On mnemnotechnics: technologies of recollection, the remembrance of things past and to come, the dark realms of pure memory, sediments, things that slip through the cracks, and strategies for shoring up these fragments against our ruin.
Index #3
Today we are accustomed to the apophatic gesture of free-speech fundamentalists and far-right demagogues, who use the flimsy legal cover of “just asking questions” to broadcast ever more widely the most violent and reactionary forms of hate speech. In resisting this enclosure of thought, art and theory continue to be instructive, if not essential activities. The late Lawrence Weiner memorably declared that “the purpose of art is to ask questions… it doesn’t answer anybody’s question but gives them the means to answer a particular question at a particular moment.” All the better when those questions can provoke a certain illuminating friction with the contradictions of one’s environment and disrupt the automaticity of one’s learned responses, remaining themselves ambiguous or unanswered—because unanswerable.
This third issue of e-flux Index, bringing together all the content commissioned and published by e-flux between April and May 2024, contains many such unexpected and unanswered (or unanswerable) questions across its 76 contributions, each of which cut across and reach beyond existing disciplines and borders: “Who is willing to care?”; “Who is the addressee at the end of the regulated pipelines of the English language?”; “Yes, but is it edible?”; “Why does everyone hate college students?”; “Is some form of suffering the condition for the emergence of an organic type of intelligence?”; “What does it mean to make a film today, in 2024, when most of our image consumption has been transferred to other (smaller) screens and other media?; “How to represent history?”; “Whose lives are worth remembering—or even, living?”; “How is it possible to speak the language of imperial renaissance and decolonization in the same breath?”; “Today is which day of the revolution?”—“Are these all just notes for a poem?”
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11 Chapters
September 2024
Flatlands of the Mind
With: Alessandro Bosetti, Brian Dillon, Ted Chiang, Agnieszka Kurant, Michał Libera, Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag, and Daniel Muzyczuk
Twenty Thousand Blinks
With: Pietro Bianchi, R.H. Lossin, Travis Diehl, Jacques Rancière, Maddie Hampton, Maria Dimitrova, and Boris Groys
On the contemporary image in all its multiplicity: appropriated, dissimulating, meta-cinematic, cartoonish, meta-photographic, indexical, operational, immediate and direct.
“Woman, Life, Freedom”
With: Ghoncheh Ghavami, Bahar Noorizadeh, Nahal Nikan, Giorgio Agamben, Arnavaz, and Negar Hatami
On the legacy of the 2022 Jina Uprising in Iran: an activist-led series of testimonials which “posit the body as a mode of inscription, as history incorporated, tracing its enforced subjections and emancipatory convulsions through the singular mutations of each body that contributed to the feminist revolution.” (part 1/2)
Characters in a Landscape
With: Daisy Hildyard, Octave Perrault, Filipa Ramos, Andrius Arutiunian, Joe Osae-Addo, Kwabena Appeaning Addo, Aoife Rosenmeyer, and Silvia Benedito
On the ever-widening metabolic rifts of the climate crisis: extractivism, how everything turns away from the disaster, architecture beyond the “abundance of fossil fuel energy,” eco-curation, and holistic sensibilities.
Structures that Want to Become Other Structures
With: Anthony Vidler, Alice Notley, Daniel Muzyczuk, Rômulo Moraes, Robert Ashley, Ren Ebel, Osman Can Yerebakan, and Ben Vida
On primary and secondary notation: diagrams, sketches, jottings in the margin, “notation in the expanded field,” going off-script, voluntary and involuntary speech, distortion and instability, and other compositional structures.
From the [■■■■■] to the [■■■]
With: Jonas Staal, Jenny Wu, Tamta Khalvashi, Boris Buden, Adeline Chia, Oliver Basciano, and Daniel Spaulding
On censorship and speaking in codes: keeping quiet, saying too much, raising one’s voice (and the costs of doing so), evasion, detection, cat-and-mouse games with the censor, and art’s potential to generate a “private world of symbols.”
Planetary Acupuncture
With: Ana Dana Beroš, Mika Savela, Canada Choate, Arno Brandlhuber, Ludwig Engel, Olaf Grawert, Alina Kolar, Corina L. Apostol, Cat Kron, and Merve Bedir
On pointed, decisive interventions (social, critical, artistic, pedagogic): the work of repair and restoration, art criticism for a time without critics, finding the future in what we still have from the past, and learning as a proto-biological activity of transformation and adaptation to new environments.
Jina, the Moment of No Return
With: Elaheh, Shouka Alizadeh, Goli Baharan, Nuzhan Didartalab, Aram, Parva, and Dasgoharan
On the legacy of the 2022 Jina Uprising in Iran: an activist-led series of testimonials which “posit the body as a mode of inscription, as history incorporated, tracing its enforced subjections and emancipatory convulsions through the singular mutations of each body that contributed to the feminist revolution.” (part 2/2)
Pulverized Histories
With: Debora Silverman, Harry Burke, Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, Vivian Ziherl, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Biljana Kašić, and Jörg Heiser
On colonialism, imperialism, and the open wounds of postmodern warfare: the promises and limitations of anticolonial curation, ethical double-binds, how to approach the architectural “profanations” of the imperialist and fascist built environment, war games, and the progression from potato guns to AK-47s.
One Size Does Not Fit All
With: Boris Groys, Future Foodscapes Research Unit, Kim Córdova, Rocio Calzado, Katrina Wiberg, Jace Clayton, and Miri Davidson
On homogeneity, distinction, and diversity: globalized monocultures, ordering Pad Thai in Gary, Indiana, monolithic housing estates and architectural uniformity, differences that make a difference and those that don’t, familiar products in unfamiliar places, and the far right’s appropriation of the language of diversity.
A Jacket with Reversible Lining
With: Stephanie Bailey, Kimberly Alidio, Nicole Kalms, Juan José Santos, Robida, Tausif Noor, McKenzie Wark, Ben Eastham, and Nathan Brown
On queerness, mutability, and legibility: being read and refusing to be so, identities that turn inside out, code-switching, tender papercuts, cross-border communities that demarcate countries and climates and languages, public artists and their private day jobs, finishing with the eclipse—day as well as night.