Fotograf Zone – Nicolas Bourriaud – Inclusions, Aesthetics of the Capitalocene

How to create art during the Capitalocene and what is the artist’s position? In his most recent book, critic and curator Nicolas Bourriard finds the answer in anthropology, specifically developing upon the idea of an "anthropology of rejection". Since art often undermines the ideology of (capitalist) productivity and usefulness, expressing the creator’s personality, Bourriard often calls artists the successors to medieval magicians, alchemists, and witches. According to him, artists are “molecular anthropologists” who study and meticulously reveal sociopolitical structures, showing new possibilities of (im)materiality and life in general. They also do not comment on what has passed using an “enormous memory of emotions and ideas”, instead illustrating ways out of crisis and into the future.

Nicolas Bourriaud. Inclusions. Aesthetics of the Capitalocene. London: Sternberg Press, 2022.␣ISBN: 9783956795862.

Tereza Špinková

is a theorist and curator. Currently she is studying for a doctorate at the Department of Environmental Studies at the Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University in Brno, where she deals primarily with the relationship between human and non-human entities.

#44 Empathy

The ability to empathise with others is a construct that has only been around for a few centuries. This does not mean that such a skill did not exist until then. However, the concept of empathy creates a field in which this ability oscillates from understanding the other party to understanding the self. And because such a playground can be quite expansive, and the playing balls of empathy can be ping-ponged from one side to the other, we decided to dedicate an issue of the magazine to this field.