Allow me proudly to announce a new collaboration with Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. Your truly and www.vitalspace.org are, as of now, the ‘Athens Desk’ of the Centre’s new WdW Review. For more…
Building on its long history of framing and instigating debate, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art presents WdW Review, a new online platform aimed at informing our ever-expanding spheres of action in an age of constant reformations be they aesthetic, geographic, economic, communal, ecological, and even spiritual.
The structure of WdW Review is organized around four dedicated sections. The first takes the form of newspaper reports from several international editorial desks set in both ancient sites and rapidly expanding cities including Athens, Beijing, Cairo, Delhi/Calcutta, Istanbul, and Moscow. The second is a space for framed debates; the third is an open section for critical and theoretical essays which are interwoven with Witte de With’s program and related interests; the last section invites an author to consider a single image through a speculative piece of writing.
The first edition will run from June to December 2013 and grow on a weekly basis. Dedicated smartphone applications and users’ features will be available shortly.
For this first issue, WdW Review visits the ‘Slippery Ground’ that was Istanbul just before the current outbreak of protests and related crackdowns that have erupted across Turkey and continues this coverage with new dispatches from our Istanbul Desk Editor Erden Kosova and a special broadcast from Övül Durmusoglu in Ankara. Monitor pollution levels and their political representation in Beijing with Ou Ning, make a call to the history and uses of public phone booths as a litmus test for the bust and boom cycle in Athens with economist Yanis Varoufakis, join Moscow Desk Editor Ekaterina Degot on a hunt for a KGB officer, reconsider the past 300-year story of Calcutta with Ruchir Joshi, or reflect with Yasmine el Rashidi on the past 29-months in Egypt. Check-in on our current debate wherein sociologist Willem Schinkel puts the public/private divide into question—later followed by a new text from philosopher Judith Revel on the motion in question. Gain another perspective on Witte de With’s current and recent programing through Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl’s reverie on an ancient seismographic device, and read how three poets —Maria Barnas, Angie Keefer, and Quinn Latimer— each scan the same photographic image.
In any case, feel free to revisit our pages often as WdW Review and its Desk Editors continue their regional accounts, while new and upcoming monthly features such as Bertrand Prevost on Tintoretto’s dyes and Avinoam Shalem on museology and the sacred are released.
