Capitalism Has its Limits

Capitalism Has its Limits Judith Butler discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, and its escalating political and social effects in America. "Unfortunately, in the time of the pandemic, none of us can wait. The ideal must now be kept alive in the social movements that are riveted less on the presidential campaign than the long term struggle that lies ahead of us. These courageous and compassionate visions mocked and rejected by capitalist “realists” had enough air time, compelled enough attention, to let increasing numbers – some for the first time – desire a changed world."

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30.03.2020 | by Judith Butler

Absence: the material of memory

Absence: the material of memory Nothing could better show that the art of memory, in the way that Boltanski thinks about it and makes it, is memory itself. It knows its workings and saves it from erasure. This is the lesson that Christian Boltanski repeats to us in all the corners of his immense oeuvre. And that, literally, makes time.

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07.03.2020 | by Roberto Vecchi

Archives, films and memories: ingredients to remember and forget the past

Archives, films and memories: ingredients to remember and forget the past Funes’ condition contrasts with [Everything passes except the past], an international workshop about the politics of memory, promoted by the Goethe-Institut, which took place over a few days of September at Culturgest in Lisbon, in tandem with the cinema programme, Re imagining the post-colonial archive. Unlike Funes' condition this event was about reflecting on the relationship between remembering and forgetting the past.

Afroscreen

18.02.2020 | by Inês Ponte

Ícaro Lira, stone lessons

Ícaro Lira, stone lessons Through the territories of Brazilian northeast where he comes from and never cease to return, to the streets of São Paulo, London, Paris, Naples or a little village in Andaluzia, the artist is always moving. Not more as a traveler then exiled or immigrant, Ícaro Lira does not celebrates nomadism, but is interested in transfigurations – political, economical and social, but also on intimate ones – brought by these circulations. Starting from his trips, which are above all meetings, he brings back objects: wood pieces, stones, pictures, trash, administrative documents, press articles, but also audio interviews and personal notes. So many traces with unique stories that, juxtaposed and on a set, became a weave of fragile meaning and open to interpretation.

I'll visit

04.02.2020 | by Elena Lespes Muñoz

Ícaro Lira, stone lessons

Ícaro Lira, stone lessons Through the territories of Brazilian northeast where he comes from and never cease to return, to the streets of São Paulo, London, Paris, Naples or a little village in Andaluzia, the artist is always moving. Not more as a traveler then exiled or immigrant, Ícaro Lira does not celebrates nomadism, but is interested in transfigurations – political, economical and social, but also on intimate ones – brought by these circulations. Starting from his trips, which are above all meetings, he brings back objects: wood pieces, stones, pictures, trash, administrative documents, press articles, but also audio interviews and personal notes. So many traces with unique stories that, juxtaposed and on a set, became a weave of fragile meaning and open to interpretation.

I'll visit

04.02.2020 | by Elena Lespes Muñoz

Tufo dance: Cultural heritage of Mozambique

Tufo dance: Cultural heritage of Mozambique Tufo, therefore, has strong religions roots. The same archival documents reveal that, in its origin, the dance was only performed in rituals and festive moments associated to the Muslim faith, but with time the dance was popularized and secularized.

Stages

29.01.2020 | by Hélio Nguane

Synne

Synne “When I was little, I was mesmerized listening to the stories told by my grandparents. My grandfather was a sailor. He travelled to the poles for exploration and when he returned he would tell us a lot of stories. It is a very special thing for me to tell my family's stories. What about my grandmother! My grandmother had an incredible imagination. She made up stories. My favorite story was 'Kai Hai'. It was the name of a shark, Kai.

Face to face

29.01.2020 | by Sinem Taş

Rituals of a fractured memory

Rituals of a fractured memory We can establish, through renewed rituals, a collective ethic of memory. This shows that the fractured past has to be used with a sense of responsibility that is public, and not private, that is of the present, and not of the past. This responsibility concerns not only Northern Ireland, but all the unheralded contexts of divided memory. Ours too.

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28.01.2020 | by Roberto Vecchi

The “war of statues” and the colour of memory

The “war of statues” and the colour of memory It would be a supreme fantasy to think, naively, that we can fully recognize the black blood that lies beneath the foundations of nation-empires and post-empires if we also leave in place the very stones that sustain and adorn the idea of the nation.

