On the cover: Leo Matiz, Untitled, courtesy Fundación Leo Matiz.

• Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Editorial

• Zdenka Badovinac What Will the Next Revolution Be Like?

  The response to all this is extremely varied, ranging from nostalgic retrospection to serious reflection on the future of the idea of communism. Here I am primarily interested in artists who see this tradition as offering great potential for designing alternatives to the dominant forms of globalization. These artists are returning to their local tradition not because they want to resist the homogenizing power of globalism, but just the opposite: because they want to draw as much attention as possible to the universal potential of the unfinished past.

• Michael Baers Concerning Matters to be Left for a Later Date, Part 3 of 4 (Guest-Starring Alexandra Croitoru and Stefan Tiron)

  
  

• Gean Moreno & Ernesto Oroza Learning from Little Haiti

  Elsewhere, the seats of discarded chairs are collected over a couple of months and glued to a set of milk crates to produce a makeshift social space for afternoon domino games under a blooming Poinciana tree in a backyard. These are examples of a process that is activated so often that to continue to approach the phenomenon as a series of isolated instances—as this or that retrofitted object or clever solution—is to miss the point. What we have here is a system, even if a self-organized and improvised one, that spontaneously reshapes urban spaces.

• Hans Ulrich Obrist In Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem

  HUO: You have written a lot on life, not survival. What is the difference?
  RV: Survival is budgeted life. The system of exploitation of nature and man, starting in the Middle Neolithic with intensive farming, caused an involution in which creativity—a quality specific to humans—was supplanted by work, by the production of a covetous power. Creative life, as had begun to unfold during the Paleolithic, declined and gave way to a brutish struggle for subsistence. From then on, predation, which defines animal behavior, became the generator of all economic mechanisms.

• Marion von Osten Architecture Without Architects—Another Anarchist Approach

  The function of modernist architecture as both symbol and organizational model for the “new modern man” in Europe and America, as well as in the colonies, must be highlighted here. Housing and urban planning projects symbolized a new society, representing a modern, industrialized way of living, working, and consuming. Moreover, urban planning as such was an invention of Euro-American modernity, having emerged towards the end of the eighteenth century, in times of aggressive colonial expansion and the advancement of a new world order.

• Dieter Roelstraete After the Historiographic Turn: Current Findings

  Perhaps the challenge of this process of theorizing and naming—to theorize and name the present state of art, rather than merrily applaud its excess and heterogeneity—is precisely what is needed right now, both in (and for) art and art theory. It seems perfectly legitimate—in fact, I would say it is simply urgent—to ask oneself the following question: what, ten or fifteen years from now, will art critics, historians, and theorists think or say when they look back upon the artistic climate of the noughties?

• Mariana Silva & Pedro Neves Marques The Escape Route’s Design: Assessment of the Impact of Current Aesthetics on History and a Comparative Reading Based on an Example Close to the City of Berlin

  Therefore, we do not propose a beginning and an end to this joint initiative, or indeed the direction or accumulation of knowledge aimed at a productive extraction of conclusions. The exercise aims above all at repositioning proposals, at a productive re-evaluation, which is the main exercise in the egalitarian negotiation of value, eminently redundant and ultimately reinforcing the legitimacy of the act, the proposition which supports it, radical in itself and desperately civic.