Essays
In this essay, I take ‘disasters’ as thresholds to explain that nothing is natural about them but the underlying infrastructures and injustices that push people and beings to the brink of extinction. I further emphasise that the self-organized mutual aid networks demonstrate the necessity and potential for building alternative futures outside the deepening systems of oppression, racism, and discrimination that these disasters exacerbate.
READSurviving Unjust Lands; (im)Possible Futures
Disasters on the Turkey-Syria border expose the states’ obsolescence and collective suicide, but also people on the margins, repeatedly displaced, nonetheless building mutual aid networks to survive. These grassroots efforts offer a blueprint for a future beyond oppressive systems.
Ruination is the foundational violence that established the Indian nation-state. Long perfected in Indian-Occupied Kashmir over the last seven decades, camouflaged under the optics of democracy and development, it is ruination that has accelerated India’s settler-colonial project, setting the layout of demographic engineering across the region.
READLocked in Atrocity Image: The Ruination of Muslim Space and Body in India and Kashmir
How to fight brahmin supremacist violence in India and demand Kashmir’s liberation without disseminating images that spectacularise their ruination? Can we prioritise sensation over sensationalism? Do we have the collective tools to respect the rights of those who wish to remain unseen in life and in death, who do not want themselves to be reduced to a body circulating in pixel streams, their fate decided by algorithms? What measure of accountability can we honour to establish an ethic of seeing? How to build solidarities that are not conditional on these appeals of innocence?
How can we adopt an expression of pessimism that sees suffering and our unavoidable limitations on the one hand while also motivating a hopeful critical position that stands firmly against oppression, anywhere and for anyone?
READEditorial: Where We Are Now Is Laying the Groundwork For What Is to Come
Elham Rahmati and Vidha Saumya write on the liberatory quality of critical scepticism and the necessity of upholding it in a continuously depoliticised environment where “energies” and capacities are subdued to a bland neutral.
Heba Dbaa, a teacher from Gaza, gives an account of her experience living amid Israel’s unfolding genocide of Palestinians since October 7, 2023.
READMy Existence in My Homeland is Resistance
Heba Dbaa, a teacher from Gaza, gives an account of her experience living amid Israel’s unfolding genocide of Palestinians since October 7, 2023.
I’ve been reporting from Manipur since June 2023. From the very beginning, I could understand that though women were contributing as much as men in facing the brunt of the war, their roles never received enough acknowledgment nor were their views taken into account while making important decisions. As an outsider, I could see that women leaders had a much more pragmatic method and manner of dealing with most situations, yet they found no place on the leadership table. This, I was made to understand, stems from a society that is founded on a patriarchal structure, yet a visible reluctance of present-day male-dominated organizations to relinquish space to women during a crucial time as this continues.
READWhat it means to survive a war, with dignity
Women leaders of the Kuki-Zo community reflect on the hardships of a state supported war, and how they are rebuilding lives while negotiating denial of agency and leadership.
Is it problematic to mix friendships and professional connections, emphasising the benefits of helping friends since they will eventually feel obliged to help in return? How did such a neoliberal manipulative trick that openly instrumentalizes intimacy become acceptable? Is “friendly, warm hearted” corruption and favouritism legitimised? Am I abusing my position of power by preferring to work with friends? How does the professional environment change if a friendship ends abruptly and unpleasantly?
READAgainst Friendship: On the Dark Side of Professional Intimacies
Is it problematic to mix friendships and professional connections, emphasising the benefits of helping friends since they will eventually feel obliged to help in return? How did such a neoliberal manipulative trick that openly instrumentalizes intimacy become acceptable? Is “friendly, warm hearted” corruption and favouritism legitimised? Am I abusing my position of power by preferring to work with friends? How does the professional environment change if a friendship ends abruptly and unpleasantly?
Educational institutions, just like all other institutions, can be considered microcosms of society, where prevailing attitudes and values manifest. Consequently, as racism permeates Finnish society, it also seeps into Finnish daycares.
READMicroaggressions & Everyday Racism in Finland’s Daycare System
Finland is often celebrated for its world-renowned daycare system and commitment to social equality. However, beneath the surface, many non-white families face a disquieting reality: a barrage of microaggressions and everyday racism that challenges the nation’s ideals of equity.
This gives a more exhaustive picture of the Italian context; indeed, if, on the one hand, there is a total lack of rules and government measures to protect cultural work, on the other, many art workers themselves do not have the critical thinking attitude to analyze their own conditions and to claim their rights. The rise of neoliberal logic does not help this lack of political awareness, inasmuch as it fosters competition rather than solidarity and makes people more isolated and vulnerable.
READNo Country for Art Workers
On political imagination and activism as care, according to AWI – Art Workers Italia. How to hack the precariat-based neoliberal system and its ideology of individualisation by embracing an intersectional approach to civil rights and precarious lives.
While azerbaijan was bombing Armenians with israeli and turkish UAVs and paying bonuses to turkish-backed Syrian mercenaries for beheading Armenians, the “international community,” whatever that’s supposed to mean at this point, expressed lousy words of “concern,” and displayed a nauseous stance of both-sideism, devoid of any tangible action. The existence of this unrecognised republic and its indigenous population wasn’t legitimate enough for world powers to lift a finger.
READViolent Septembers: An Armenian Perspective Amid the Ongoing Occupation
In the shadow of a devastating ethnic cleansing campaign by azerbaijan1, this essay paints a narrative of Armenians grappling with cultural erasure and ongoing threats.
Cultural appropriation is not a new phenomenon in the Sámi context. Sámi handicrafts, duodji, have been and are still the subject of cultural appropriation. One of the central issues of cultural appropriation is that it gives the power to determine and decide on cultural objects to an actor outside the community, which weakens the self-determination of the community to manage the design themselves.
READColonial Continuity in Finland: Cultural Appropriation of Sámi Design
On the exploitation of Sámi design in Finland and how it reflects colonial continuity and power relations.
In the dimension of equity-realism, it is necessary to break the trend leading towards a further entrenching of elitism or exclusivity. In a time of profound recession and social inequality, it seems economically and socially urgent that organisations and institutes, those that use their association with the state and those who choose a path less oriented towards national promotion, learn from the actual experimentation on financial models and choose to distribute and support the diverse economic ecologies of grassroots art organisations and independent artists.
READSelling the Nordic Miracle
The Board of Directors of Frame Contemporary Art Finland1, has made an apparently uneventful change to their guidelines: “As a general rule, the grant will be paid to foreign beneficiaries only on presentation of a report on the use of the grant in accordance with the grant guidelines after the implementation of the supported project.” How does this decision align with the current trend of financial cuts underway in the arts sector in Finland, and what does it say about the ever-rising classism, social discrimination, racism, and the exclusion of non-Finnish workers?
I am terrified, devastated, and drained. Every massacre makes me believe that this world does not deserve our dreams. Israel kills us in full view of the world, yet no one is doing anything to stop this genocide. The West’s presidents supported Israel and funded them to kill us. This war was not going to continue without the West and Arab leader’s consent.
READWhere Should We Go? No Place Is Safe in Gaza
Noura Selmi, a writer and translator from Gaza, has written us an account of her experience living in the south of Gaza amid Israel’s unfolding genocide of Palestinians.
