Civic

26th January 2021

The Uncanny City
by
Pippa Goldschmidt

What happens when a cataclysm brings about the loss of a city's populations and of its historic buildings and neighbourhoods? Can they be rebuilt in reality, or refound in fragments of memory, in art, in history, in literature in documentation? There is something strangely unsettling about reproductions of historical realities, and the relationship of disappeared history to current day realities. Pippa Goldschmidt examines the case with the help of Freud's notion of the Uncanny.
14th January 2021

All you need to know :
Election and Insurrection in the USA
by Owen Dudley Edwards

January 6th, Epiphany in the Christian calendar, is most commonly marked here by the taking down of the pagan midwinter decorations. This year, on the day that gifts were brought from the east for the baby Jesus, some strange kings and magicians visited the home of the American Republic. Owen Dudley Edwards tells us all we need to know, and more, about that 2020 election, and then, the Epiphany at the Capitol.
8th January 2021

Alien of Extraordinary Ability
by
Gavin Mottram

Walls are being built, straits policed, high seas patrolled: in the frantic seeking after sovereignty the stranger is become a foreigner and foreigners are recast as aliens ... Storm the ramparts of the Capitol then, and ask not what we have done to them, but what they could possibly do for us? Gavin Mottram attempts to make an intervention...
2nd January 2021

Feminism and Film: A Dialogue
by Núria Araüna Baro and David Archibald

An epistolary transliteration of a performative dialogue on the possibility of building a non-fiction cinema for the memory of women (as political subjects) – and the role of male academics in that process. Originally presented at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Catalunya by Núria Araüna Baro and David Archibald.
23rd December 2020

Feminist City :
City of Possibility
Andrea Gibbons

'Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies', runs the blurb on on Leslie Kerns' book feminist city published by Verso. Writer and housing activist Andrea Gibbons takes a critical read, and ponders on why our cities are still made for and by 'mostly men', and what are the possibilities for other, better cities for all sorts of bodies and beyond the already charted pathways...
16th December 2020

Australian War Crimes : The Importance of Holding Oneself to Account 75 years after Nuremberg by Shannon Maree Torrens

The Brereton Report, commonly named so after the leader of investigations, NSW Supreme Court Judge Paul Brereton, was published in November 2020, seventy-five years after the Nuremberg Trials began. The Report found evidence of war crimes committed by the Australian Defence Force troops in Afghanistan between 2009-13. Shannon Maree Torrens discusses the situation in Australia. In an age where 'sovereignty' is much discussed (and much superficially in Brexit) this piece shows us something of where the life and death issues of the question really lie.