For more than three decades Francisco Toledo was the reference point for a cultural practice that invents common space as a form of ethical expression. Mexico in particular, and the Global South in general, have lost a multifaceted artist, one of inexhaustible depths. In today’s Mexico, no one knows who will continue to protect the causes that Francisco defended. The danger that the beauty he created in his cultural institutions will be lost is a ghost that haunts our nightmares with an oppressive sense of dread.

1. Moving Titles An animated sequence at the beginning of Raqs Media Collective’s two-screen film The Capital of Accumulation (2010) performs the title of the work’s reversal of the most important of Rosa Luxemburg’s economic studies, The Accumulation of Capital (1913). 1 What can this mean as a reflection on the legacy, the corpse, and the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg? In her 1913 book, Luxemburg boldly exposed the shortcomings of Karl Marx’s understanding of the process of the...

1. It would appear that the notion of “the contemporary” is irredeemably vain and empty; in fact, we would not be entirely mistaken in suspecting “contemporary art” to be a concept that became central to art as a result of the need to find a replacement, rather than as a matter of legitimate theorizing. For above all, “contemporary” is the term that stands to mark the death of “modern.” This vague descriptor of aesthetic currency became customary precisely when the critique of “the...