South as a State of Mind documenta 14, #1

South as a State of Mind #6 [documenta 14 #1]

Possession and dispossession, displacement and debt—it seems like the stories that condition our present are inextricably born out of the stories that conditioned our past. The first of four special issues of South as a State of Mind, temporarily reconfigured as the documenta 14 journal, examines forms and figures of displacement and dispossession, and the modes of resistance—aesthetic, political, literary, biological—found within them. New essays, both literary and visual, consider dispossession as a historical and contemporary condition, and its connections to archaeology and architecture, coloniality and performativity, debt and imperialism, provenance and restitution, feminism and protest. Featured too are historical documents of displacement and debt, as well as a photo essay on the building and burning of knowledge that explores libraries and temples, our edifices of learning and power, as emblems of hegemony as well as shelters for ideas. While the intensity of our present political conditions and the challenges of our global economic world order cannot be overstated (“Am I exaggerating? Perhaps I am under-exaggerating,” as poet Bhanu Kapil writes in our pages), still the means of protest are rich, diverse. The collective of voices here, and the often dissident and marginalized histories they limn and draw from, offer an alternative cartography and chorus; in so doing, we imagine that they might allow us to delineate alternatives to our untenable present and unclear future. “The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot,” writes Audre Lorde. We hope so.


CONTENTS
Editors’ Letter
Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk
What Foundations Have Been Laid for Them: The Building and Burning of Knowledge
Pierre Bal-Blanc, Marina Fokidis, Quinn Latimer, Yorgos Makris, Marta Minujín
Like a Riot: The Politics of Forgetfulness, Relearning the South, and the Island of Dr. Moreau
Françoise Vergès
Restif de la Bretonne’s State Brothel: Sperm, Sovereignty, and Debt in the Eighteenth-Century Utopian Construction of Europe
Paul B. Preciado
The Construction of Southern Ruins, or Instructions for Dealing with Debt
Aristide Antonas
Incarceration
Brandon Shimoda
The Invisible Collection
Stefan Zweig
The Indelible Presence of the Gurlitt Estate:
Adam Szymczyk in conversation with Alexander Alberro, Maria Eichhorn, and Hans Haacke
Mare Nostrum
Miriam Cahn
I Had Nowhere to Go
Jonas Mekas
We Refugees
Hannah Arendt
Mutations and Deletions (3): For Ban
Bhanu Kapil
Volume Eleven (A Flaw in the Algorithm of Cosmopolitanism)
Naeem Mohaiemen
“Elections Change Nothing”: On the Misery of the Democracy of Equivalence
Angela Dimitrakaki
A United Front Against the Debt
Thomas Sankara
Representing Misery: Courbet’s Beggar Woman
Linda Nochlin
Two Poems
Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke
The Haunted City
Peter Friedl
Édouard Glissant’s Worldmentality: An Introduction to One World in Relation
Manthia Diawara
Always Struggle with the Object, Always Rewrite the World
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Contributors
Marx and Stilinović
Sven Stilinović