Art Magazine
In Sokndal, southern Norway, humans have been digging the earth for generations. First for iron, then for ilmenite – mineral, black, heavy ilmenite. Titanium-iron oxide pulled from the mountain’s dark seams to make the whitest of whites…
READHow Stone is Made to Disappear: Notes from Sokndal
In the Sokndal region of Norway, ilmenite – the dark mineral crucial for the fabrication of titanium white pigment has been mined for generations. In this essay, writer, artworker Joss Allen reflects on the relationship between humans and a landscape shaped by extraction, delving into geological time, industrial impact, and the persistent traces of removal.
On January 31st, workers at the Zangezur Copper-Molybdenum Combine (ZCMC) in Armenia’s southern Syunik region launched a wildcat strike to demand safer working conditions and adequate wages. Unprecedented in scale since Armenia’s independence, the eleven-day strike was nothing short of revolutionary, as over 2000 workers self-organized in defiance of corporate authority.
READA Mine That’s Not Ours: Land, Labor and Resistance in Armenia’s Syunik Region
In Armenia’s Syunik region, a wildcat strike at the Zangezur mine exposes deep-rooted exploitation, colonial extractivism, and the human cost of a neoliberal economy prioritizing profit over people.
Their perseverance signals that the underrepresentation of Somali voices is not a reflection of lack of interest but of barriers that can and will be dismantled. As their presence grows, so too does the possibility of a cultural landscape that is not only more inclusive but also more honest about the histories, languages, and identities that it is made up of.
READOn the Cusp: the Underrepresentation of Somali-Finnish Youth in Finland’s Artistic Spaces
From limited mentorship opportunities to subtle cultural gatekeeping, this essay examines the educational, social, and cultural factors that contribute to the persistent underrepresentation of Somali-Finnish youth in Finland’s artistic spaces.
There is no universal ‘the’ trans body. Where does this article ‘the’ come from and what does it do? To us it seems that to look at something through the lens of ‘the trans body’ is claiming to know something that is situated in some imagined universal trans body – ultimately projecting one’s own body as that universal human in the trans context; the same universal human that the work claims to critically dismantle. White, non-disabled, thin, masculine and middle-class.
READThe Trans Body in Venice: A Critique of Universalising Transness
This review of Teo Ala-Ruona’s ‘Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture’ explores the implications of universalising language, such as ‘the trans body’, in describing marginalised experiences within large-scale, nationalist, and artistic contexts, including the Nordic Countries Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
I think of how many people are not able to be involved in social movements because of their own disability or their caring responsibilities, or the way that forms of social violence take away their capacity, or their ability to fight that social violence, because they’re simply trying to stay alive.
READDreaming of Liberation: An Interview with Lola Olufemi
AK Wane and Lola Olufemi discuss what we can learn from archives of revolutionary movements and which lessons to bring into modern activist practices.
I think it scares me as a researcher to make all these claims, and then you do the fieldwork and find out it’s not as easy as you thought; you can’t put humans into boxes, and you certainly can’t enforce any of these notions onto them.
READAn Anti-Archive of the Present: An Interview with Jood AlThukair
Jood AlThukair’s ‘With the Feather in Our Throat’ creates a living anti-archive of women in Riyadh, navigating the challenges of nostalgia, language, and loss while resisting institutional erasure.
The Shipibo-Konibo are an Indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon whose spiritual, artistic, and medicinal practices are profoundly intertwined with a vision of the universe as a web of living energies. Their knowledge is transmitted through songs, visions, master plants, and symbolic designs that operate as technologies of healing and communication with the non-human world.
READLanguage, Rituality & Technology: An Interview with Pedro Favaron
What if the most advanced technologies aren’t being developed in Silicon Valley but are already in the singing forest? Renzo Signori, in a conversation with Pedro Favaron, explores elements of Amazonian epistemologies and Shipibo-Konibo cosmology to propose a radical rethinking of language, ritual, and technology – not as tools of control, but as vibrant, relational forces rooted in healing and reciprocity.
The story of the Democratic Republic of Congo isn’t just about coups or Cold War power plays – it’s also a story told through rhythm, resistance, and reinvention. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État invites us to see music not as something that plays in the background of history, but as a key player in it – used by empires, reclaimed by artists, and still resonating in the voices of those who won’t be silenced.
READFrontlines of Power: Sonic Politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo
How does the intricate relationship between music, political strategy, and the legacy of Cold War imperialism intertwine in shaping the Democratic Republic of Congo’s past and present? This paper examines Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’État to argue that cultural manipulation was not only central to the Congo’s Cold War history, but that music remains, even today, a potent site for control, resistance and renewal.