To begin, they barricaded the gallery. Three grated Czech hedgehogs balance alongside each other on the herringbone floor of MAK’s Upper Exhibition Gallery. Varying in heights and slants, each face of these structures’ wings are pinned with a largescale poster: on one, a photograph showing the early hours of Madrid’s 2011 anti-austerity protests on Puerto de Sol, where citizens established their hold of the square by swathing it in cardboard sheets; on another, an archival image of the wooden pylon watchtower at the center of the 1980 Republik Freies Wendland encampment in Gorleben, which blocked the proposed site of a nuclear waste dump.

Angled and overlayed, light and confounding, these gentle “display” barricades by design firm Something Fantastic summarize the approach of MAK’s 2024 exhibition, PROTEST/ARCHITECTURE: Barricades, Camps, Superglue. Curated by Oliver Elser and Sebastian Hackenschmidt, PROTEST/ARCHITECTURE seeks to archive the provisional, adaptable, and vernacular constructions that define spaces of protest by leveraging historical examples towards understanding today’s struggles. But what is a barricade when it is made to restage, and not to resist? When it draws the eye but does not shield the body?

Leaning in one direction towards protest’s provisional nature, MAK’s team use materials already in the Museum’s possession to realize Something Fantastic’s exhibition design— the curators go so far as to list outright the handful of materials they needed to purchase. Leaning towards the other, towards the total vision of the vitrine, Elser and Hackenschmidt commissioned high-res paper models of encampments extrapolated from drone footage, tapped director Oliver Hardt to produce a new montaged film, and restaged several structures in the gallery on loan from active movements. Recurringly, PROTEST/ARCHITECTURE in its design, content, and commission, materializes the tension between demonstrational and institutional paradigms, between the provisional necessity of the protest and the archival impulse of the museum.

Entering the gallery at the crux of its L-shape, visitors are met with this didactic text:

“What have we learned? Protest architecture…

Claims space; is utopian; is effective; is risky; is defensive; is domestic; is symbolic.”

Nearby, an encyclopedic array of supplies is neatly displayed on a low plinth: a poncho, some rope, duct tape, a flashlight and a water bottle, bolt cutters, a bicycle, a radio, a blue tent… surprisingly regimented and nonetheless overwhelming. The near immediate definition of what protest architecture is and isn’t in the early didactic offers the viewer a tether to cling to as they survey a room littered with the quotidian objects, ephemera, constructions, and images of resistance. Anticipating this need, the catalog for the exhibition is itself a glossary, alphabetizing the room’s material and conceptual contents, from “anti-” to Black Lives Matter to counterinsurgency. Elsewhere, another low plinth contrasts a mid-century Austrian police uniform with the militarized exoskeleton of a contemporary version. This route from bolt cutters to rubber bullets functions as the exhibition’s A to Z, introducing visitors immediately to a familiar narrative of foreclosure: this is how citizens rise up, and this is how the state prevails.

To meet the provisional with the archival impulse is perhaps to return to a bruise left by regimes of subjugation. On a small table between the barricades and the supply display, 40 paper structures by artist Rokas Wille recreate the Lützerath encampment, an anti-coal demonstration violently displaced by police at the end of 2023. When active, the Lützerath encampment was a dynamic environment of construction, repair, and care, with new structures emerging as new needs arose. Wille’s work freezes the encampment at its zenith, right before its demolition by state forces. Using handheld, drone, and satellite photography to restage these spaces on miniature scale, the exhibition’s models employ the same counter-insurgent technologies of vision to satisfy the archival eye. Perhaps, to archive the provisional with military-industrial assisted vision is to again press a fist into purpled flesh.

An ungenerous, pre-Sedgwickian “paranoid” reading would stop here—another curatorial team too enamored with form and archival aesthetics to see their own complicity in spatial and visional hegemonies. And yet, seeing protest architectures through the vectors that surveil them offer visitors two critical perspectives: the bird’s eye view and hindsight. How are these rebellious landscapes read by police forces and the private interests that back them? What recurrent forms and strategies must be re-evaluated and adapted to render them more effective? To see as the institution sees, an inflection on how a state might see is itself a tactical aesthetic choice on the part of the curators.

One of PROTEST/ARCHITECTURE’s most salient moments occurs in a far back corner, where the curators have displayed legal advice on Austrians’ right to assemble and demonstrate. This printed consult waits quietly to guide future demonstrators through the judicial system, written in plain language for clear and accessible public consumption. Both the institutional and state gaze are virtually unavoidable—but as PROTEST/ARCHITECUTRE maintains, knowing how this gaze is laid upon you is invaluable—and subvertable—knowledge.

