Issue 1
This fall [NAME] Publications launched dispatches, an online journal that explores the linkages among forms of cultural production and the enduring colonial logic of capitalist financialization, capture, and erasure of bodies and land. Published in Spanish and English, each issue of the journal offers a variety of contributions that analyze emergent tendencies that cast their lot with anti-extractivist and climate struggles, alert us to cultural and territorial dispossession, highlight new forms of resistance and epistemological reconfigurations, and in the process offer a prism through which to read the complex configurations that define our contemporary moment. Throughout the winter, dispatches will be releasing contributions by T.J. Demos, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Angela Mitropoulos, Godofredo Pereira, and Stephanie Wakefield.
Via the work of Allora & Calzadilla, Ursula Biemann, and Angela Melitopoulos, T.J. Demos’s essay addresses extraction, its visual cultures, as well as the politics and aesthetics of consolidating forms of resistance. In a similar vein, Irmgard Emmelhainz revisits the historical legacy of aesthetic realism as represented by the work of Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler in order to employ it as a lens through which to consider the state of contemporary political art. In “Lifeboat Capitalism, Catastrophism, Borders” Angela Mitropoulos guides us through the resurgence of the Far Right and the theoretical contradictions that bolster its xenophobic ideologies. Godofredo Pereira looks at the wide-spread use of exhumations in the Americas over the last few decades in order to highlight the potential for new political configurations that emerges as a consequence. And finally, Stephanie Wakefield traces new modes of experimentation as cities become “first responders” to climate upheavals. Each of these contributions furthers the journal’s aim to engage cultural and everyday practices that, moving beyond a “sensing” of the world coming undone, search for operational capacities that extend political and actionable traction.
