Things fall apart, but they are also actively disassembled, digested, and thoughtlessly thrown from car windows. All that remains is waste. In the scraheap we find essays on the “destructive desire” for the cheap caloric waste ofjunk food, the gratuitous wastefulness of the modern construction industry, and the material ecology of “muck” accumulating in the twenty-first centuries’ soils, oceans, and rivers. But the potential for incubating new subjectivities within such wastelands also come...
Index #6
“Sorry, what were you saying?” Thirty years into life online and our collective attention-spans are now potholed and weathered. We find ourselves easy prey for algorithmic time-sinks (content) and predictive analytics (commerce); succumbing to cycles of instant disgust, instant delight, and instant tedium.
Research shows we read ever less deeply into the articles we open, glance at paintings in museums for ever shorter periods, and read ever fewer books. The solutions offered for this attentional crisis are varied, but equal in their severity. They range from the New York Times weekly dare to just spend ten minutes scrutinizing a single painting as a form of “slow looking,” through to the increasing ubiquity of the “one-unbroken-take” gimmick in prestige film and streaming series and the “one-unbroken-sentence” gimmick in contemporary fiction,not to mention the heady apparel of mindfulness apps, productivity hacks, noise canceling headphones,smart-drugs, and smart-beverages that keep the poly-working precariat on their A-game.
The e-flux Index has a slightly different relationship to contemporary distraction. It extols the playful and associative non-linearity native to the best anthologies and magazines, the absorbing zigzag journey from C to A to B and back again. In ethos the Index therefore sits within an artistic, literary, and philosophical lineage that has long celebrated the potency of, rather than prohibiting and punishing, the creative wandering of a digressive and receptive mind, and moments of reverie. It seeks to facilitate those epiphanic moments when a promising distraction catches wind: “Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker/ Over the strained time-ridden faces/ Distracted from distraction by distraction.”
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11 ChaptersJune 2025
With: Irmgard Emmelhainz, Zofia Trafas White, Océane Ragoucy, Mae-ling Lokko, Frans Saraste, Anna Gorskaya and Jason Fitzroy Jeffers
With: Isabel Jacobs, Elsa Mäki, Jean Epstein, Kateryna Iakovlenko, Simon Hajdini and John Douglas Millar
How do our bodies give us away? A new study of the handreader and sexologist Charlotte Wolff suggests our palms might reveal what we otherwise try to conceal. The olfactory likewise becomes a means of detection in an analysis of Bong Joon-Ho’s 2019 film Parasite. Meanwhile the intimate role of “stitching”—making and thinking with textiles— offers lessons for the imperative work of repair and “resetting the settler-colonial clock.” A profile of Katya Libkind’s work investigates how an injured bod...
With: Jeremy Millar, Minh Nguyen, Luise Mörke, Dylan Huw, Alan Gilbert, Cathryn Drake, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi and Lua Vollaard
On the use and abuse of historical memory. In a time when official “memory cultures” mandate a single reading of the past and present, how can collective counter-memories fight against the forces of forgetting? We find such an approachin Ariella A.sha Azoulay’s “unshowable photographs” of the 1947 Nakba, Basyma Saad’s eulogies for the human cost of the American Century, the archival interrogations of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s analytical camera, and Sam Ashby’s reverential queer...
With: Trevor Paglen, Trevor Paglen, Pietro Bianchi, Valery Podoroga, Jörg Heiser, Aaron Schuster, Oleksiy Radynski and Boris Groys
Did you hear the one about the magician recruited by CIA psyops? The one about the tricksters, the jokers, the storytellers, and the daydreamers? In this section the extraterrestrial comes into contact with the utterly quotidian inside the limbic world of storytelling, magic, and the conjuring act of fiction. We also read of two contemporary American filmmakers pushing the limits of anti-cathartic storytelling, and learn how the eschatological cosmology of a Soviet Marxist channeled the “magic s...