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28.01.2020 | by Bruno Sena Martins

La grande bellezza: a brief note on culture in Italy, today

La grande bellezza: a brief note on culture in Italy, today We urgently need a return to culture as the filter between individuals and the political, broadly conceived. Without this we will not escape from the current situation that, not only in Italy, finds its reflection in the protagonist of Paolo Sorrentino’s acclaimed La Grande Bellezza: the tragic, failed, mundane visage of Jep Gambardella.

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28.01.2020 | by Lívia Apa

Nonaligned modernisms: interview with Bojana Videkanic

Nonaligned modernisms: interview with Bojana Videkanic My research on the nonaligned comes from a cultural and art-historical position. It is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how the non-aligned movement, apart from creating political, or social, or economic alliances was also attempting to create cultural alliances that would counter Western cultural hegemony, and what many in the movement, who were interested in culture, also called Western cultural imperialism.

Face to face

03.01.2020 | by Iolanda Vasile

The french state and the portuguese state in the face of the arrival of the pieds-noirs and the retornados

The french state and the portuguese state in the face of the arrival of the pieds-noirs and the retornados In France, in spite of the economic context of the Trente Glorieuses being favourable to the absorption of labour, the socioprofessional characteristics of the French people who arrived from Algeria did not correspond to the needs of the French labour market, which required industrially qualified workers. In the Portuguese case the inverse situation pertained.

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02.01.2020 | by Morgane Delaunay

Luanda, Lisboa, Paradise?

Luanda, Lisboa, Paradise? What is at stake in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s book are the living, human ruins of empire. No longer based on the figure of the veteran or the returnee, but on someone from the other side of the line colonialism traced: a black man and, in this case, the complex figure that colonialism generated, the assimilated African who, here, for the first time in Portuguese literature, is at the centre of the narrative.

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26.12.2019 | by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

Gabriel

Gabriel Gabriel was born in 1988, in Colombia, and was adopted by a Norwegian family in 1989. Growing up in a small, pretty little town in east Norway, he was the only brunette among the blonde kids. "You can spot this darker kid in the middle of blue-eyed, blond kids in our class photo for kindergarten. I was aware of how different I was when I was a kid.

Face to face

23.12.2019 | by Sinem Taş

3rd Coimbra Biennial of Contemporary Art – Anozero’19 The Third Bank

3rd Coimbra Biennial of Contemporary Art – Anozero’19 The Third Bank There is something poetic in a city cut through by a river, like the imperturbable flow of the Mondego between the banks from which Coimbra sprawls. The river is the image of continuity and impermanence, its time a tangent to infinity. Our existences, as fleeting as the people who cross it, the bridges that cut across it and the waters that pass through it, are the height of discontinuity; our time is minuscule compared to the river.

Mukanda

19.12.2019 | by Lígia Afonso, Agnaldo Farias and Nuno de Brito Rocha

Rural topographies

Rural topographies They create a network of different approaches to the rural and simultaneously call attention to ecological concerns. The works constitute potent signifiers within a global discourse of regionalism as well as representing a call to (poetic) action within our natural environment.

Mukanda

04.12.2019 | by vários

Do you say I am lying? - Jimmie Durham

Do you say I am lying? -  Jimmie Durham Jimmie Durham brings to the surface the issue of the truth of the artwork, probably one of the most relevant themes in a world that is constantly forgetting about the fictional nature of art – not necessarily implying that it lacks an intrinsic paradoxical truth in its materiality and representational nature.

I'll visit

04.12.2019 | by Delfim Sardo

Postmemory and resentment

Postmemory and resentment The construction of postmemory is a complex process which may take place in very different ways and, as is worth repeating, is never simply based on transmission, but, rather, implies an active positioning, a decision, on the part of members of a second generation. Such a decision is never simply played out at a strictly rational level, it inevitably presupposes a high degree of emotional involvement.

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30.11.2019 | by António Sousa Ribeiro

Louisiana Unsettled

Louisiana Unsettled What if we accounted for all labor that was put in the development of those lands, both human, and non-human, the living, the inert, and the not-yet-lived, would this then lead us to a new understanding of its environment and its constitution as a disappearing geological strata in flux? Can we interpret how the energetic metabolism speculated around the Mississippi is withholding processes of land recuperation and human health, while privileging forms of dissolved property?

Games Without Borders

27.11.2019 | by Margarida Mendes

Marianne Keating

Marianne Keating Keating accumulates the disregarded and overlooked traces of the Irish presence in Jamaica, inserting previously muted voices into the archive. In doing so, she critiques the dominant Western constructions of nationhood and identity, producing an alternative to the master narratives that shape one’ worldviews in the West.

Mukanda

19.11.2019 | by Miguel Amado