Austerity and Utopia is the first in a series looking at other potential narratives for mapping our current landscape through redefining the social, political and economic terms of engagement. It was planned a long time before the pandemic. Our current situation was unimaginable just a few months ago, but that it was not easily predictable does not mean that there were no elements pointing to a possible crisis of this nature. Yet the collective search for measures of care and climate justice in the attempt to redefine the neoliberal understanding of austerity and utopia – two major points of the current socio-economic formation – becomes even more pressing. The contributions to this issue have been written and edited to a high degree in confinement, at a time when the desire for things to go back to normal is ever-present and much discussed. But is ‘normality' what we really want? And if so, whose normality shall we return to? We need to reimagine the role that art and cultural institutions play in the production of a new set of relations and other modes of production and distribution. One can no longer think in terms of abundance, in terms of the desire of accumulation and the capitalist utopia, which only creates inequality and exhaustion. Undoubtedly, the world is in a situation of fatal economic disaster, crisis and breakdown, but austerity as another means of accumulation must not be the solution. Social and political scientist Athena Athanasiou speaks about dispossession and the unsustainable consequences of neoliberal management over life itself, ‘as much as current neoliberal austerity is injurious for most people’. Moving from global historical events to phantasmatic world history, this edition gathers analysis and engagement with the various contradictions and possible emancipations that the term ‘austerity’ generates, together with the radical, transnational desire to unravel utopian promises. In an effort to expand conceptions of austerity and utopia beyond the economic paradigm, we enter into a different epistemological realm which recognises a multitude of knowledges. Any call for imagining another world must involve artists, performers, composers, writers and thinkers. This thought-provoking exercise, then, seeks to elaborate on other understandings of austerity and its relations to utopia.

Living with Ghosts: Legacies of Colonialism and Fascism, is a constellation of essays, conversations and images that point to the manner in which the legacies of colonialism and fascism reverberate in our present conjuncture. The impulse for producing this issue was a question of whether it may be possible to trace the connections between the violences of the colonial project through the horrors of fascism to current forms of racism, identitarianism and populism – what we initially called 'an arc' of colonialism-nationalism-fascism.

These shifts are palpable in the contemporary political uncertainties expressed in this collection of texts. Each of the contributors reflect on the specificities of their environment through their lived experiences, through their artistic practices, or reflections on the curatorial climate. They seek to maintain a space for critical engagement and political criticism. Furthermore, this issue considers the layers of historical conditions that inform states of 'belonging' and 'sovereignty' (even 'citizenry' as a debatable proposition) in Europe. What becomes evident from these various contributions is that there is no sudden or surprising development towards the right – too often expressed an 'inexplicable phenomena' of contemporary society. They instead address it as a slow and steady movement based on historical events and political terms of reference which have remain unresolved and have again returned, this time through the opportunism advanced and fuelled by the structures of capitalism that connect Europe to Russia and America. Each is a case study that recognises the patterns of violence and inequality evident in the political structures of colonialism and fascism.

The importance of women's rights have sprung up in movements across the globe in the past few years, exacerbated by increasing social, environmental, technological and political polarities. Feminisms is the sixth in a series of online publications published by L'Internationale Online.

This publication examines how women, or those who identify as female have been addressing not only inequalities - in reproductive rights, sexual rights, and in the right to equal pay - but also how plural feminisms have been and are being consistently re-thought, and how art museums can work with and respond to issues surrounding women's rights.

Feminisms play a crucial role in what L'Internationale does - not only as a way to live and work with women, but as a framework for continually re-assessing the institution's position for its publics. What is prevalent in this publication is a need to ask how we deal with emotion - not only as individuals, but as institutions and within bureaucracies. We hope that this publication can serve to raise discussions and to develop institutional practices that take into account our different publics, through a feminist lens.

Read the new publication Living with Ghosts: Legacies of Colonialism and Fascism.