MAK’s barricades will come down on August 25^th— not by bulldozer or by cudgel, but by the professionalized hands of the museum’s install team, with parts of the exhibition potentially salvaged for future use. As students continue to establish and enliven encampments on college campuses across the globe, and as their reclamation of space in the name of justice continues to be met with violence, we might keep to the words of one Gorleben demonstrator featured in the exhibition:

“There’s this area and you build something there and it’s your only way of showing you want something different there, by showing what you want it to be. If you just think it’ll be torn down anyway and don’t build anything in the first place, nothing will ever happen. But maybe it won’t be torn down, you never know.”

“As the Environmental Humanities continues its solidification as a field of study and specialization, the discipline and its methodologies are at risk of reifying the violences that occur when experimental and emerging methods are codified within pre-existing institutional logics. How can the Environmental Humanities keep its nimbleness, its indeterminacy, its commitment to epistemological justice, in order to resist the pitfalls of standardization? How might scholars, artists, and practitioners escape their enfolding into an opaque epistemological enclosure and the
limitations that follow suit? We suggest that it is precisely through ecological, cultural, and political attunement to forms of stasis and change, climatic and atmospheric flux, as well as epistemic and methodological discontents that we may encounter new modalities of praxis and
thought.

How do flux and state-change engage our attention and how does that attention influence the processes of flux and state-change?
How could attunement to states of transition, tension, and suspension reorient existing modalities of environmental thought and critique?
What forms of attention, reading, or engagement are better attuned to deciphering transitions of material, thought, and practice?
What experiments in affective, attentive modes can prepare us for increased and overlapping forms of indeterminacy?”

Our website, designed by Sasha Artamonova, can be found here. My opening remarks for the symposium can be found here. Contributions from the symposium compose the first issue of the cluster’s digital publication Lime, launching Spring 2025.

“Language has been given to [people] so that [they] may make Surrealist use of it.”

Andre Breton, Surrealist Manifesto, 1924.

One hundred years ago in the wake of the First World War, a group of artists coalesced in Paris seeking a free and unencumbered access to the
imagination and subconscious. Under the name “Surrealists,” these artists used exercises in dream analysis and free association to guide their arts practice. In one such exercise called Exquisite Corpse, participants would make a drawing on a piece of paper guided by their subconscious, then fold the paper to hide their sketch and pass it to another artist who would continue the “automatic” drawing. Unfolded to reveal the composite drawing, Exquisite Corpse was not only a collaboration between artists, but with chance, serendipity, and happenstance.

Today, OpenAI’s image generation platform DALL-E2 takes its namesake from the the most popularly recognized artist associated with Surrealism:
Salvador Dali. DALL-E2 and other AI image generators are built on a diffusion model– a type of generative model trained on large collections of image data that obscures images with noise, then attempts to recover image data by learning to reverse the process. Much like the Surrealists who took the diffuse data of their own dreams and reassembled them into uncanny and haunting works of art, DALL-E2 uses its diffusion model to generate original images based on text prompts supplied by users.

Artificial Intelligentsia invites the creative writers at the helm of Northwestern’s literary magazine Helicon to engage in their own version of Exquisite Corpse with DALL-E2. Exchanging prose, prompts, and images to create new works, our participating writers explore the advantages, surprises, pitfalls, and challenges of AI image generation as a creative tool of the future.

A short, if rough, reflection of cultural violence, deep time, and mineralization resulting from a 2022 summer intensive in Madrid, Spain.

For 2022, I acted as co-chair of the Symposium committee, organizing around the central theme of Making Space. More information about the Symposium and our program of speakers can be found at the link above.

Whale Game – A Proposal is a cursory exploration of interspecies empathies, linguistics, and objecthood through the logics of video game mechanics and world building. Click here or on the image for more information.

A Material Collapse That is Construction is a 30-minute audio experience situated around Crown Hall at IIT in Bronzeville, Chicago. The project strives to explore the complicated and layered history of the site through the building that preceded the campus—The Mecca Apartments. Affectionately known as “The Mecca Flats” or simply “The Mecca,” the building was a hub of Black culture and life in Bronzeville for nearly half a century. When the Mecca was demolished in 1951 to clear the way for IIT’s campus expansion, it signaled the loss of a historic community. Through poetry, soundscapes, music, and critical analysis, A Material Collapse That is Construction proposes deeper reflection on the legacy of this site, and its implications for socio-spatial politics in the city. Participants can either visit Crown Hall and move through the experience using their location data, or click through the map from home.

Click the image above to visit the site.

“The messiness of history is the harbinger of abstraction. Whatever narratives do not fit the master plan are diminished, rewritten, or entirely lost, abstracted to the point of unrecognizability.”