Day 47: Manuel Vargas responds to Jonas Staal, “Empire and its Double: The Many Pavilions of the Islamic State”
“If the XXI century has shown us anything, it is that it has been a very fractured one. The same can be also said about the Islamic State, which is composed by independent hubs, each one an ensemble manifested through a virtual platform and without any objective but the spread of acts of extreme violence, and a message of hate at its most elementary level . . . having wanted to destroy any resemblance of what they are against, they show themselves as the ultimate example of the object in their destructive hands. The only point they might be proving therefore is that subjectivity has ceased to exist so that, basically, we can easily conclude that they are condemning themselves. . . . But the West will go on, new saviors of the loss are emerging, even going further with this butchery, recovering—with the help of 3D printers—what is no longer there, as the work of Morehshin Allahyari titled Material Speculation: ISIS and all its unapologetically pastiche, and embedded nostalgia that surrounds it in the form of a diluted repetition that ends up looking as an edible gummy. For the sake of Art, we, for sure, can still feel safe at home.“
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