The Funambulist
The Funambulist does not understand architecture as an authored design of inhabitable sculptures, but rather as a discipline that organizes bodies in space. With this perspective, we have attempted to formulate spatial approaches to anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, queer, trans, and feminist struggles in the hope to create a platform where activist, academic, and practitioner voices can build solidarities across geographical scales. Through essays, epistolary exchanges, interviews, artworks, and design projects, we are assembling an ongoing archive for these multitudes of struggles. We are trying to imagine, through our practice, ways to make care central to our quest for justice, and not render it as a mere appendage to wider narratives.
Over the last eight years, we have been bringing out the magazine every two months, and have published 45 issues so far. Additionally, we have four podcast shows in English and French, with over 200 episodes (and counting), where a constellation of conversations has allowed us to learn from our brilliant guests.
Our more than 600 contributors include Zoé Samudzi, Rasheedah Phillips, Sinthujan Varatharajah, Nick Estes, Tshepo Madlingozi, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Christina Sharpe, Paul Preciado, Samia Henni, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Menna Agha, Bouchra Khalili, Tao Leigh Goffe, Lina Attalah, Karim Kattan, Brenna Bhandar, Katherine McKittrick, and many more.
We are trying to sustain an accessible model of publishing following one rule: when one of our issues runs out of print, we make it accessible to everyone online. So far we have placed a total of 34 out of our 45 issues in full open-access! Our podcast shows and online editorials are also permanently accessible to all.
With the exception of a few specific projects, we are 100 percent funded by our readers. Subscriptions, in particular, constitute the backbone of the support we receive (over 72 percent of our incomes). If you believe the editorial line we articulate is important and you have the means to do so, you can support us by purchasing a subscription.
Since March 2022, we have been enjoying publishing a new format of the magazine designed by Walid Bouchouchi. “The Land,” “Decentering the US,” “Algerian Independence and Global Revolution,” “Diasporas,” and “The Desert” reflect on our ways to organize and embrace the seed of care that fuses political imaginaries and internationalist solidarities from Afro-diasporic, indentured, exiled, and landless communities to the anti-colonial lifeworlds in the Sahara, the Atacama, the Gibson, the Kgalagadi, the Dhofar, and the Taklimakan deserts, from the pluriverse of queerness, caste, and indigeneity to the fights against settler-colonial land dispossession and extractivism in Ecuador, Alaska, the Caribbean, and Turtle Island, from the Jewish, Eelam Tamil, Chinese, and Cape Verdean diasporas to the solidarity with the Algerian Revolution on the African Continent, Ireland, Palestine, and Yugoslavia.
Subscribe to The Funambulist here.
The Funambulist team: Léopold Lambert, editor-in-chief / Shivangi Mariam Raj, head of communications. Advisory board: Caroline Honorien, Flora Hergon, Margarida Nzuzi Waco, Nadia El Hakim, Noelle Geller.
