The myth of “democratic design” and why the concept never should be used again.
There has been an inflation of the concept of ‘democracy’. City-planning, public talks, town squares, and design in general, are today termed ‘democratic’. It is not surprising, who does not want to be democratic? But as Jeff Werner, professor of art history, writes in the book Postdemokratisk...
The Remote Sensation of Disintegration
In the coastal wetlands of the US state of Louisiana, the fossil fuel industry maintains the spatial, environmental, and economic logics and landscapes of colonialism and slavery. There, two hundred of the nation’s most polluting petrochemical plants and refineries occupy the footprints of fallow sl...
Notes on Degrowth and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
In the April 2022 issue of Monthly Review, degrowth scholars laid out a vision for an ecosocialist degrowth. They reasoned that, fundamentally, degrowth “requires the social appropriation of the main means of (re)production and a democratic, participatory, ecological planning.”(1) That, only when “p...
The Silence of Carpets
Carpets and art share a long and interwoven past. Historically there was no distinction between the two. Carpets have been a legitimate medium for both art and artistic expression, yet something changed in the western world during early modernity. The Danish artist and weaver Anna Thommesen was well...
Look Up: Climate Change Is Not a Crisis, It’s a Beating
We are ruining the planet to such an extent that it prompted scientists to proclaim the start of a new geological period. The Anthropocene, they called it, emphasising the influence of humanity on the environment. “Influence” is perhaps too soft a term to describe what George Monbiot calls a “full s...
Oikos: The Home As a Cosmogram
Seen in its pure materiality, as a giant rock speeding through outer space, our planet can be examined through the lenses of astronomy, geology, physics and chemistry. If we focus on the thin layer of life on its surface, however, we need to resort to a particular branch of biology, known as ‘ecolog...
Growthocene: On the Origins of the ‘Fairy Tale of Eternal Economic Growth’
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet, I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth...
In Times of Accelerated Change, to What Flag Do You Pledge Allegiance?
When Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, as a way of marking the territory he put a flag on it. After all, it’s human nature to fight for power by creating compelling spectacles, to impose dominance by using symbols as an extension of our thought and vision. We will never know if that spectacle was...
Disco, Donna & Donna
Disco is not merely a genre of dance music, but a complex subculture holding progressive political beliefs. Alongside it’s glittering clothes and sexy moves, disco came to rise in the United States in the 1970s, evolving from the well-known international sounds of Motown, rooted in New York and...