The editorial board began discussing this e-publication in the aftermath of summer 2015. The decision to put together this fifth edition, titled "Subjects and Objects in Exile", was prompted by the many tragic displacements, fates and deaths of those seeking asylum in Europe and elsewhere. These enforced mass exiles are the result of civil wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The appalling and dehumanising management by European powers is having worrying economic, cultural, political and juridical implications. In this publication, we would like to address what has come to be called, not un-problematically we would argue, the European "refugee crisis". We do so in the shadow of recent and ongoing terrorist attacks, rising nationalism and Britain's imminent notification to leave the European Union.

The e-publication Decolonising Archives aims to show how archives bear testimony to what was, even more so than collections. Archives present documents that allow one to understand what happened and in which order. Today Internet technology, combined with rapid moves made on the geopolitical chessboard, make archives a contested site of affirmation, recognition and denial. As such, it is of great importance to be aware of processes of colonialisation and decolonisation taking place as new technology can both be used to affirm existing hegemonic colonial relationships or break them open.

The implications around climate change have far-reaching consequences but they can also have far-reaching benefits. The e-publication Ecologising Museums explores how museums and cultural institutions can face the issue not only head-on, but from all angles. To what degree are the core activities of collecting, preserving and presenting in fact attitudes that embody an unsustainable view of the world and the relationship between man and nature?

Following the attacks on the creators of the controversial satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, the shootings at a debate on free speech in Copenhagen, the punishment of the rights activist and blogger Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, and the subsequent massive civil mobilisation, the cultural field is forced to process the significance of these events and their wider implications for our work. In Paris and many other instances across continents, representation itself came under attack. Arguably, the field of representation has been in crisis for some time, yet the current context demands that we consider this crisis from different perspectives and historical frameworks. As the public platform of a confederation of museums and art institutions, L'Internationale Online has commissioned a series of opinion pieces that comment on this complex situation in order to start a wider discussion from different cultural and geopolitical contexts. We invited contributors to consider the issues at stake: from questions of manipulated archives and how access to historical documents might play a role in attacks on representation, to what kind of manipulation and victimisation strategies attacks such as these engender.

Decolonising Museums is the second thematic publication of L'Internationale Online; it addresses colonial legacies and mindsets, which are still so rooted and present today in the museum institutions in Europe and beyond. The publication draws from the conference Decolonising the Museum which took place at MACBA in Barcelona, 27-29 November 2014 (among the contributors to this thematic issue, Clémentine Deliss, Daniela Ortiz and Francisco Godoy Vega participated at this seminar), and offers new essays, responding to texts published on the online platform earlier this year.

What would happen if museums put relationships at the centre of their operations? This question inspires this publication, which offers a diverse, rigorous, and experimental analysis of what is commonly known as education, mediation or interpretation within museum institutions. It regards the visitor not as a passive receiver of predefined content, but as an active member of a constituent body, whom it facilitates, provokes, inspires and learns from. Moving beyond the practice of mediation as such, the publication situates constituent practices of collaboration and co-production within the existing social-political (neoliberal) context. It does this to reimagine and affect both the physical and organizational structures of museums and galleries.Understanding the challenges of a constituent practice in an integral, interdisciplinary manner is what this publication aspires to. This is explored by placing the museum's constituents—museum professionals, active audience/co-curator, local and political agencies, operational structures and contexts—at the centre of the museum organization and looking at how their positions in society start to shift and change.Issues that are addressed: ownership and power dynamics, collective pedagogy, pedagogy of encounter, collaboration, assent, dissent and consent, co-labour and co-curation (economies of exchange), precarity, and working with interns, archives and how to activate them, broadcasting, digital cultivation, crowdsourcing, and many other topics. Editors: John Byrne (Lead Editor, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool), Elinor Morgan (MIMA, Middlesbrough), November Paynter (MOCA, Toronto), Aida Sánchez de Serdio (UOC, Barcelona), Adela Železnik (MG+msum, Ljubljana). Contributors: Azra Akšamija, Alberto Altés Arlandis, Burak Arikan, James Beighton, Manuel Borja-Villel, Sara Buraya, John Byrne, Jesús Carrillo, Alejandro Cevallos Narváez, Céline Condorelli, Sean Dockray, Özge Ersoy, Carmen Esbrí, Oriol Fontdevila, Amy Franceschini, Janna Graham, Nav Haq, Yaiza Hernández Velázquez, Emily Hesse, John Hill, Alistair Hudson, Adelita Husni-Bey, Kristine Khouri, Nora Landkammer, Maria Lind, Isabell Lorey, Francis McKee, Elinor Morgan, Paula Moliner, November Paynter, Manuela Pedrón Nicolau, Elliot Perkins, Bojana Piškur, Tjaša Pogačar Podgornik, Alan Quireyns, RedCSur, Rasha Salti, Francesco Salvini / pantxo ramas, Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, Aida Sánchez de Serdio, Somateca, Igor Španjol, Nora Sternfeld, Subtramas, Tiziana Terranova, Piet Van Hecke, Onur Yıldız, Adela Železnik. 2018, Valiz with L'internationale | supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union | partners: Liverpool John Moores University, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art | paperback | 384 pp. | English | ISBN 978-94-92095-42-8 | Design by George&Harrison.Download table of contents and texts by Francis McKee, John Byrne, Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri and Nora Sternfeld.Update November 2018: we would like to inform you that the show referred to in the text by Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti is no longer taking place at the Palestinian Museum.To purchase the book, please follow this link to the website of our publisher, Valiz

