Essays
12th March 2021
Expansive and exclusive is the paradoxical mentality of the frontier from Trump's Wall to Offa's Dyke. Can anybody live on a non-existent border, and how have they done it? Owen Dudley Edwards looks deep into a line of no breadth
3rd March 2021
In both Daisy Lafarge's poetry and prose -see her 'Metaphor as Parasite' in our Hollow issue - consciousness seems to float seamlessly in a fermentation of biology and minerology. Rochelle Roberts reviews her latest poetry collection here and finds it 'full of, and without air'.
26th January 2021
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.
23rd January 2021
A major thinker and innovator in the understanding of the significance of Cognitive Capitalism, US artist and activist Warren Neidich has worked across fields from neurobiology and psychology to art and architecture. Here he probes, proposes and defines neuroaesthetics as an area of critical , politically engaged and creative thought.
14th January 2021
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
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
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
'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...
‘Ní Rabhas ach Seal/ It was only a Matter of Time’ by Noah Rose