Features
Heritage Algorithms and Other Letters to the Future
Passenger—Migration Patterns on the Living and Those of the Dead
Millions of dead birds follow such new migratory paths, which draw capital from the south and the east into the north and the west. Often, these paths consolidate, convene in the centers of the colonizing empires—London and Paris—for a few years, or decades, before moving on to museums in the new world. These routes are not the birds’ natural flyways. They are new paths toward a capitalist archive that usurps purpose from the world it exploits.
Liv Bugge: The Consequence of Touching Oil
“What is the consequence of touching oil—of coming to know it in an embodied sense? What gets destabilized when oil slips out of the category of the inhuman, even momentarily? To make an image with the body requires revaluation of the discursive function of touch. I propose that Bugge’s document of people touching oil and becoming aware of its aliveness, its animateness, awakens those people to the violent relationship humans have not only with oil, but also with the world beings that humans broadly consider inanimate.”
Nope—A Certain Tendency of the Immaterial
All My …/All My— Designing Motherhood and the Labyrinth of Reproductive Health
The breathtaking range of topics in Designing Motherhood—choices of whether to conceive children or take a pregnancy to term, infant mortality, sterilization abuse, thalidomide, cesarean birth curtains, masculine birth, baby formula, the faja (a wrap for binding a postpartum abdomen), gender reveals, the Del Em Device, car seats, carers and carrying, the tie-waist skirt, the breast pump, and so on—reveals the immense, intricate knowledge necessary to understand reproductive health, and to advocate for conditions that promote wellbeing.
Binge Watch—On Performances of Excessive Eating
“The act of binging is one of abjection. It demonstrates the power of something inanimate, or no longer animate, over human beings—in this case, food. The abject manifests viscerally as squirming, belching, or vomiting. Such images threaten the common belief that eating is pleasurable, a notion that begins in infancy.”
Gone But Not Disrespected
On the last Sunday in June 2022, a particularly hot day in Philadelphia, about 100 of us gathered in front of Saint Luke’s landing for the culmination of an experimental AIDS memorial called Gone and for Ever, a community-informed spectacle of sight, sound, and grief—part of Remembrance, a project of the William Way LGBT Community Center and funded by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage—to grapple with the question of how to memorialize amid the ongoing crisis.
Office Landscaping—A Genealogy of Corporate Critique
Ultimately, corporate critique has a genealogy, one that is cyclical and resilient, and that allows artists to engage aesthetics of control, desire, and regulation which corporate capitalist structures aim to produce.