Turba

The more we humans need to act in shared purpose to preserve our chance of thriving on this planet, the less we seem to want to. This is not to say that shared purposes are always desirable. There are indeed times when aiming for a compromise is not an option: when one's country is invaded or threatened, when one needs to stand one's ground in a totalitarian regime, when it becomes an urgent moral imperative to speak out for the oppressed, the betrayed, the harmed, and the murdered. These are situations in which not taking the side of the weak is tantamount to allowing free rein to the strong.

This article examines the relationship between the Opera House in Damascus and Al-Assad dynasty. Hafez Al-Assad ordered the building of the Opera House but it remained unfinished till he died. His son Bashar opened it after three decades of construction. It is argued that leaving the institution unfinished was due to uncertainty regarding its identity, place in the bureaucratic hierarchy, and meaning in a totalitarian regime. Theatre institutions were driven to take oppositional positions against one another, and the Opera House intensified this model of enmity.

No theater buildings were built during the reign of Hafez Al-Assad, but theater directorates increased with no space to host their productions. Syrian practices and discourses of identity prioritise the need to defeat the enemy that has no tangible trace in the Syrian life. These aspects intensified enmity among theatre makers and theatre institutions. The Opera House was a hope for many Syrians, but played a role in dividing the Syrians too. It is concluded that the exceptional trait and the location of the Opera House have left many significances on the building and on its design as well as on its activities and that the Opera House, in relation to Al-Assad dynasty, has become one of the critical topics during the Syrian war.

What is the importance of a “body” in the curatorial practice and discourse? How to acknowledge bodies as “epistemic agents” in the process of making art public? Expanding on Beatrice von Bismarck's notion of the curatorial coming-together in public as a constellation, this text is an outline to formulate embodied curating as a relationally attuned, felt-sense, responsible curatorial approach that could resonate in today's complex social and political lifeworlds. Applying philosophical, somatic and feminist socio-political frameworks in different registers such as Karen Barad's agential realism, Resmaa Menakem's Somatic Abolitionism, and Minna Salami's Sensuous Knowledge, I reflect the urgency to acknowledge the intra-active, situated nature of bodies becoming public in art and culture in order to make more attuned worlds.

This text deals with the working conditions and vision of Planta Inclán, a live arts space born in 2019 and located in the southern part of the city of Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina. This is a place created and dreamed by artists that survives within the enormous cultural maelstrom of the city.

During October 2024 I conducted interviews with most of Planta's artistic and managerial team and which, in dialogue with my own on-the-ground field experience as a protagonist worker and creator of what is generated there, constitutes the voice of this research. This is complemented by an overview of studies on the current state of the scene in Buenos Aires, literature on curating live art and contributions from feminist philosophy and cultural studies. This research project will be located in its particular context of production and traversed by the specific conditions that surround it, providing a framework for developing and articulating a curatorial perspective for Planta based on its history and present situation.

Avatar-driven virtual concerts are often framed as a pandemic-era necessity—but their origins and potential extend far beyond that moment. This article challenges the notion that these concerts are failed imitations of physical events, instead proposing that they be understood as a distinct and evolving format of live music. Drawing on research across media studies, ludomusicology, and digital anthropology, I explore how these performances enable new forms of digital, social, and participatory liveness. Rather than focusing on what they lack in comparison to physical concerts, the article argues for evaluating virtual concerts on their own terms—as participatory, inclusive, and socially curated spaces that reimagine what live music can be in digital worlds.

When the Shah of Iran was eager to westernize his country in the 1960s and 1970s, he and his wife assumed that, by buying and displaying European art in museums, they could bring Iran closer to a more westernized world—a world where modernism, industrial development, and culture flourished. Half a century earlier, in the nineteenth century, European classical music, mostly from France, was imported to train military bands, leading to the establishment of a music school in Tehran. This school even taught Iranian instruments in the Western style, embodying the belief that anything manufactured, processed, or taught in the West should be available in Iran, then Persia.

Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski and Slavcho Dimitrov, eds., 2022. Curating in Context: Political and Performative Curatorial Imaginaries.

Reviewed by Karoline Skuseth