How can one act within a system one did not create yet cannot simply leave? Artists and workers organize a strike inside the Venice Biennale rather than outside it. Filmmakers search for forms of freedom within the industrial machinery of cinema. Philosophers attempt to think through inherited ideological structures rather than discard them. Again and again, the problem is not escape but intervention.
Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) recounts the organizing that led to the May 8 strike at the Venice Biennale, tracing months of work among artists, cultural workers, and Italian labor unions. We also published the open letter “Artists Call Out Venice Biennale for Disregarding Their Repeated Requests to Be Withdrawn from ‘Visitors’ Lions’ Awards,” which addresses the continuing controversy surrounding the Biennale’s prize system following the resignation of the awards jury.
In Film Notes: Edgar Morin begins with cinematic illusion and arrives at a theory of how human beings project themselves into the world, in excerpts from The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man. Speaking with Cici Peng, Utako Koguchi describes a filmmaking practice that allows ordinary situations to become slightly unstable, opening them to unexpected encounters and transformations. Mike Kuchar’s “The Metaphysics of Moviemaking” proposes that films are often guided less by intention than by accident, coincidence, and forces that only become legible after the fact. Jia Zhangke’s “The Age of Amateur Cinema Will Return” argues that the future of cinema may depend on forms of production that remain resistant to professionalization.
Other texts address the question of theory itself. In “Have No Theory,” George MacBeth revisits the Theory Wars and argues that art’s periodic attempts to free itself from theory have never fully succeeded. Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s “The Inner Western Marxism of Soviet Philosophy” returns to Evald Ilyenkov, locating within Soviet thought a philosophical project far more complex than the official doctrines that surrounded it. William Wiebe’s conversation with Martha Schwendener explores Vilém Flusser’s account of apparatuses, asking whether systems designed to program human behavior can nonetheless be redirected toward other ends.
In “Lessons from Life in Its Rawest Forms,” Tereza Stejskalová writes from a cultural field marked by censorship, political pressure, and shrinking public support. Her response is neither defiant optimism nor despair, but a reflection on her grandmother’s life and an insistence that culture matters precisely when its effects are difficult to measure. “The goal is not to win the screaming match,” she writes. “The goal is to become, like her, a person who brings more music than noise, more care than cruelty, into a world desperate for both.”
—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.
