The story of Chicago is the story of the making of this canal zone, the making and making opaque of settler property regimes, so as to appear inevitable in retrospect. The unfinished embattled space of occupation as “safe passage”. In centering the settler-colonial narrative, we risk reinforcing the myth of Indigenous disappearance, normalizing settler worlds, jurisdictions and futurities. But this centering is here intended as a tactical and self-conscious move that tries to confront the ways we are implicated in the exertion of settler authorities over Indigenous peoples and places.
Beginnings In November 2017, Miami citizens with voting rights approved a $400 million bond for climate resiliency adaptation in response to climate-change induced sea level rise. This is only a small portion of the price tag of the city’s sea level rise plans, which varies from official estimates at $900 million to analyst projections of… Read more »
…we are in a state of shock, caught in an impossibility to react, to respond and shape history, even while we rehearse – zombie-like – the spectral forms and choreographies of capitalist democracy. If deciphering the present also implies, as Achille Mbembe has stated, “making a judgement, a verdict on being our own contemporaries”, we see that the history of our encounter with “post-communism” under the sign of the global victory of capitalism is a process that has very specific effects, foreclosing the possibilities for critical thinking and delegitimizing the search for alternatives.
Different communities of illegalized migrants and refugees have developed highly nuanced and sophisticated ways of “surfing” regimes of visibility and invisibility. Eastern Europeans in particular are keenly aware of the tactical importance of “passing as white” while at the same time maintaining spaces that are densely “invisible” to the state and to the market. In the same ways that so-called black markets operate both outside of, and within, the logic of “legitimate” markets, the invisiblity of Eastern European illegality requires the production of a visible whiteness.
The occupation as a political process was a way of thinking beyond the narrative of capitalism as the only alternative. In the absence of an established critical tradition, protest became the way to attend to the spatial and social expressions of power, and to open up a search for critical counter-narratives. It would entail the sustained collective attempt to learn about social reality by radically reconfiguring it. Instead of reducing the entire phenomenon to a handful of slogans, we can look to their production and transformation as evidence of a continuously shifting conception and experience of power.
“Extra-territoriality and deportability are instruments of statecraft, but they are also global regimes. The Foreign Trade Zone offers a perspective on the articulation of neoliberal logic and the state form: a dynamic process whereby territories and populations are increasingly zoned for optimal insertion into capital circuits, enforcing regimes of stratified spatiality.”
We did not want to do an exhibition project that would be organized elsewhere, funded elsewhere, then curated, packaged and drop-shipped into Palestine; we did not want to work within a cultural politics that merely replicated the power dynamics we found already at work in military logic and the logic of the global (art) markets. Instead, we wanted to use the exhibition form as a vehicle for different kinds of encounter, at different scales and unfolding slowly, with time – and which would carry the very real weight of consequence and accountability.
The massive deployment on the global art market of “participatory”, “community” or “relational” practices since the early 90’s functions to reinforce poverty, oppression and inequality as problems of specific communities, and not of capitalism, while suppressing the implication of artist and audience in the structures that produce and maintain uneven power relations. The crisis, for me, is provoked by the ways in which both aesthetic pleasure and the philantrophic mobilization of art often function to “manage” the threat of systemic critique.
Mariame’s post (linked here) on anti-blackness prompted some further reflection on militarization and also on merit-based immigration, extending the question of who and what is rendered invisible. One of the key questions mentioned in her post had to do how anti-blackness operates to frame the relationship between race and migration. Mariame received many comments on the facebook note,… Read more »
How can we make sense of the ways in which structures of inequality are not natural or given, but instead are made, even while this making is hidden by both right-wing politics of criminalization as well as liberal notions of “diversity” ?… The myth of Chicago as a city of immigrants in a nation of immigrants glosses over the erasure of indigenous presence – while celebrating a false notion of undifferentiated arriving