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.…
Something is rotten in the state of the media. Rotten to the point that today a man accused of war crimes can summon mainstream media to announce that reality has debunked their narrative, delighting in…
In her short story “The Iron Table” (1943), Jane Bowles describes a couple who are discussing whether or not the woman would be happy living in the desert, where the man wants to be. They seem to be…
Pedro Matta is a survivor who gives guided visits to people who want to know about what happened in Villa Grimaldi, Santiago de Chile. Given my work on…
Central to Athenian democracy and justice was the Agora, a place of assembly for its citizens. At the center of the Ancient Agora of Athens was the Odeion of Agrippa, an auditorium with the capacity to…
Thomas Dick was an amateur photographer who photographed members of the Birpai community in the early decades of the twentieth century. Dick had a consistency in style, yet his work was not a record of…
Similar to the Landesmuseum a couple of blocks to the south, the Stadtmuseum has had a recent rebirth. Founded in 1979 inside a typical 1870s Gründerzeit building, it reopened in 2016 after a long period…
I am trying to think “language or hunger,” but I inevitably supplant hunger with eating, not eating, and shitting, all of which differ from hunger. Hunger is abstract, and…
Carmelo Bene’s 1971 film Don Giovanni is not an adaptation of a famous Don Juan story. Instead, the film critically investigates the multifaceted legend of the wealthy male sinner who seduces one woman after another. This is a film about Don Juanism…
The sense we have is that in the vast expanses of space between celestial bodies there is a void. Hence, total silence. The Greek word for space is διάστημα, which means literally in-between…
Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that the chronotope connects temporal and spatial relationships of language to the ideological and political context that has produced them. Time, Bakhtin says, “thickens, takes…
by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Marina Fokidis, Quinn Latimer, Yorgos Makris, Marta Minujín
We are accustomed to equating literature and architecture—a stanza, the basic unit of poetry, is, after all, a “room” in Italian. But in the case of the edifices built to hold books, this relationship…
