e-flux Index #2

e-flux Index is a quarterly print publication that sets out to untangle the mess of the contemporary. Index is unique for its remit, bringing together art and film theory, philosophy, architecture, and criticism under the same mantle. Each edition of the Index brings into dialogue commissioned essays, reviews, and articles drawn from the five separate e-flux sections: e-flux Architecture, e-flux Criticism, e-flux Education, e-flux Journal, and e-flux Notes. Together the contents of e-flux Index #2 map the rich complexity of discourse in the arts and adjacent fields. 

Index #2 features e-flux’s February-March 2024 editorial breadth, encompassing contributions from 74 authors, artists, architects, filmmakers, and educators. The Index #2 dawns with A Brand-New Day, in a section that watches the clock to parse the question of temporality in current artistic practice. It continues with Bad Circulation, which traces the figure of “circulation struggles” across a series of outwardly rippling concentric circles, from the circulation of militant texts for the Autonomists to the paradoxes of philanthrocapitalist “gifting.” Opening a window to ventilate the stale, dead air of the classical classroom, The Traveling of a Concept combines practical and theoretical approaches to radical and expanded pedagogy.

 In the next section, The Earth Is an Image, we zoom out, and further out still, to examine what gets made visible and what is occluded—as is devastatingly evoked by Oraib Toikan’s text on the “things the eye sees that the mind alone cannot decipher,” within the context of Israel’s genocidal occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Leaving Without a Suitcase draws its title from a description of Ilya Kabakov’s famous “total installation” The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, to gather together texts that examine the im/permeability of nations and their thresholds, as well as the condition of (forced) exile such borders produce. The Technocapitalist Gentry data-mines the fantasies, extracurricular pursuits, and downstream cultural impact of the capitalist class enriched beyond all hitherto known limits by the current AI tech boom. The Poetics of Relation meanwhile borrows its title from Édouard Glissant’s famous book, where he wrote of how “our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.” The texts here open up onto horizons of intersubjectivity, hybridization, cosmopolitanism, and internationalism. 

We move in the next section from these open ideals into the exclusionary, xenophobic world of America’s Fox News Expanded Universe; in a compact selection of essays and discussions on modern or “late” fascisms and the forms of anti-fascism that seek to resist them. Transgenerational Witnessing meanwhile brings together pieces which interrogate the status of the home: not just a place to rest our heads or somewhere to securitise against outsiders (as for the denizens of the Fox News Expanded Universe), but often also a repository of memory which marks the ties binding generations together. The penultimate section, “Anything can come after anything else …” (drawing its title from a skeptical remark against montage, from the dawn of film history) pools together pieces that play with and investigate montage, collage, listing, and other combinatorial pursuits in art, architecture, and literature. Index #2’s final section turns its lens upward toward the source of life-giving energy itself. Only the Sun Works moves from a review of a retranslated novel that deals with solar communism to the avant-garde solar imaginary of the Kabakovs. The issue draws to a close with Oxana Timofeeva squinting into the glare of the apocalypse and asking: “Is another end of the world possible?”

Index#2 features contributions from Hallie Ayres, Nick Axel, Stephanie Bailey, Xenia Benivolski, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Gail Brager, Lukas Braskisis, Evan Calder Williams, Luis Camnitzer, Gaby Cepeda, Adeline Chia, Jasmina Cibic, Phil Coldiron, Salmaan Craig, Benjamin Crais, Mark DeKay, T. J.  Demos, Tom Denman, Ben Eastham, Mariana Fernández, Sylvie Fortin, Victor Galdino, Orit Gat, Gerhub, Boris Groys, Maddie Hampton, Lyn Hejinian, Hide and Seek Audiovisual Art, Vanessa Holyoak, Leigh House, Suzanne Hudson, Dylan Huw, Florian Idenburg, Ana Ivanovska Deskova, Isabel Jacobs, Tom Jeffreys, Juan José Santos, Christina Kiaer, Damjan Kokalevski, Anna Kornbluh, Ekaterina Kulinicheva, Michael Kurtz, Andres Lepik, Ye Liu, Natasha Marie Llorens, Antonia Majaca, Claudio Medeiros, Charles Tonderai Mudede, Chris Murtha, Daniel Muzyczuk, Isadora Neves Marques, Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Jason Read, Dominique Routhier, Noah Simblist, Anya Sirota, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Sorokina, Jamila Squire, Jonas Staal, Łukasz Stanek, The New School Art Modality, Xu Tiantian, Oxana Timofeeva, Alberto Toscano, Ecosistema Urbano, Anton Vidokle, Elena Vogman, Xin Wang, Ben Ware, Seth Wheeler, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Zairong Xiang, Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, Zhen Zhang, and Arseny Zhilyaev.