Activism

What does it mean to strike art? A recent upswing of 'art strikes', from the actions against Trump’s inauguration, to the covering of works of art in solidarity with the global climate strikes, has been accompanied by the reappraisal of actions from the past, like Lee Lozano's General Strike Piece. For May Day 2020, Stewart Martin has assembled every case he could find, in the hope that it will offer some answers

Woodbine recently published a text on getting organised within the pandemic, ‘Mutual Aid, Social Distancing, and Dual Power in the State of Emergency’.¹ They have since transformed their space into a mutual aid organising hub for their neighbourhood of Ridgewood, Queens, and have partnered with a local homeless outreach organisation to start a food pantry.

The austerity programme imposed by the IMF after Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis, far from imposing debt universally as Maurizio Lazzarato’s figure of the ‘indebted man’ would have it, hit women hardest. George Jepson revisits this history to extract the figure of the ‘indebted woman’ it forged and the collective female body of protest that erupted as a result.

Artists in the City is a deep red and surprisingly meaty anthology covering 50 years of SPACE Studios’ activities in London. Josephine Berry’s review balances the claims for a struggle for freedom in the arts with a critical eye towards the emergent modes of the neoliberal city

‘the present is not sustainable and any futures will require many hands and a lot of rebuilding’

– David Morris, ‘DIY’, Artists in the City

Taking the case of Tunisia’s Dignity Revolution, Oana Parvan examines the structural connections between the growing global category of those designated ‘surplus life’ by the neo-imperial economy – and by extension, condemned to social and often actual death – and the preconditions of revolution

How do we turn the normalisation of precarity into a basis for collective action? While the social category ‘precariat’ grafted over differences, Isabell Lorey’s new book imagines how interlocking differentials of insecurity can be harnessed as a weapon of struggle. Review by Sarah Charalambides