“Three generations of white South African men were bound together at that table. Vermuelen was the first generation. He defined Africa, made it safe for Basson to defile. I was the last generation, the last to grow up in segregated neighborhoods. Between us was the silent photograph of Wouter Basson. Like a distant father, Basson was absent at the dining table.” – Henk Rossouw (Hole in the White ‘Hood). Also Mahmood Mamdani on Bantu Education at UCT, Gael Reagon on sisterhood, Binyavanga Wainaina on dis-covering Kenya, Gaston Zossou on African intellectuals and more…
Cover:
Strange Fruit by Lewis Allen
Instituting: space-making, refusal, and organizing in the arts and beyond eds. by Gigi Argyropoulou in cooperation with Olga Schubert and Kostas Tzimoulis (Archive Books and HKW, 2022)
This publication seeks to continue previous trans- formative moments, movements, and encounters, as a call for new densities through visible and invisible plottings. Editorials tend to focus on the work that is going to follow that comprises a complete volume on the subject. However, this edition cannot but start by acknowledging dependencies, connections, and thus its incompleteness as it is pointing towards potential constellations of practice. Engaging with ongoing questions of possible infrastructures in situations of brokenness—as Lauren Berlant notes in the opening quote—this volume brings together practices, ways of being together, of both fleeing and inhabiting spaces. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten propose “commitment to the impermanence of form because form is to be used, like an everyday thing” and that by using it you “deform it . . . acceding to and enacting its transformation, in and for the everyday.” In this publication, instituting is discussed as a continuous process that is integral to the everyday, making and tearing apart, using and deforming. In a sense, this book hopes to function as an infrastructure for use. An incomplete composition that has already started in many places.