi argues that the film “stands as the culmination—and perhaps the summa—of a decades-long body of work that has placed the deconstruction of the colonial gaze at the center of its aesthetic project.” Alexi Kukuljevic writes about the multivolume booklet series Diversity of Aesthetics, bringing its examination of art and social struggle into dialogue with Marina Vishmidt’s infrastructural critique and John Berger’s work on political resistance. And in “Henrike Naumann (1984–2026): Domestic Responsibilities,” Kerstin Stakemeier pens a powerful tribute to the artist known for her sociopolitical installations: “Moral discussions about art’s (ir)responsibility tend to speak from an imagined position of exemption, beyond fascism … Henrike’s scenographies, on the contrary, figured art’s (ir)responsibilities by showing our implication, our involvement.”
Film Notes presented several texts: In selections from his memoir, Akira Kurosawa recounts the making of Rashōmon, focusing on the film’s central concern with the instability of truth and the eventful development of its structure. Nathaniel Dorsky’s “The Illuminated Room” argues for a balance between inner experience and external reality through which cinema can be treated as a form of devotional seeing. In conversation with Nataliia Serebriakova, the British filmmaker John Smith reflects on Being John Smith (2024), his filmic self-reflection, while situating his practice within a broader context. And Mats Antonissen’s essay on Henri Michaux’s Images du monde visionnaire situates the writer’s film at the intersection of avant-garde cinema and pharmaceutical research, examining the limits of representing states of altered perception and the tensions between artistic ambition and scientific framing.
“Open Letter on the Imminent Departure of the Gelman Collection from Mexico” protests the removal of Frida Kahlo paintings from Mexico. We published the introduction to Bogna Konior’s Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, which uses ideas from science fiction author Liu Cixin to reconceive the treacherous realm of cyberspace. And Laurie Spiegel writes a beautiful memorial to her fellow composer Éliane Radigue, a pioneer of electronic music. "Her music can be played loud, like the roar of a plane taking off—the kind of sound she strived for when she was young. Or it can be listened to quietly, as the most intimate of musics."
—The Editors