With: Yuk Hui, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Mónica Amor, Andreas Petrossiants, Molly Crabapple, Shellyne Rodriguez, Adeline Chia, Kirsty Bell, Armina Pilav, Jamie Allen and André Pitol
What happens when we shift our perspective of dwelling, of being-in-the-world, from the sturdy terrain of home to the conditions of Heimatlosigkeit, in-betweenness, diaspora, and glocality? To understand the power of doikayt (“hereness” in the Yiddish of the interwar Jewish Bund) as a political horizon, we can look to the delicate connectivity of Gego’s Reticuláreas sculptures, to the “imaginary diasporas” of Edival Ramosa, or to Gregg Bordowitz’s celebration of “Yinglish.” The intermeshing of l...
With: Rob Goyanes, Michael Marder, Marakianí Olivieri, Enzo Lara-Hamilton, Lucy Benjamin, Sarah Bell, Jen Liu and Nadia Huggins
Setting off through the smoke of Gustav Metzger’s pioneering auto-destructive installations, we approach the antipastoral landscapes of what he called “damaged nature.” An essay theorizing the mismatch between the sea as we imagine it and the realities of marine pollution suggests theurgency of a phenomenology of climate devastation. A photographer details her efforts to produce an ecological archive of black sand deposits secreted across the touristparadise of the Grenadines. Ecologically-minde...
With: Mal Ahern, Novuyo Moyo, Serubiri Moses, Ives Maes and Andrea Fraser
For Frantz Fanon, the White West was “a world divided into compartments, a Manicheistic world, a world of statues.” Adventurous and radical curatorial research and practice seeks meanwhile to cross-compartmentalize, to depose reductive binaries, and to topple or at least détourn this settled order of things. An attempt to rethink the contained environment of the white cube asks what must change for the gallery to accommodate a more accessible, egalitarian approach to art. An ambitious effor...
With: Sven Lütticken, Marina Vishmidt, Caroline Elbaor, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Babette Mangolte, Stephanie Bailey, Almudena Escobar López, Jhordan Channer and Dorraine Duncan
What comes after autonomy? After independence? A searching conversation between two leading art theorists departs from the hobbyhorse of art’s autonomy to consider how “to effect a more thoroughgoing transformation of social life and productive relations, one that would render autonomy specifically for art or culture redundant.” Olivia Erlanger’s sculptures and video work sketch infrastructures of control. An essay on “hyper-colonialism” critiques the reassertion of domination by former colonial...
With: Chris Fite-Wassilak, Slavoj Žižek, Guy Debord, Michael Kurtz, Jennifer Johung, Katherine C. M. Adams, Marguerite Duras and Chris Murtha
On stage. On playing to the gallery. On performance theory, performativity, and feedback loops. On our scripted realities and attention-seeking reality TV presidents. On dolls and marionettes and cheap thrills and jump scares. On the dramatic force of the text and the relationship between theater and film. On dress rehearsals and improvisation. On the society of the spectacle and its subversions.
With: Kristin Ross, Jason Waite, George Kafka, David Gissen, Ewa Borysiewicz, Brian Dillon, Toby Üpson and Amy Zhang
Can we live together? An essay on commoning and coalition building within land-based and Indigenous struggles threads the needle from nineteenth-century communards to contemporary movements against Cop Cities. A glance backwards to Okwui Enwezor’s 2006 Seville biennial finds him there making use of the concept of “neighborliness,” while Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s recent work brings together humans and AI through “one of nature’s oldest coordination technologies”—the choir. Meanwhile autopo...
With: Luis Othoniel Rosa, Sophie Rose, Post-Novis, Oliver Basciano, Ben Eastham, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera and Natasha Marie Llorens
Ahem. How to make oneself heard? Selections from an e-flux Architecture project on “Loudreading” ask how far a collective voice can travel, and what obstacles radical recitation must overcome to become audible. The cacophony only increases in an essay on the snag of the spoken voice, and the points where perfect articulacy breaks down: What happens when a stutter interferes with the possibility to “raise one’s voice”? Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s soundwork heightens the decibel count thro...