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.
This text proposes a model of analysis on how we represent European expansion, focusing on how this expansion led to the dismantling of certain social relations as a consequence of profit maximization in so-called Eastern Europe, which can be identified first and foremost at the level of private life or what may be called the sphere of the “home.” In short, it is the instrumentalization of reproduction, home labor and caregiving-as-labor that are at stake.
a “textual installation” in the pages of Vector Magazine, commissioned as part of the Documenta Magazine platform. Where we look, through what medium and from where determine a series of disappearances, obfuscations and camouflages, displacements of perspectives opened towards the possibilities for shaping our futures, as they appear today regarded from the perspective of the past, dissolving the concatenation of temporal regime within the present stasis which conditions the unidirectional perception of reality.
This text is part of a map accompanying a series of walks in the Financial district of Chicago, from the headquarters of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange southward across the opening acts of a real estate medagevelopment boom. Different groups of participants were assembled and invited to wander, trespass and research; the methods were improvisational and… Read more »
“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.