It would have been great if the Cold War had actually been cold. But instead of any mutually assured destruction of world powers, conflicts were simply outsourced to searing hot proxy wars, many of which still burn today. In a deeply researched piece in this issue, artist Charles Stankievech notes that the great-power thaw of the Cold War also coincided with a more general radiating logic of war in all directions, to be found in the warming of the earth’s atmosphere and a growing awareness of climate crisis. Stankievech’s essay “Warm War” crystallizes the ambient and general environment of militarization as the weaponization of the environment itself. But how to master such awesome thermodynamic contingencies as weather and the atmosphere if not by the predictive powers of computing platforms—which consume such vast resources that they might be analyzing the heat that they themselves generate?
Also in this issue, Bogna Konior asks whether synthetic images can reveal something about war that photography no longer can. Examining artist Alexey Yurenev’s Silent Hero, which uses AI to generate composite images from WWII photographs, Konior considers how they reveal a different kind of truth about the distorted trauma of war and how violence resists coherent perception.
Silvia Federici shares her memories about the postwar years in Italy and her radicalization, as she worked to build internationalist feminist movements. Though she is perhaps best known as a key contributor to postwar Italian feminist theory, she left Italy for the US in 1967. In a conversation with Andreas Petrossiants, Federici shares her impressions of wartime and postwar struggle in Italy from her unique perspective.
For the last installment of the After Okwui series, Patrick Flores also draws connections across borders by revisiting Enwezor’s concept of the postcolonial “constellation,” supplementing it with related concepts of his own: “concatenation” (links in a chain) and “effervescence” (vitality). Drawing from Southeast Asian artist-curators such as David Medalla, Jim Supangkat, and Redza Piyadasa, Flores examines how their practices build on Enwezor’s methodology of expanding dominant curatorial models through creative social experimentation.
Noting the fraught interpretations of the notion of accountability, Josephine Berry offers responsibility as a framework for thinking about social movements and ecological struggle. While “accountability’s logic is also one of immunization,” responsibility “offers a more informal, yet essential, way of maintaining communal relations.” Berry inquires into how we might conceive of a collective, nonpunitive, and solidaristic notion of planetary responsibility.
The philosopher Vilém Flusser pushed back against the notion that Brazil suffers from historical “delay”; Brazilians, he argued, think outside of linear concepts of historical development entirely. Common readings of underdevelopment mistakenly assert that Brazil must “catch up” to Europe, which promotes mimicry rather than genuine culture. This issue features a chapter from Flusser’s Fenomenologia do Brasileiro: Em Busca de Um Novo Homem (Phenomenology of the Brazilian: In search of a new man), translated into English for the first time by Rômulo Moraes. In an accompanying essay, Moraes argues that Flusser’s early writings are essential for understanding his “phenomenology of underdevelopment,” and how his theories of nonlinear history tie into his works on cultures of radical synthesis in Brazil.
