Par les damné.e.s de la terre – Des Voix de Luttes 1969-1988

By The Wretched of the Earth – Voices of Struggle 1969-1988 Curated by French rapper Rocé this ambitious compilation refers to Frantz Fanon’s book “Les damnés de la terre” and collects rare protest songs from around the world -mostly from former French colonies-. All are sung or delivered in French and the tracklist also features …

Fraternity, Politics and Art

Museo de la Solidaridad was born out of the visionary idea of a handful of individuals—later named the International Committee of Artistic Solidarity with Chile of which Mario Pedrosa, a Brazilian art critic in exile was the president. The founding idea was articulated in March 1971 during “Operation Truth,” when President Allende invited international artists …

Siren Song: The Death of Poetry and Commodified Singing

What has always fascinated me about Sirens, whether written of by Euripides, Homer, Ovid or Hesiod, is that no one writes about Siren’s Song. (Todorov, 2010)It is the hour of the discrete siren who refuses in advance to disseminate and cause to vanish truths that are still only in the state of ‘scales or chord …

Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-Socialist Europe by Zdenka Badovinac

Date: September 21st 2019 Venue: Ostavinska, Kraljevica Marka 8, Belgrade Comradeship is a collection of essays by Zdenka Badovinac, the forward-thinking Slovenian curator, museum director, and scholar. Badovinac has been an influential voice in international conversations rethinking the geopolitics of art after the fall of communism, a ferocious critic of unequal negotiations between East and …

Philosophy and Politics

Justice is the philosophical name of the inconsistency, for the state, of any equalitarian political orientation. And we can here join the declarative and axiomatic vocation of the poem. For it is Paul Celan who probably gives us the most exact image of what we must understand by ʻjusticeʼ: On inconsistencies Lean:flickin the abyss, in …

Seoul Biennale: Collective City

Seoul Biennale 2019 will be held from Sept. 7 to Nov. 10, 2019 The contemporary city operates as a speculative apparatus, shaped by the logic of efficiency and profit; public resources and spaces are increasingly being privatized and conceived of as commodities. Emerging models are based on a managerial model that privileges corporate and/or technocratic …

Rhapsody for the Theatre

[ … ] next to the spiritual suspicion that befalls theatre, there is always the vigilant concern of the State, to the point where all theatre has been one of the affairs of the State and remains so to this day! Who fails to see that this territorial and mental division has the additional merit …

The Supreme Music: Music and Politics by Giorgio Agamben

An Excerpt If the access to the word is, in this sense, museically determined, we understand that for the Greeks, the nexus between music and politics was so evident that Plato and Aristotle treat musical questions only in the works they consecrate to politics. The relation of what they called μουσική (which included poetry, music …

The Barbarian Invasions: A Genealogy of the History of Art

The history of art, argues Éric Michaud, begins with the romantic myth of the barbarian invasions. The history of art linked its objects with racial groups—denouncing or praising certain qualities as “Latin” or “Germanic.” The predominance of linear elements was thought to betray a southern origin, and the “painterly” a Germanic or Nordic source. Even …

‘The Political Possibility of Sound’

The themes of these seven essays emerge from and deepen discussions started in Voegelin’s previous books, Listening to Noise and Silence and Sonic Possible Worlds. Continuing the methodological juxtaposition of phenomenology and logic and writing from close sonic encounters, each represents a fragment of listening to a variety of sound works, to music, the acoustic …