This hope no doubt seems naive, even impossible, to many. Nevertheless, some of us must rather wildly hold to it, refusing to believe that the structures that now exist will exist forever. For this, we need our poets and our dreamers, the untamed fools, the kind who know how to organise.
–Judith Butler, 13 October 20231
Since 7 October, across European public spheres, rampant censorship and self-censorship has infected institutions and been internalised by cultural producers. The refusal by western governments and media to use words pronounced by the world’s leading human rights bodies to name the decades-long occupation and apartheid and the unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people also pervades the cultural sectors. The expression of grief, anger and sadness at the killing in Palestine and Israel is even contested, while the basic humanitarian appeal for a lasting ceasefire has been opposed. Consequently, the agents of the European political and public spheres are restricting freedom of expression, rather than mediating conversations across differences.
Censorship and a heightened contestation of language reveals how interpellation is acting on, and within, public spheres, whereby the ideological positions of state and media infrastructures become internalised by citizens and articulated as their own. As this interpellation takes hold and actors are reduced to passive rather than thinking subjects, the capacity of public spheres to be shaped or moved by discourse and debate is at stake. At the same time, the global role of Europe has come under question, as it has failed to adopt any constructive or even meaningful position, either displaying its underlying acceptance of dehumanization or actively taking the side of colonial domination. International alliances and relations – including those within our network of museums, universities and arts organisations – are confronted anew with how the traces of coloniality and imperial violence, exerted from multiple directions, cross their structures.
This is where we all are – even as we are touched in different ways and to different degrees. We, the editors of L’Internationale Online, are unwilling, or unable, to write with an institutional voice, assumed or imposed. That voice, wherever it may be located, is alien. We write, however, in an attempt to find some common expression among specific, situated and generational experiences, with the aim to mobilise critical voices and to work and think collectively, beyond the interpellation of governments and the media.
The demands of the Palestinian liberation movements on cultural sectors are clear. If our institutions cannot meet them, we must acknowledge the failures and limits of our spaces, entangled as they are in broader political mechanisms. The immediate path, then, for a publishing platform like L’Internationale Online, is to utter, to speak, to work with subjectivities and situated knowledges – our own and others’. The material we plan to publish over the coming weeks and months will not be able to adequately address the extent of the daily tragedies, the contortions of debate, the historical implications of witnessing and speaking to genocide. Still, the texts, films and sounds offer a possibility to work in excess of institutional positions and to contribute to an ongoing reshaping of public spheres and critical discourses.
In addition, we see the long-term task for the cultural sphere to be to reformulate the vocabularies that have acted as the scaffolding for rhetorical frames and political positions within artistic fields, in order to overcome the weaponizing and imposed foreclosure of language. Any attempts at this will have to foster a wide appeal, building a popular front that could have the approach, the attention and the drive to effectuate such change, while knowing that such moves might lead to a fragile, tumultuous phase of in-betweenness.
Following Donna Haraway’s call to ‘think we must; we must think’ – as a struggle against Denkverbot and the shutting down of discursive spaces and practices – and after Fred Moten’s summoning of ‘collective study’, we embark on multiple lines of inquiry to navigate the shifting grounds and registers of the present conjuncture. Among these many trajectories we will turn to feminist decolonial thought and praxis to analyse the ongoing case of Israeli settler colonialism and its military and carceral regimes. We will seek to draw attention to the asymmetries in power relations and the instrumentalization of rhetorical frames, their origins and their consequences in the European context. And in a forthcoming article Ovidiu Tichindeleanu outlines the repression within European public spheres and the entanglement of this with imperial histories. As acts of solidarity, we will platform the work of artists, poets, musicians and film-makers working past the limits of language to think through the present and its myriad implications and inflections. The publishing here will be necessarily partial and incomplete. It is not approached as a declaration, or an answer. Rather, to recall Audre Lorde, we approach it as an exercise in finding the words we do not have.
The views and opinions published here mirror the principles of academic freedom and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the L'Internationale confederation and its members.
Related activities
The Soils Project
The Soils Project, is part of the eponymous, long term research initiative involving Tarrawara Museum of Art, Wurundjeri Country, Australia, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands and Struggles for Sovereignty, a collective based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. It works through specific and situated practices that consider soil, as both metaphor and matter. A further iteration of the project will open at the Van Abbemuseum in May - September 2024 as part of Museum of the Commons.
