December events

Join us at e-flux this December with screenings, talks, and music featuring Daniel A. Barber, Florian Idenburg, Dorit Aviv,  Bobby Johnston and Ruth Mandl, Keti Chukhrov, Saodat Ismailova, Tamara Khasanova, Alejandro Alonso, Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde, Rafael Ramirez, Alberto Toscano, Evan Calder Williams, Laura Ortman, gabby fluke-mogul, Martin Bisi.

Saturday, December 2, 2023, 4pm
New York launch of After Comfort: A User’s Guide
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The duration of fossil fuel dependency will be in large part determined by how rapidly and radically existing buildings can be decarbonized. Architects, engineers, historians, technologists, and others need to consider the shape, pace, and aspirations of the decarbonization process. We need to determine how best to design and create buildings appropriate to a new lifeworld: after carbon, after comfort. Please join editors and contributors to e-flux Architecture’s After Comfort: A User’s Guide for a series of presentations and discussions on what tomorrow’s comfort might look like and how architecture’s value is evolving through its entanglement with the building industry, economic systems, and energy transitions. The event is organized by Daniel A. Barber, co-editor of After Comfort: A User’s Guide, Nick Axel, deputy editor at e-flux Architecture, and Christina Moushoul, assistant editor at e-flux Architecture. It is moderated by Daniel A. Barber, and includes participants Florian Idenburg (SO-IL), Dorit Aviv (UPenn), and Bobby Johnston and Ruth Mandl (Co-Adaptive). Read more here.

Tuesday, December 5, 2023, 7pm
Keti Chukhrov, “From Basic Need to the Cosmology of the Commons”
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The talk by Keti Chukhrov will revisit the  paradoxes of non-capitalist economics in its historical as well as futurological context. Many researchers have claimed—with surprise—that the socialist non-libidinal political economy was an enigma. If in capitalist society there is an abundance of commodities and an insufficiency of means for some layers of society to access them, in socialism, conversely, even minimum wage exceeds the supply of goods available for access: There is money, but there is very little to buy. Some economists say that it was an error of planning; others insist that the essence of any economics which should be to dispense with surplus value in production and market. During the pandemic, discussions about the necessity of slowing down, de-growth, basic need, or even exit from capitalist over-production—towards the post-capitalist condition—emerged again. As Evald  Ilyenkov, Bernard Stiegler, and Boris Groys showed in their analysis of Marx’s political economy, abolition of surplus value would not only transform production and sociality, but can even change the approach to material objects, endowing them with a noumenal (conceptual) dimension. Our question therefore is: What are the differences and affinities between contemporary theories of post-capitalism—vectoralism,  platform capitalism,  rentierism—and socialist ones in their treatment of surplus value? Presented by e-flux Journal. Read more here.

Thursday, December 7, 2023, 7pm
Saodat Ismailova: To Share a Dream With a River
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A rare screening of films by Saodat Ismailova, guest-curated by Tamara Khasanova and supported by CEC ArtsLink. Followed by a discussion between the artist and the curator. To Share a Dream With a River is a cine-topographic unfolding that draws its title from a scene in Ismailova’s film, Stains of Oxus. Over the course of this film, one bears witness to the changes in landscapes and climate conditions while three protagonists narrate their dreams. “When I woke up, I shared this dream with the river,” recounts one of the protagonists. The river she refers to is the Amu Darya, known in the past by its Ancient Greek name Oxus. Throughout the film program, the entirety of the Amu Darya basin presents an epistemic, material, and psychic space for exercising alternative ways of ecological relating that center exchanges between human and more-than-human forms of living. The river’s embrace is an anchor for many subjects that rely on this body of water. Together with Stains of Oxus, two other films by Ismailova, The Haunted and Chillpiq, shed light on the challenges faced in Central Asia due to vanishing water sources and desertification, a result of decades of Russian imperial and Soviet development projects intended to modernize local landscapes. Where these regimes understood these spaces via an extractivist logic, Ismailova draws upon ancestral knowledge, rituals, and dreaming to resist these lines of reasoning. Read more here.

Saturday, December 9, 2023, 3:30pm
IV INSTAR Film Festival
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The INSTAR Film Festival is an annual event organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR), that supports independent film production on an international scale. The fourth edition of the festival will take place in multiple venues around the world, particularly in cities with a significant Cuban expatriate community: Barcelona, Paris, Miami, New York, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo. For the festival’s activities in New York, INSTAR collaborates with e-flux Screening Room to present a two-part program featuring a selection of contemporary and historical works of Cuban experimental cinema. The first session of the program, at 3:30pm, proposes a dialogue on diaspora and national identity based on two shorts by Alejandro Alonso, an award-winning documentarian working today, and a pair of shorts by Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde, an exiled filmmaker couple who were involved in the New York underground film scene of the 1970s. The second session, at 5pm,  will present the North American premiere of Rafael Ramirez’s first feature film The Winter Campaigns, considered by several critics to be a milestone in Latin-American avant-garde cinema. The premiere will be followed by a virtual Q&A with the filmmaker. Read more here.

Tuesday, December 12, 2023, 7pm
Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism
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A lecture and in-depth conversation with Alberto Toscano about his major new book Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso Books, 2023). Toscano will be in dialogue with e-flux journal Contributing Editor Evan Calder Williams. From the “Great Replacement” to campaigns against critical race theory and “gender ideology,” today’s global far right is launching lethal panics about the threats to traditional political, sexual, and racial hierarchies. But counter to the prevalent contemporary attempt to situate these contemporary tendencies within a static framework of early twentieth-century fascism, Toscano develops a rigorous and expansive reading of the concept. Drawing especially on Black radical and anti-colonial theories of fascism, Toscano makes clear the limits of associating fascism primarily with the kind of political violence experienced by past European regimes. Rather than looking for analogies from history, the book argues we should instead see fascism as a mutable process, one anchored in racial and colonial capitalism, which both predates and survives its crystallization in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. It is a threat that continues to evolve in the present day, and Late Fascism offers crucial resources not only for “the program of watchfulness he so carefully constructs to uncover the contemporaneity of late fascism in our midst,” (Harry Harootunian) but also for the continued and necessary development of ongoing anti-fascist thought and organization. Read more here.

Thursday, December 14, 2023, 7pm
Laura Ortman with gabby fluke-mogul, Q&A with Martin Bisi
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The live music by Laura Ortman accompanied by gabby fluke-mogul will be followed by a Q&A with the artists moderated by Martin Bisi. Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) is a soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator who creates across multiple platforms. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and amplified violin, and often sings through a megaphone. gabby fluke-mogul is a New York-based violinist, improviser, composer, and educator. fluke-mogul weaves within the threads of avant and free jazz, with deep roots in improvised and experimental music. Martin Bisi is an original No Wave, Post-Punk, and Experimental music producer from New York who has been a central figure in the city’s musical formation for the past four decades. Read more here.

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For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.