Dispatches Journal

Never Again Mexico without Us? *

dispatches — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 15:08:21 +0000

A River The name of a river that springs from the Tibetan plateau, passes through India, and crosses Pakistan has a disquieting history. Its name in Spanish, Indo , comes from an ancient language reserved for the works and sacred writings of Hinduism. From the Sanskrit “sindhu,” the word moved into Persian as “hindush,” into Greek as “indós”; from there it became the Latin “indus,” later settling in Spanish as “indo.” The name of this river came to be related to the region we call India; and later, through a ...

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The Art of Articulation

dispatches — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 20:49:50 +0000

This essay discusses the exhibit Kwel’ Hoy!: Many Struggles, One Front , a collaborative art installation featuring a sixteen-foot totem pole created by the House of Tears Carvers of the Lummi Nation in northern Washington State and southern British Columbia. The exhibit was the product of a collaboration between the Lummi and The Natural History Museum, a mobile and pop-up museum founded by composed of a collective of radical artist-activists. Kwel’ Hoy! appeared in different forms in two natural history museums in the eastern US during the 2017–18 year, helping ...

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EX-HUMUS: Collective Politics from Below

dispatches — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 16:26:15 +0000

1984, July, Argentina. First exhumation by the recently formed Equipo Argentino de Antropologia Forense (EAAF), a team created to investigate the cases of at least 9,000 desaparecidos after a genocide perpetrated by the military junta that ruled from 1976–1983. The EAAF pioneered the application of forensic sciences to the documentation of human rights violations, which had an undeniable impact throughout the world. Since then, the development of technologies that allow scientists to look deeper into bones, such as advances in molecular biology, DNA analysis, and toxicological procedures, has facilitated the ...

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Aesthetic Materialism under Absolute Capitalisms

dispatches — Mon, 17 Dec 2018 14:00:10 +0000

Ever since the avant-gardes of the twentieth century, a particular debate has persisted: should art have a transitive relationship to politics and be put at the service of a critical function, or should artists find strategies to maintain art’s autonomy and evade instrumentalization in the name of political ideologies? Walter Benjamin, for instance, posited that progressive politicized art involved an awareness of the artist’s position in the process of production, while Theodor Adorno vouched for an intransitive or non-causal relationship between art and politics. In the 1960s, readings of these ...

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Lifeboat Capitalism, Catastrophism, Borders

dispatches — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 19:00:06 +0000

1. Category Storms At the time of writing, Hurricane Florence is gathering off the coast of the Carolinas. A compulsory evacuation order has been issued. Those who could not make their way out of the path of surging waters due to the prohibitive costs of transport, incapacity, imprisonment, or some other form of confinement, or for whom taking shelter in public emergency facilities might precipitate deportation, have been left to survive a disaster defined as natural. These compulsory evacuation orders are not the empowerment of movement. They are the stratified ...

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Blackout: The Necropolitics of Extraction

André addd.studio — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 22:57:52 +0000

This essay addresses extraction, its visual cultures, as well as the politics and aesthetics of emergent forms of resistance today. In view of spreading sacrifice zones given over to resource mining, accompanied by exploitative international trade agreements and the finances of debt servitude, what forms do the cultural politics of opposition take, and how are artist-activists materializing the images and sounds of emancipation and decolonization against capitalism’s rapacious commodification of anything and everything? With reference to the diverse artworks of Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, which variously ...

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