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issue guide
#10 intro
Key
Points of interest
Essays
2 non-maps
Masthead

Essays

Paula Cobo-Guevara: Displacement: A molecular map of discomforts

Amber Hickey: Europeans are so far removed from who we are as a people

Mauvais Troupe: LA ZAD / THE ZONE TO DEFEND

Brett Bloom: Searching For Spiritual Connections To Landscapes In The Throes Of Breakdown

Rachel O'Reilly & Danny Butt: Infrastructures of Autonomy on the Professional Frontier: ‘Art and the

Boycott of/as Art'

 

 

Editorial note

 

The attached essays were selected for how they help illustrate this issue’s cartographic concepts as described in our key:
tectonics (fixed context/apparent necessity)
humors (the lived relationally of life)
totems (universalities that orient action)

In her essay, Paula Cobo-Guevara works through the endless variety of ways to relate to herself, her community, her past and possible futures within Barcelona– her chosen home. Her writing demonstrates the necessary contradiction embedded between fixity of being and possible variations for life that this issue sees as being what humors bridge, as ways of relating.

Humors inform the logistical and are the very possibility for relational thought. Amber Hickey’s engagement with indigenous seal hunter Aaju Peter tectonically situates relations within a seemingly settled cultural and environmental climates yet demonstrates how practices and relations are subject to change and ongoing negotiation.

Mauvais Troupe is situated in the zad in France, a place where farmers, artists and activists are resisting capitalist logistical efforts to predetermine relations. The states wants the zad to becoem an airport- instead, its becomeliberated territory. The work demonstrate how fixed and conflicted relations become by facts of strategy and tactic a field for
cultural innovation. In the essay’s voice in retelling, we note how objects of concrete and particular resistance live on as narratives that exceed their original setting.

The totemic ordering of meaning over time is societally grasped as ideology; as concepts we can name capitalism, socialism, spirituality etc... Real though abstract, they compete among themselves to frame common notions of what (for example) is a good life and provide lively orientation toward eventual death. Focused upon re-organizing macro-economic systems, Brett Bloom encounters such totemic ideologies and demonstrates the necessity of working upon them when effectively confronting capitalism’s climactic effects.

Also interested in the towers of abstract meaning– here with meaning attendant to the fact of general and particular artistic works– Rachel O’Reilly and Danny Butt discuss an artistic refusal(boycott) to provide meaning for the service of the extractive and incarceration industries who sponsored the Biennial of Sydney.

Many of the essays presented in the print version of this issue were extracts, here the full essays available.

By presenting texts imbedded within personal and collective practices of living through climactic and political change, it is the editors’ hope that readers recognize both this issue’s presented themes, and the ways in which submitted artworks’ and the author’s concepts exceed base conceptualization. They do so in praxis that efforts to create meaningful thought and action in the world, utilizing their full faces of being, rather than purely mechanical thought. Recognizing that in response to the challenge of climate change, total relations must be rearranged for an actual human response (one not governed by capitalist logics) to the crisis, this issue recognizes thought and action that exceeds its own logics by insisting upon the central need for space of variation and for space for the other. So, while it is possible and useful to concisely order thought, in this curotorial space we have chosen instead to focus on how pieces sit rather how they are organized. In the face of climate change, we prioritize lifes’ capacity to organize its own variation. 'To what end?' is one meaningful question.

 

 

A sideways inversion of German Romantic, Pilip Otto Runge's, De Vier Zeiten, Die Nacht (1807), though it may as well have benn titled, The Metaphysical Logistics of Capitalist Spirituality, with the Goddess Profit and her Angels of Abstraction Who Are the Natural Blessing of those who make Good Judgement Calls.

<see the original artwork here>

 

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