A banquet.
Dark clouds assail the bounteous table:
It is time to dance.
The clouds, uncertainties that unsettle order, open onto new forms of coexistence. It is the joy of inhabiting doubt. A fluid space, made of attempts and transient notes, perpetually positioning itself outside of predefined categories, in an undisciplined dance.
Dance with us. We don’t struggle, we hustle. We dance, therefore we revolt – ruangrupa.
With How little I know about you, the ruangrupa collective urges us to abandon suffocating bureaucracies to encounter a relational time, with the invitation to Let’s waste time on each other, turning togetherness and fellowship into a true infrastructure of resistance.
This is the spirit that runs through the texts of this second issue. At last, every method slips through our fingers; between failures and losing our way, we find ourselves moving beyond structures and products. We begin the dance with steps backward and diagonally — ambiguous, enigmatic steps, explorations in language, and poetic speculations on the run–up, with Cosimo Mollica's User Manual for Run–ups.
By dancing, we can reclaim the political potential of dancing in complete invisibility; by dancing, we can deconstruct the binarism between the observer and the observed; by dancing, we can dismantle the tyranny of visuality. It is thus that with Johannes Purovaara's Flashdance, explored in Performing in invisibility, it is no longer possible to evaluate performance through categorizable skills.
A bodiless dance is the one investigated in the essay Performative Gestures of a Bodiless Community: Notes for an Analysis of 4chan Through Performance Studies. Moving through the digital conversations of anonymity, Salvatore Crucitti prompts us to question what presence is within online communities (What is presence in these online communities?) and what it means to be part of an anonymous collective (What does it mean to be part of an anonymous collective?).
Decategorization becomes a fundamental step in this dance. As the ruangrupa collective states: When there’s a need to label us, refrain. A radical escape from normative definitions takes shape in the decentralized ecosystems investigated by Paola Pietronave and Berto Tukan in What Needs to Be Rethought Is the Paradigm: On Lumbung Practice possibilities through the case of Jakarta Biennale 2024. Through the experience of the Jakarta Biennale, togetherness is not a static noun, but a verb: a dynamic, horizontal process that redistributes resources and solidarity.
Another fracture of order can be found in Untamed Archive: Archiving the Wild by Giorgia Pinzauti. A concept of a wild archive and of the wild, of the untamed, of the undisciplined, whose rules, if necessary, will be developed throughout its existence and for its own internal self–regulation.
Uncertainty is a resource. In Returning to Enigma: How to Manufacture Explosives by Simona Allegra and Daniela Bonanomi, we experience this through a zine that departs radically from traditional academic writing. Here, explosives are assembled from scraps, and precisely through this process is possible to crack certainties and reveal new possibilities.
In Exploring the potentials for street photography to serve as a mode of socio–political action in context of Neo–liberal ‘regeneration’: Camden Town: from Mecca to The World’s End by Reynard d'Avoine, we explore the refusal of urban sterilization caused by regeneration, in favor of the city's complexity. Through analogical photographs of Camden Town, he restores dignity to communities threatened by the processes of gentrification.
Finally, with Dizi Mania: Turkish Soap Operas Between Romanticism and Soft Power, Beatrice D'Ascenzi highlights a mechanism capable of disseminating nationalistic values and the Turkish government's worldview through the seemingly harmless device of the TV series, demonstrating how emotional engagement can be strategically transformed into pervasive political influence.
The dark clouds have announced the time of the storm.
Through these pages, we have renounced rigid taxonomies to inhabit the vertigo of uncertainty and the anarchy of bodies. Now that every protocol evades us and borders falter, all that remains is to build new paths from the rubble of the collapse.
The clouds are still low.
Let us keep dancing.