Imaginations, Memories, and the Pandemic: An Ode to Jean-Baptiste Clamence
Arrival: The Fall Wandering aimlessly at Centrum — alone, invisible, masked — I am lost in the distanced crowd of people lazily meandering around with no place to be. The pandemic really warped the sense of time and space. In an attempt to escape the paranoia of contracting the virus in a new, strange country,…
Call for Papers: 3.0 ‘Impasse’ Contribute to the third volume of our research journal
Deadline extended to January 15th For the next volume of Soapbox, a graduate peer-reviewed journal for cultural analysis, we invite young researchers and established scholars alike to submit work that critically engages with the theme of impasse. [Border] In its first instance, and most literal meaning, an impasse indicates a border that arises in our…
Escherian Nightmare
Escherian Nightmare violent politics are penetrating my dreams. as the angry, armed mob closes in a loud shot and a bang awaken me. I lie in a dark limbo startled and disoriented. scroll scroll scroll the algorithm’s gravitational pull sucks us deeper into a dark …
AUDITORY FRAGMENTS FROM THE MULTITUDE (a series) reframing the narrative around italian youth emigration (part three)
In this series, Silvia Vari explores and reframes narratives about the emigration of Italian youth through the use of auditory fragments. Her “audiobiography” creates a network of different people, individual narratives, homes, feelings and voices, whose intersections and ramifications uncover a “heterogenous multitude”. She argues against the oversimplification of the experience of the young Italian…
AUDITORY FRAGMENTS FROM THE MULTITUDE (a series) reframing the narrative around italian youth emigration (part two)
In this series, Silvia Vari explores and reframes narratives about the emigration of Italian youth through the use of auditory fragments. Her “audiobiography” creates a network of different people, individual narratives, homes, feelings and voices, whose intersections and ramifications uncover a “heterogenous multitude”. She argues against the oversimplification of the experience of the young Italian…
AUDITORY FRAGMENTS FROM THE MULTITUDE (a series) reframing the narrative around italian youth emigration (part one)
In this series, Silvia Vari explores and reframes narratives about the emigration of Italian youth through the use of auditory fragments. Her “audiobiography” creates a network of different people, individual narratives, homes, feelings and voices, whose intersections and ramifications uncover a “heterogenous multitude”. She argues against the oversimplification of the experience of the young Italian…
Why Is Everyone Talking About Biopolitics?
This article interrogates Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, the meddling of politics into the biological lives of citizens, and its resurgence during the corona pandemic. She argues that biopower has evolved and has been supplemented by the digital and spread along the channels of capital, rendering the phenomenon more widespread than its conceptual revival in times…
Remixing as Reincarnation Contagious trans*birthing in the work of boychild
Chloe Turner examines how remixing, in a 2013 festival performance by the artist and activist boychild, acts as an agitative, queer design practice for building radical, new collective trans futures.
Quintessentially Queer (series) Quintessentially Queer
Queerness for me, does not limit itself to sexual preference in regards to gender. Queerness for me is more so about understanding the political substantiality of your own sexual identity and the power plays, meanings and structures that can be perpetuated with its expression. Besides writing, I am a performer and curator, thus I try…
Art and Activism (series) Out of the Blue
ART AND ACTIVISM In this series, students from the Graduate School of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) explore the complex overlaps and conversations between art and activism. They seek to illustrate how artistic practices often speak to the urgency of protest and activism, and how activism intertwines with the demands of art. In…