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Rural Riots, Animist Rituals and Teaching from the Territory
A Conversation with the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
A teacher in the CCC Master's Research Programme and a researcher at HEAD – Genève, Gene Ray is interested in radical practices of art and activism in a time of multiple social and ecological crises. He spoke with the artist, researcher and activist…
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Ode to an Empty Plinth
Iconoclasm by Other Means
In a 1997 issue of October journal devoted to the Situationists, T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith rejected the narrative that, in the early 1960s, the SI renounced art in favour of politics. In reality, the organisation only renounced…
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All Monuments Must Fall
Thinking Through the Proposition
In this introduction, Gene Ray (HEAD – Genève, HES-SO) reviews a series of recent events, mostly related to the Black Lives Matter movement, which may suggest that a new iconoclasm has begun. Ray associates this aggressive way of questioning the…
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Dossier #8
All Monuments Must Fall: Episodes and Counterimages from a Present History of Iconoclasm
“All Monuments Must Fall.” Four words, calling out and calling up. An indictment of police terror, a demand for an end to impunity. A toppling of white supremacist, settler colonial patriarchs: Robert E. Lee and Christopher Columbus, Cecil Rhodes and…
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Justice Afoot
Communing with the Friends of Acoma
One night in 1998, a collective amputated the foot of an equestrian statue of Juan de Oñate in New Mexico. In this article, Gene Ray examines the multiple echoes of this iconoclastic act, a reference to the mutilation of indigenous Acoma people 400…
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Diasporas of the So-Called Anthropocene
Notes in the Margins of "The Anthropocene Atlas of Geneva" - An essay by Gene Ray (HES-SO)
Gene Ray (HEAD – Genève, HES-SO) calls for a post-modernism that would fully overcome capitalist modernity and its catastrophes. From a reading of Walter Benjamin’s Thesis on the Philosophy of History and Trauerspiel, Ray invokes…