Issue 4
Summer 2016

“When one is born, one chooses nothing,” said the architect Lina Bo Bardi. “I chose to live in this place. That’s why Brazil is my country twice over.” Now the Americas’ shooting star faces joint political, economic, and medical crises — but we won't abandon Brazil either.
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Essays

Brasília at Midnight

by Silas Martí

Latin America’s powerhouse has buckled, and with startling speed. Seventy years of progress and downfall have taught Brazil’s artists about survival — but this crisis may put off the future forever

A House Is Not a Home

by Sam Kriss

The world’s biggest architecture prize went to a builder of social housing; more strangely, Britain’s biggest art prize did too. It’s easier to celebrate usefulness than aesthetics, but is it better?

Dancing in Chains

by Jarrett Gregory

Lovers make the best executioners. Jordan Wolfson’s unfortunate robot stares us down with his google eyes, and endures a punishment we find too familiar

Negatives

Dansez le Twist

Malick Sidibé’s Bamako nights. Remembering the images, and the dance moves, of the photographer who framed a generation of Malian youth
by Allison Moore

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Interviews

Kaari Upson

“Loss, death, experiencing that through the body; the inability to conceptually work through these things…. When something is outside the body it becomes disgusting, but when it’s inside it’s as natural as blood.”

Ian Cheng

“I feel like we have ‘Uber consciousness’ now. The idea that you can just get into a stranger’s car, fully trust them because of a rating system, and then literally just exit the car, without any transaction, or with that whole transaction masked. In some small, tiny, tiny way, that is a different kind of consciousness.”

Negatives

Jealous or Crazy

by Zachary Woolfe

The Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist gets channeled by the most famous woman in America. But Beyoncé’s aesthetics, like her baseball bat, are a blunt instrument

Mourning Dress

by Tina Rivers Ryan

Marisol and the weight of fashion. The Pop artist, who died this April, reshaped bodies in wood and in clothes. Apparel is an arena in which to act

Rem Sleep

by Vincent Schipper

Rem Koolhaas is architecture’s most consistent opponent of preservation. But even he was surprised by the silence greeting the destruction of his Netherlands Dance Theater

The Belly of the Beast

by Aaron Ayscough

A canopy of gold floats above the site of Paris’s erstwhile central food market. Les Halles reemerges, but where can you eat?

Portfolio

The art of Pilar Mata Dupont: leaving the colonies and taking the cure