The Long 1980s considers the significance of the 1980s for culture and society today. It revisits this pivotal decade via a collection of microhistories from across Europe that span the fields of art, culture, and politics. Central to the stories in this book is the changing relationship between ideologies, governments, and their publics, the effects of which have come to shape the contemporary condition of Europe and beyond. Artists, writers, and activists were responding to and articulating these changes in myriad ways: in the streets, through words, images, objects, and actions. At the same time, new subjectivities were emerging at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, all voices that were demanding to be heard. The publication is divided into four thematic chapters: 1. No Alternative? (on counter cultures, alternative forms of self-organization and art as activism); 2. Know Your Rights (on civil liberties, the rising planetary consciousness and new ecologies); 3. Processes of Identification (on anti-colonial positions and the drive for sexual and gender equality through culture); 4. New Order (on the far-reaching effects of the neoliberal regime and, finally, the significance of the year 1989). Comprising newly commissioned essays by leading thinkers alongside seventy case studies, including images and archival material published for the first time, this reader offers an invaluable and alternative reading of the recent past. A constellation of over seventy micro-histories, ranging from significant exhibitions or events to publications or key essays are presented across the four sections, spanning the different contexts out of which the research developed: Belgium, Catalonia, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey and the UK. These case studies are presented through a rich combination of archival material, reproductions or reprinted texts with introductions by curators, historians, and theorists. Editors: Nick Aikens (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven), Teresa Grandas (MACBA, Barcelona), Nav Haq (M HKA, Antwerp), Beatriz Herráez (independent curator, San Sebastián), Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez (L'Internationale online). Contributors: Nick Aikens, Henry Andersen, Zdenka Badovinac, Barış Gençer Baykan, Cristina Cámara Bello, Hakim Bey, Manuel Borja-Villel, Rosi Braidotti, Boris Buden, Jesús Carrillo, Bojana Cvejić, Luc Deleu, Ayşe Düzkan, Diedrich Diederichsen, Nazım Hikmet Richard Dikbaş, Corinne Diserens, Merve Elveren, Charles Esche, Marcelo Expósito, Božidar Flajšman, Annie Fletcher, Diana Franssen, June Givanni, Lisa Godson, Teresa Grandas, Nav Haq, Beatriz Herráez, Lubaina Himid, Lola Hinojosa, Antony Hudek, Tea Hvala, Gal Kirn, Neža Kogovšek Šalamon, Anders Kreuger, Elisabeth Lebovici, Rogelio López Cuenca, Geert Lovink, Amna Malik, Pablo Martínez, Lourdes Méndez, Aleš Mendiževec, Ana Mizerit, Alexei Monroe, Meriç Öner, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Bojana Piškur, Marta Popivoda, Carlos Prieto del Campo, Pedro G. Romero, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Igor Španjol, Chris Straetling, Luis Trindade, Erman Ata Uncu, Jelena Vesić, Mar Villaespesa, Vladimir Jerić Vlidi, Ana Vujanović. 2018, Valiz with L'internationale | supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union | partner: KASK School of Arts, University College Ghent | paperback | 416 pp. | English | ISBN 978-94-92095-49-7 | Design by George&Harrison. Download table of contents and introduction, and texts by Rosi Braidotti, Diedrich Diederichsen, Lisa Godson and Boris Buden.To purchase the book, please follow this link to the website of our publisher, Valiz

