This month’s e-flux Notes features radical Italian thought, with interventions on feminism, financialization, and the role of racism in governmental and market structures—and, in light of the recent passing of VALIE EXPORT, we offer a revaluation of the potentials of performance art and the meaning of action in Viennese actionism. Running through many of this month's contributions is a concern with the formation of subjects under contemporary conditions: how consciousness, social relations, identities, and possibilities for action are shaped by larger historical, economic, and institutional structures—and how forms of resistance might nevertheless emerge from within them.
Over one hundred artists participating in In Minor Keys and the national pavilions signed a statement withdrawing from consideration for the so-called “Visitor Lion” awards at the 61st Venice Biennale, in the wake of the jury’s resignation. Reporting from Cannes, Pietro Bianchi contextualizes this year’s film festival in terms of the protests at the Venice preview, the Bolloré affair at Canal+, and the generally fraught relationship between Cannes and politics. The second part of his report focuses on three of the festival’s most significant films: Bruno Dumont’s Les Roches Rouges, Radu Jude’s Diary of a Chambermaid, and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur.
In Film Notes: Félix Guattari’s “The Image Machine” addresses cinema and television at the threshold of the postmedia condition, where images begin to function less as representations than as forces shaping subjectivity. Qingyuan Deng’s essay consults Lacan and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to discuss recent moving-image installations, and how they address the delay between an event’s occurrence and its political comprehension. In conversation, Lucy Beech reflects on her film and video practice as a way to engage hidden biological, industrial, and ecological systems through intertextual strategies and collaboration. And in “Why? Because…,” Jean-Pierre Gorin revisits films by Renoir, Grémillon, Allégret, and the Dziga Vertov Group, wittily reading the history of cinema against received ideas.
Rose-Anne Gush writes about Caroline Lillian Schopp’s recent book In-action: Viennese Actionism and the Passivities of Performance Art, which challenges the “action paradigm,” with its heroic conception of emancipatory action, and instead highlights passivity, ordinary gestures, and ambiguous and sometimes bewildering forms of in-action. We published an open letter in support of the Asel Kadyrkhanova, whose installation Machine (2013)—a reflection on Stalin-era repression in Kazakhstan—was removed from the Kazakhstan pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In “The Invisible Debt of Social Reproduction,” Leopoldina Fortunati reviews Verónica Gago and Luci Cavallero’s Rivendicare futuro: Il transfemminismo contro il capitale finanziario (Reclaiming the future: Transfeminism against financial capital), underlining that “before we can talk about personal debt to the financial system, we must talk about the historic debt of society to women.” And “Race, Gender, Antagonism, Compatibility: The Role of Difference for Capital,” a chapter translated from Anna Curcio’s book L’Italia è un paese razzista (Italy is a racist country, 2024), presents a powerful analysis of the role of racism in the consolidation of the Italian nation-state and capitalism.
—The Editors
e-flux Notes is for timely interventions on issues of contemporary concern, ranging over art, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and culture. Subscribe to e-flux Announcements for a monthly roundup of newly published essays and updates.
