Essays
This is a story about a small group of young artists in Romania (zoom-in on Bucharest, please) and their endeavour of trying to make it in the Art world. We do not know how this will turn out.
READE T A J Artist-Run Space, the ‘Make It’ Experience in the Art World
Ilina Schileru writes about a group of young artists in Bucharest and their endeavors to make it in an art world that offers no guarantees and is frequently a hostile environment for newcomers to the stage.
Where the striped hyenas are is not only a place in the imagination or in the past. Where the striped hyenas are is also a possibility for what the future could bring. It’s where they lie, waiting for their turn to return from their exile. Where the hyenas are is also where the ghouls and the djinn are, behind seven mountains, dreaming and chasing their world into being again.
READWhere the Striped Hyenas Are, or, A Tale Is a Map and a Compass: Some Fragments on the Fantastical, Land and Remembrance
Shayma Nader on how can the fantastical embody the political; what if all fantastical creatures were to rise up against the dispossessions and alienations from the lands that sustain them, to which they belong?
How can we facilitate collective transfers of knowledge and support peer feedback practices in a transdisciplinary cohort? How can we cultivate learning communities where sites of authority are multiple and distributed? How to expand this learning in a microcosm to exist critically and together in the world?
READFeedback in Relation: On Friendship, Microcosms & Constructive Criticism
How can we facilitate collective transfers of knowledge and support peer feedback practices in a transdisciplinary cohort? How can we cultivate learning communities where sites of authority are multiple and distributed? How to expand this learning in a microcosm to exist critically and together in the world?
Accused of being “shrewd, rogue, ill-mannered and undisciplined”, the black goat was constantly abducted and killed to prevent it from distorting the European landscape that Israel wished to create on the rubbles of the destroyed Palestinian one. In 1948, the year of the Nakba, Israel began importing a white Swiss goat to replace the black one. The white European goat was described as “polite, beautiful, healthy” and even “civilized”.
READApproaches to Palestinian Liberation: Magical Realism as Resistance Literature
Can literary magical realism be considered a type of resistance literature in the Palestinian context? This essay argues that magical-realistic manifestations—death-defying ghosts, the black goat, soil with resurrection powers, and the malleability of time—found in contemporary Palestinian literature play a significant role in resisting the ongoing effects of the Nakba.
European modes of living and cultures have become globalised and naturalised, so much so that critical conversations around European traditions today focus more on questions of racial diversity in, say, orchestras, ensembles, and European music and dance schools rather than why and how European cultural productions have become such a global commodity and signifier for class and and “civilisational” ascend to begin with.
READThe Innocence of (European) Instruments
European modes of living and cultures have become globalised and naturalised, so much so that critical conversations around European traditions today focus more on questions of racial diversity in, say, orchestras, ensembles, and European music and dance schools rather than why and how European cultural productions have become such a global commodity and signifier for class and and “civilisational” ascend to begin with.
Formal modes of engineering the well-being of the population are oppressive and exclusionary. Activists, scholars and citizens of the world have to find compassionate and strategic ways to enact their power of adaptability. Memes allow us to challenge conventional and restrictive forms of education, policy and collective action, fostering effective solutions for a broken system. Memes, as the new toolkit adopted by Internet users of India, has the potential to nurture democracy and pluralism, with the hope to preserve freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom to resist.
READPOOJA, What Is This Behaviour?: Memes as Political Participation & Toolkit of Digital Resistance in India
Abhinit Khanna discusses meme culture, misinformation, trolling, and data-muddying in times of pandemic and war using the visual language of digital artworks.
Club Dia is a ‘daytime haven born out of a need for a safe and well-thought-out regular open-air venue and hangout in Helsinki’. Surrounded by a wall of shipping containers and nestled against the Swerock cement factory in Verkkosaari, it comprises a dancefloor, bar, food truck and community radio studio. Decorated with disco balls that sit atop towers of wooden cable reels, its aesthetic speaks of its industrial setting, but the colour scheme and clientele are reminiscent of hip, gentrifying areas such as Kallio.
READThe Value(s) of Verkkosaari: Urban Safety and Subculture in Gentrifying Helsinki
Unpicking the ‘problem’ of safety in Helsinki’s underground music scene and what it ‘can and does do’ in processes of urban change.
Independently from one another, we began reclaiming a loudly crying face to denote the feeling of being overwhelmingly pained by beauty and our inability to grasp it fully.
READAll I Want to Do Is to Hold Your Hand and Cry the Tears of Joy
Vera Kavaleuskaya convinces us to evade the rigid notion of professionalism, to not accept the invisible hand, and to kill the joy but to then revive it on your terms.
With this text, I’m probing into ongoing processes at Aalto University in the last five years, which, among other things, led to the administrative decision to remove the University-Wide Art Studies (UWAS) program in 2021. The story starts in 2016 when something quite special was cooking in the Art, Design, and Architecture School, and a truly radical form of transdisciplinary education was lived and enjoyed by many, thanks to UWAS. I want to make sense of the sad fallout from such dream; a fallout that happened despite countless protests at different levels of the organization’s pyramid.
READTransdisciplinarity in Higher Education: Wicked Problems, Dreams, and Nightmares
On the ongoing processes at Aalto University in the last five years that led to the administrative decision to remove the University-Wide Art Studies (UWAS) program in 2021.