The Glossary of Common Knowledge (GCK) is a compilation of art terminology that differs substantially from what is found in the existing literature on art, and constitutes a five-year research project conducted by Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), in the framework of L'Internationale's programme The Uses of Art.

In collaboration with institutions and individuals from Europe and other parts of the world, 66 contributors/narrators proposed terms relating to their own practices and contexts, to historical references, political or social situations, or L'Internationale projects. The terms were discussed and defined in six seminars dealing with six referential fields (historicisation, subjectivisation, geopolitics, constituencies, commons and ther institutionality) and the book follows these topics across six chapters.

Narrators created a plurality of voices and narratives which examine the proposed terms and add their different viewpoints, bringing with them overlooked, suppressed knowledge and also non-Western categories of thought and memories. This method gave rise to different ways of participating, sharing and using knowledge, as well as working together trans-globally.

The book contains 86 terms proposed by 66 contributors: Nick Aikens, Azra Akšamija, Burak Arıkan, Marwa Arsanios, Zdenka Badovinac, Sezgin Boynik, Boris Buden, Zoe Butt, John Byrne, Jesús Carrillo, Colin Chinnery, Keti Chukhrov, Anyely Marín Cisneros, Rebecca Close, Lia Colombino, Bart De Baere, Carlos Prieto del Campo, Marta Malo de Molina, Ekaterina Degot, Galit Eilat, Róza El-Hassan, Patrick D. Flores, Kate Fowle, Cristina Freire, Anthony Gardner, Chema González, Alenka Gregorič, Dušan Grlja, Khwezi Gule, Aigul Hakimova, Vít Havránek, Beatriz Herráez, Ida Hiršenfelder, Marianna Hovhannisyan, Manray Hsu, Marko Jenko, Anej Korsika, Vasıf Kortun, Anders Kreuger, Lisette Lagnado, Thomas Lange, Miguel A. López, Manos Invisibles, Sohrab Mohebbi, Gabi Ngcobo, Miglena Nikolchina, Ahmet Öğüt, Meriç Öner, November Paynter, Alexei Penzin, Jabulani Chen Pereira, Bojana Piškur, Paul B. Preciado, Tzortzis Rallis, pantxo ramas, Suely Rolnik, Rasha Salti, Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, Aida Sánchez de Serdio Martín, Ania Szremski, Igor Španjol, Mabel Tapia, Francisco Godoy Vega, Jelena Vesić, Stephen Wright, Darij Zadnikar, Adela Železnik.

The Glossary of Common Knowledge was curated by Zdenka Badovinac (Moderna galerija, Ljubljana), Bojana Piškur (Moderna galerija, Ljubljana) and Jesús Carrillo (Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2012–2016), and the book was edited by Ida Hiršenfelder, and published by Moderna galerija.

ISBN 978-961-206-132-6

To purchase the publication, please contact the bookstores in the Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, or the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana.

March 31, 1998: New York. Carlos Basualdo and Hans-Ulrich Obrist found the digital forum Union of the Imaginary (VOTI) in a meeting with Jordan Crandall. Later in the year Susan Hapgood is invited to help run the VOTI platform. Initially established as a permanent forum for the discussion of issues pertaining to curatorial practice in the context of contemporary society, over fifty arts professionals were invited to contribute to the forum by participating in themed conversations.This e-publication gathers together hundreds of e-mails mainly sourced from Robert Fleck Archives, Lannion; and Wolfgang Staehle, Walter Palmetshofer and Max Kossatz of The Thing. There is a growing archive of materials on VOTI available at SALT.TO DOWNLOAD THE BOOK, CLICK HERE.

