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Take heed that thou wash said the Angel to Dante before opening the gates to the Purgatory with two keys, a silver key for remorse and a gold key for reconciliation. Irrespective of where the path leads henceforth, this is where virus Covid-19 has placed us. 
 

Published at Popmatters. Read there.

Herbie Hancock and the Body Politics of Pop

Rockit by Herbie Hancock, an unlikely sound track in 1983, arrived as a completely tangential entry into the world of pop. But besides reaching the Billboard #1 dance hit that summer, it broke a number of other thresholds as well. Hancock's single was the first by a black artist to be aired on MTV...

Published at Popmatters. Read there.

The Prefabrication of Utopia, East Berlin

Neu Hohenschönhausen 2019

Familiar as I am with the paradoxes of life in modern industrial housing, that the more humans are packed into concrete compartments the more atomised they become, such spaces are conceived through ideas about modern utopias and socialist dreams. Irrespective of whether it's the banlieues of Paris, or the Stalinist mega-estates of the former Soviet bloc, cast in each and every cubic millimetre of concrete is a strain of utopia. Nowhere was it as bold or as advanced as in the vast estates of the former East German republic.
 

Published at Popmatters Read there.

Revisiting Archives: Democracy Village

  Parliament Square 02.07.2010

The 20th of July this year marked the tenth anniversary of the eviction of Democracy Village from Parliament Square. The tent occupation of Parliament Square began May Day 2010 and was evicted 20 July 2010. To recall that spell of time, the 81 days, is to reflect on how the world of activism was about to change.

Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter
June 2020 London

  07.06.20 Archive

To understand the month of June 2020, a month in pandemic time enfolded between Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter requires a reading of its political space as a double emergency. For what intervened in the lock-down of Covid-19 could only be described as another state of emergency, a People's Emergency.

(in pandemic time)

The purpose of this writing is to make a clearing in the time of this pandemic, a space for a clarity of confrontation between the claims to violence in it. The claim between natural violence and state violence – or between the divine violence of nature and mythic violence of law as Walter Benjamin puts it in his Critique of Violence.

Republished in Critical Legal Thinking

We have all become prisoners of the State. Wherever we are across the whole planet. It's a time like no other time in human history or natural history. Is it a force of Nature as virus Covid-19 that has brought this about; or is it something to do with the nature of our State?

virus Covid-19

The arrival of the corona virus Covid-19 in Europe was staggered, uneven, belated and sudden. The first reported case of infection may have been on the 27th of January 2020 in Germany, but the virus as a political body arrived in Europe sometime at the start of March.

Afterword on work submitted for Territorium Tijuana July 2019
Catalogues & Archives 05/11

The word territorium, territory in Latin, recalls the territorium of Imperial Rome – from the time when all roads led to Rome. To imagine territorium today as a sort of twinning of Tijuana and London is to lay bare the reality of the contemporary “post-Imperial” territorium.