Commentary

April 12, 2021<April 12, 2021

“It’s not your loss. It’s San Francisco’s”: Black Movement, Displacement, Home/lessness, and Gentrification in The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)

by Jacqueline Pinkowitz

Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco is an elegy to the displacement of minority communities from the gentrifying city. Jacqueline Pinkowitz discusses the film’s images of movement, dislocation, and loss and the legacy of racial inequality in the Bay Area.

April 6, 2021<April 14, 2021

Projections that Give: Cauleen Smith’s COVID Manifesto (2020)

by Malini Guha

Malini Guha discusses filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith's month-long projection COVID Manifesto. She argues that, unlike methods of surplus accumulation that ensure neoliberal capitalism, the piece gives viewers time to pause, process, and grieve during the pandemic without asking for anything in return.

September 30, 2017<October 2, 2017

Of Drones and Angels: GAIKA’s Sonic Images of Urban Resistance

by Alessio Kolioulis

Alessio Kolioulis examines the work of GAIKA – music, videos, and films – and explores the critiques of surveillance and state control running throughout.

September 27, 2017<September 29, 2017

The Day Social Housing Hit Mainstream Media

by Anna Viola Sborgi

In the first of a two-part look at the Grenfell Tower crisis, Anna Sborgi examines the complicated relationship between the media and social housing in contemporary London.

September 1, 2017<September 2, 2017

Cosmopolis and the Right to the City

by Thomas Nail

In this essay, Thomas Nail explores the history of sanctuary cities, and proposes the notion of migrant cosmpolitanism as a means of achieving the right to the city.

September 7, 2016<January 17, 2017

Drag Queens in Kevlar, or The Right to Bear Arms in Queer Public Space

by Hollis Griffin

Queer public spaces are zones of intimacy and possibility. They spatialize desire in ways that foster new modes of being and wanting. When I read about the June 12, 2016 shooting at Pulse in Orlando, I saw with new clarity how the public spaces in which I have felt most fully alive can so quickly be obliterated.