A Temporary Futures Institute wants us to think associatively and critically about things to come rather than looking back at how previous periods imagined 'the future'. It uses the basic tools of exhibition-making – authors and audiences, pictures and stories, surfaces and spaces – to probe some possible futures. It brings professional futurists together with artists, to see what they might have in common and how they might question each other.

The Heritage of 1989. Case Study: The Second Yugoslav Documents presents a re-enactment of the last big art exhibition in Yugoslavia. Titled Yugoslav Documents '89, it was curated by the artists Jusuf Hadžifejzović and Rade Tadić and realized under the auspices of the ZOI '84 Olimpijski centar Skenderija in the 8,000-square-meter Skenderija Center in Sarajevo in 1989. This was surely one of Yugoslavia's largest exhibitions, if not, indeed, the largest. This re-enactment is interested in Yugoslav Documents primarily because this was the largest exhibition that bore the label "Yugoslav", a label that, among other things, was meant to strengthen the ideology of brotherhood and unity in the socialist federal republic.

Show Me Your Archive and I Will Tell You Who is in Power combines an exhibition with a public program of lectures, panel discussions, performances and screenings to present stories and testimonies from the history of feminist struggle in Belgium and beyond. Within that struggle,the categories of race, gender and class continue to be thoroughly intertwined, and by focusing on these intersections the project wishes to extend its scope beyond Western feminism.

The 1980s. Today's Beginnings? explores the long 1980s from six European perspectives, examining the relevance of this trans- formative decade for today. Placing different contexts alongside one another, the exhibition aims to offer alternative views on the recent past by allowing multiple social and cultural voices to speak to one another. The project comprises a diverse mix of artworks, music,TV, graphic and archival material, exploring a wide set of socio-political themes through the lens of culture.

Hard Gelatin takes a look at the Spanish situation in the eighties by reconsidering the stories generated during this period and questioning them from today's perspective. This exhibition spans the period from 1977 to 1992, although on occasions it necessarily exceeds these limits. It looks at a series of social, political and economic events in history, and at the same time presents the work of a number of groups, cultural activists and artists who adopted refutation, irony and questioning as subversive and dissenting stances. The exhibits include features lms, documentaries, television programmes, magazines, comics, fanzines, artworks, exercises in anti-art and other materials.

The welfare state has, generally speaking, become synonymous with the synthesis of a market economy and active government that characterises both 'Western' and 'emergent' societies today. Yet there is little agreement among the many who operate and observe public social policy – politicians, civil servants, trade union leaders, social scientists, journalists, the public at large – about how the welfare state could or should be defined in more precise terms.

The exhibition NSK from Kapital to Capital was the first major museum project of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) collective, and followed the events of its individual constitutive groups, from 1980 and the Laibach poster scandal in Trbovlje (Slovenia) through 1992, when the art collective transformed into the NSK State in Time. The title, NSK from Kapital to Capital, places the exhibition in the socio-political context of the turbulent 1980s, when the old world order was crumbling and the all-encompassing system of global capitalism was starting to come into its own.

Is 'identity politics' still relevant or necessary in art? We wanted to see how and why artists today addres issues of identification and subjectivity in their work. We've focused specifically on emergent practices, because we think they might help us, and our audience, to understand the here-and-now of art and to speculate on its future.

How societies define and distribute knowledge indicates the means whereby they are structured, their dominant social order, and their degrees of inclusion and exclusion. The exhibition Really Useful Knowledge looks into diverse procedural, non-academic, anti- hierarchical, grass-root, heterodox educational situations primarily occupied with the transformative potentials of art.

With this display from its collection, the Museo Reina Sofía looks at the art produced in the eighties and nineties in Spain and within the international context. Minimal Resistance focuses on the search by artists for spaces of resistance in a globalized world, and explores the series of dualities which polarize the period in question.