Isabel Löfgren takes us to the Stockholm high-rise suburbs to show us how art projects and transnational media intermingle with the multicultural urban reality. In this book, she discusses the architecture of her project Satellitstaden, where her artistic interventions with the satellite dishes on façades highlight the voices of its inhabitants through participatory and co-generative artistic processes. In these peripheries, satellite subjects emerge, orbiting around multiple identifications, foregrounding the notion of spatial justice, the subaltern and the importance of grassroots movements.The book outlines a philosophy of hospitality in response to the turn in Europe against refugees, which Löfgren considers to be a crisis of hospitality, not a crisis of migration. Löfgren discusses the ethics that govern the relationship between guest and host, the self and Other. Who has the right to belong? On what terms? She argues for a hospitable turn in art, urban planning and media, in which guest-host relationships are performed, mediated and problematized.We urgently need to re-imagine the ethics of hospitality and habitability for the near future. The 2020 pandemic forces us to reassess our philosophy and practice of human contact, re-engineering how we relate to the Other, and what hospitality means in the face of a global halt.Isabel Löfgren is a Swedish-Brazilian artist, researcher and educator based in Stockholm and Rio de Janeiro. She is currently working at the Media and Communication Studies Department at Södertörn University in Sweden, next to her artistic practice. Her research interests include cultural politics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of diaspora in the fields of contemporary art, media philosophy, and media activism.
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After the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich in May 1945, Germany no longer existed as a sovereign, independent nation. It was occupied by the four Allied powers: France, Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. When it came to the postwar European recovery, the biggest obstacle was that the economy in Germany, the dominant continental economic power before the Second World War, was at an almost complete standstill. This not only had severe consequences for Germany itself, but also had strong economic repercussions for surrounding countries, especially the Netherlands. As Germany had been the former’s most important trading partner since the middle of the nineteenth century, it was clear that the Netherlands would be unable to recover economically without a healthy Germany. However, Allied policy, especially that of the British and the Americans, made this impossible for years. This article therefore focuses on the early postwar Dutch-German trade relations and the consequences of Allied policy. While much has been written about the occupation of Germany, far less attention has been paid to the results of this policy on neighbouring countries. Moreover, the main claim of this article is that it was not Marshall Aid which was responsible for the quick and remarkable Dutch economic growth as of 1949, but the opening of the German market for Dutch exports that same year. https://doi.org/10.1515/jbwg-2018-0009 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martijn-lak-71793013/
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In: Frank Gadinger, Martina Kopf, Ayşem Mert, and Christopher Smith (eds.). Political Storytelling: From Fact to Fiction (Global Dialogues 12) This essay presents a summary of important perspectives concerning the distinction between what counts as truth or fiction. As a source of inspiration, it starts with two examples found in literature – the first a classical Spanish novel and the second a collection of stories written by the leader of a social movement in Mexico. These two examples of the conflictive relations between truth and fiction, authenticity and imagination serve as a source of inspiration for the rest of this article, which shows that this issue has been a subject of intense debate in philosophy and in the philosophy of science and still presents a challenge in the 21st century. The essay states that absolute, objective truth is a myth. It describes that what counts as ‘truth’ in a particular era, is, among other things, the result of power relations. It suggests productive ways to deal with this problem in modern society, through deliberative, emancipatory processes of reflexivity (Weick 1999), participatory research and dialogue, facilitating innovation and generation of new solutions.
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