As Futurity Report is making its way through reopened bookstores and online retailers, another edited volume has just arrived from the printer’s: Deserting from the Culture Wars, which comes out of the project I did with BAK last November, and which is co-published by BAK and MIT Press. The book won’t actually hit stores before October, but it can be preordered. Editing this volume sometimes felt like Achilles racing the tortoise, as it seemed impossible to keep up with events. Even so, as the culture wars keep raging (now with face masks being added to the arsenal), I think the book’s urgency and pertinence have only increased.
One text is, sadly, a document of a bygone era: in his essay in Deserting from the Culture Wars, Kader Attia expounds the thinking behind La Colonie, the decolonial space he founded near the Gare du Nord in Paris. By now, La Colonie is no more; it did not survive the corona lockdown. For me, in the last few years La Colonie has been one of a handful of art and cultural spaces in Europe whose practice define and transform the moment. Kader and the team created and curated a montage of positions and practices that was more than the sum of its parts, and at its best went beyond the simulation of dialogue or confrontational one-upmanship. The whole thing amounted to a generative social sculpture that the likes of Beuys and Hirschhorn can only dream of.
To help the team “open a new La Colonie space in Paris or its banlieue,” you can make a donation on one of the following platforms:
Sven Lütticken: Texts and Projects 
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