documenta 14 is not owned by anyone in particular. It is shared among its visitors and artists, readers and writers, as well as all those whose work made it happen.…
The former plantation of Álava in the Matanzas province of Cuba evokes sound before one hears it. In January 2017, we went there to record local musicians and were told to meet them near the bell tower…
Few filmmakers in recent years have managed to combine formal innovation with a programmatic stance toward filmmaking quite like Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. In the process of reinventing…
Migrants are perceived, at best, as victims. But leaving home, enduring perils, taking a chance on the unknown requires courage. Their story is heroic as well. Talk and dance by Mandela Girls.
Above the entrance of the Athens School of Fine Arts on Pireos Street we find the popular Greek slogan Ένας στο Χώμα χιλιάδες στον Αγώνα (One in the soil, thousands on the battlefield)…
“As for me, I produce awkward objects. This absurd and convulsive mania proves the existence of an unknown, secret gland, necessary for life. Yes, this mania can be reduced to a single gesture, within…
BALi-Kinos is located in Kassel’s former central train station. In 1995 it became part of the complex developed as the KulturBahnhof, and since 1997 it has been the home of the documenta film program…
Bloody Beans, Narimane Mari’s first feature-length film, is a dreamlike take on the violent spiral of Algeria’s recent history. Its force and beauty is that it does not employ a straightforward historical narrative, but instead re-enacts the past through play…
I translated this Bengali short story into English as much for the sake of its villain, Senanayak, as for its title character, Draupadi (or Dopdi). Because in Senanayak I find the closest approximation…
with Colin Dayan, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Tavia Nyong’o, David Scott, and Françoise Vergès
Books are material surfaces of inscription where political fictions have the opportunity to become collective reality. The Code Noir was an economic and legal decree passed by King Louis XIV in 1685 to…
The mechanism of forgetfulness has ramifications far beyond the importance it has played in psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud notes that forgetfulness is not “left to psychic arbitrariness, but that it follows…
