The first selection of Social Distances includes María Belén Sáez de Ibarra’s “Cosmopolitics of the Living” from What about Activism?, edited by Steven Henry Madoff; Martin Herbert’s “On and Off the Grid: Agnes Martin,” from Tell Them I Said No; as well as Fernando García-Dory’s “Inside Us: A Dinner as an Aesthetic and Agro-political Excursion” and Chris Fite-Wassilak’s “Species of Specialties: St. Louis’s Provel Cheese”—both featured in Politics of Food.

The second packet includes chapters from Hubert Fichte’s The Black City: Glosses, Ingo Niermann’s Solution 295–304: Mare Amoris, and Charlotte Birnbaum’s Bon! Bon! On the Charms of Sweet Cuisine, as well as the introduction to Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai, edited by Maria Lind, Michele Masucci, and Joanna Warsza. 

Our third packet includes art-historical chapters from Sven Lütticken’s Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Revolution and Josephine Berry’s Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry; “On Passive Resistance,” a conversation between Vanessa Joan Müller and Cristina Ricupero in New Ways of Doing Nothing; and Mark Fisher’s “We’re Not All in This Together: Public Space and Antagonism in the Wake of Capitalist Realism” from Caring Culture: Art, Architecture and the Politics of Public Health, edited by Markus Miessen and Andrea Phillips.

Our series of shared excerpts continues with a fifth installment focusing on issues of democracy and protest. From Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere, philosopher Oliver Marchart proposes an aesthetics of agitating, propagating, and organizing. Artist and researcher Sonia Boyce reconciles the aesthetic strategies of collage and montage with the political address to racism and nationalism in artworks by Rasheed Araeen and Eddie Chamber, included in The Place Is Here: The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain. We turn to artist Amar Kanwar’s video installation The Torn First Pages—referring to the Burmese bookshop owner who was imprisoned for tearing out pages with government propaganda in the books and journals he sold—and scholar and critic Erika Balsom’s essay on this work in Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary: The Commissions Book. Architect Eyal Weizman identifies the role of the roundabout as a site of eruption in recent uprisings and revolutions in The Roundabout Revolutions from the Critical Spatial Practice series. And to conclude this selection of attachments, writer and performer Johanna Hedva steers away from an ableist discourse on political participation and renders visible care as the most anti-capitalist protest there is, in their essay included in Where are the tiny revolts?