voices
Urban Front Voices
Urban Front Voices is a space to disseminate writings and voices related to our projects and the strategic lines of action that define our work. These include articles generating opinion, opening debates, and proposing alternatives. It also serves to share our insights and commitment to different localities across cities as well as to open a dialog on critical issues across different social, cultural, economic and political circles. UF Voices seeks to intervene in current debates, bring about new perspectives, and propose new practices based on our own translocal experience and diagnoses.
podcasts
Politics in Motion is an anti-capitalist media cooperative that strives to educate, challenge, and motivate, pushing the very boundaries of critical discourse in pursuit of inspiring radical change, actively informing the growth and development of mass movements fighting for social and environmental justice.
A radical exploration into the capitalist contradictions of our urban world, and the many anti-capitalist futures to come.
op-ed
Ask any workers in the nonprofit arts sector — maybe after they have had a few drinks — and they will tell you that arts funding in this country is a mess.
Pablo Caballero Moreira
Hoy, una frase común es decir que la epidemia del coronavirus no solo pone a prueba el sistema de salud a nivel mundial, sino que pone a prueba al propio sistema; y que esta crisis genera la expectativa de cómo volver a la normalidad. Se me ocurre pensar en voz alta: “y si no volvemos?” pero no lo digo solo como pregunta, lo hago como un desafío. ¿No será que la anterior “normalidad” era el problema?
BOOKS
Studies into Darkness emerged from a series of seminars guided by acclaimed artist, filmmaker, and activist Amar Kanwar at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School convened by the editors of this volume, Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich. This collection of newly commissioned texts, artist projects, and historic resources examines aspects of freedom of speech informed by recent debates around hate speech, censorship, sexism, and racism.
This volume from BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, combines handbook, dictionary, and anthology to investigate artistic practice aimed at achieving social change. With text and visual essays, definitions, exercises, interviews, and images, the contributors envision a praxis that is committed to experimenting with aesthetics and politics in ways that go beyond the conventions of Western modernity. These are practices that are interdisciplinary, theoretically informed, and politically driven, offering ways of “being together otherwise.” Catalyzed by the work of Urban Front co-founder Jeanne van Heeswijk, this book focuses on radicalizing civic processes, Toward the Not-Yet imagines and enacts alternative ways of conceiving the present and future.
articles
La puesta del sol aquí en Asunción regala un engañoso espectáculo visual: como fotografía el enorme sol color rojo ocultándose sobre las mansas aguas del Rio Paraguay mientras una bandada de patos nativos llamados mbigua posa sobre un banco de arena en medio del rio; ciertamente es una gran toma. Pero detrás de ese paisaje se ocultan la histórica bajante del rio, y el humo de los enormes incendios forestales que azotan la región y dan color rojizo al sol y un aspecto nublado casi permanente a la ciudad.
As a transcontinental assembly of fellow-travelers united by a shared vision within the urban front, we unequivocally denounce the ruthless and systematic ongoing acts of murder, forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, starvation, and the unprecedented urban destruction inflicted upon the Palestinian people by the state of Israel, its military, security apparatuses, and complicit elements within both the public and private sectors of society.
Pablo Caballero Moreira
Todo es polvo y cenizas en el Humedal Entre Cerros; todo es polvo y cenizas en Achupallas ese sector popular arrasado por los incendios de hace unas semanas. Todo es polvo y cenizas en Viña del Mar …
David Bravo
Innovation in affordable and sustainable housing policies may be one of the best recipes to tackle the social and environmental crises in Spain.
La innovación en políticas de vivienda asequible y sostenible puede ser una de las mejores recetas para afrontar las crisis social y ambiental que España tiene por delante.
Laura Raicovich
For museums to become more equitable spaces, the histories and structures that underpin them must be confronted, starting with recognizing that museums have never been neutral. This necessary evolution is not a transition towards an ideology but, rather, a recognition of past and current ideological frameworks that are unjust and exclusionary.
Laura Raicovich
This is the first article in a series by Laura Raicovich, the recipient of Hyperallergic’s inaugural Journalism Fellowship for Curators, made possible by Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation. Today, she connects Anand Giridharadas’s latest book on philanthropy and late-capitalism with useful questions about how cultural institutions function today. (Reposted from Hyperallergic)
Laia Forné / Jaime Palomera
Hace unos días, mientras nos confinábamos para salvar vidas, se presentó públicamente una especie de patronal de los rentistas. Una asociación impulsada por los grandes fondos e inmobiliarias pero que dice representar a los pequeños propietarios de viviendas en alquiler. ¿A qué responde este movimiento, en plena pandemia?
David Harvey
It is a difficult time to know exactly how to respond to what is happening. Normally in a situation of this kind, we anti-capitalists would be out on the streets demonstrating and agitating. Instead, I am in a frustrating situation of personal isolation at a moment when the time calls for collective forms of action. But as Marx famously put it, we cannot make history under circumstance of our own choosing. So we have to figure out how best to make use of the opportunities we do have.