The Soils Project has been in development since 2018. An international collaboration between three organisations, and several artists, curators, writers and activists, the project has manifested in various iterations over several years including a three-part public webinar series titled The Soils Project: groundwork, and a two-week workshop, titled The Soils Project: On Country, for participating curators and artists. With a curatorium comprising arts workers from TarraWarra Museum of Art, the Van Abbemuseum, and Struggles for Sovereignty, the project’s approach seeks and facilitates opportunities to listen to diverse voices and perspectives around notions of caring for land, soil and sovereign territories.
Developed from this journey, The Soils Project’s forthcoming exhibition will embrace the deep histories of each participant’s location, examining the multiplicity of landscapes and environments, and the impact of colonisations and global industries on cultural heritage, land management and traditional knowledges.
Kyiv Biennial 2023
L’Internationale Confederation is a proud partner of this year’s edition of Kyiv Biennial.
Where are the Oases?
PEI OBERT seminar
with Kader Attia, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Emily Jacir, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall and Françoise Vergès
An oasis is the potential for life in an adverse environment.
Anti-imperialism in the 20th century and anti-imperialism today: similarities and differences
PEI OBERT seminar
Lecture by Ramón Grosfoguel
In 1956, countries that were fighting colonialism by freeing themselves from both capitalism and communism dreamed of a third path, one that did not align with or bend to the politics dictated by Washington or Moscow. They held their first conference in Bandung, Indonesia.
Cinema as Assembly
Cinema as Assembly investigates cinema as a space of social gathering and political engagement that prefigures and enacts forms of living beyond colonial capitalism.
Maria Lugones Decolonial Summer School
Recalling Earth: Decoloniality and Demodernity
Course Directors: Prof. Walter Mignolo & Dr. Rolando Vázquez
Recalling Earth and learning worlds and worlds-making will be the topic of chapter 14th of the María Lugones Summer School that will take place at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
Archive of the Conceptual Art of Odesa in the 1980s
The research project turns to the beginning of 1980s, when conceptual art circle emerged in Odesa, Ukraine. Artists worked independently and in collaborations creating the first examples of performances, paradoxical objects and drawings.
Summer School: Our Many Easts
Our Many Easts summer school is organised by Moderna galerija in Ljubljana in partnership with ZRC SAZU (the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) as part of the L’Internationale project Museum of the Commons.
Open Call – Summer School: Our Many Easts
Our Many Easts summer school takes place in Ljubljana 24–30 August and the application deadline is 15 March. Courses will be held in English and cover topics such as the legacy of the Eastern European avant-gardes, archives as tools of emancipation, the new “non-aligned” networks, art in times of conflict and war, ecology and the environment.
Song for Many Movements: Scenes of Collective Creation
An ephemeral experiment in which the ground floor of MACBA becomes a stage for encounters, conversations and shared listening.
Related contributions
…and the Earth along. Tales about the making, remaking and unmaking of the world.
Statement on the attack on Kakhovka Water Dam
The Kitchen, an Introduction to Subversive Film with Nick Aikens, Reem Shilleh and Mohanad Yaqubi
The Repressive Tendency within the European Public Sphere
Troubles with the East(s)
Right now, today, we must say that Palestine is the centre of the world
Body Counts, Balancing Acts and the Performativity of Statements
Until Liberation I: Learning Palestine
Until Liberation II: Learning Palestine
In solidarity with all the people affected by the earthquake in Turkiye and Syria
Public letter on WHW termination as directors of Kunsthalle Wien
Statement in support of documenta fifteen
Never Again War!
Statement on the dismissal of Alistair Hudson
L’Internationale Public Statement on the recent events at MACBA
L’Internationale statement: Towards a healthy society
Standing up for the rights of all artists to free and independent expression
Tearing Down Bridges – Turkey's Withdrawal from Creative Europe
Of Cats and Canary Birds: Statement in Support of Lunds Konsthall
How Much Austerity Can Europe Endure?
L'Internationale supports Walid Raad, Andrew Ross and Ashok Sukumaran after the recent ban on their entry to the UAE
L'Internationale statement in support of the decision to open "La Bestia y el soberano" (The Beast and the Sovereign)
Artists for Kobanê: An online auction to benefit refugees from Kobanê
L'Internationale statement in support of MNCARS
New online platform for research, resources and discussion
The Veil of Peace
Editorial: Towards Collective Study in Times of Emergency
Song for Many Movements. Opening Performance Live on Radio Alhara
We Have Been Here Forever. Palestinian Poets Write Back
Indra's Web
Diary of a Crossing
The Silence Has Been Unfolding For Too Long
One Day, Freedom Will Be
