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Art events like biennials and large-scale exhibitions typically strive to address urgent, timely issues; curatorial approaches respond to various crises from the environment and war to Indigenous rights – notwithstanding the way existing exhibition structures often reproduce exploitative relations or other forms of everyday precarity. In our analysis of crisis, we eschew the concept of crisis as a disruptive event with a clear end for a framing of crisis as a condition. Especially for art events on the ‘periphery’, working under conditions of crisis is hardly new. We investigate the collective practices of three artist collectives, ruangrupa (Indonesia), Womanifesto (Thailand), and Atis Rezistans/Ghetto Biennale (Haiti). In practices like sharing resources, centring non-productivity and giving attention to nourishment and health, these collectives are reshaping art events from events that matter in terms of their pursuits of relevance towards events that care.

Dieser Artikel untersucht das Verhältnis zwischen räumlichem Eingeschlossensein und dystopischem Alltag in fiktionalen Filmen. Unser empirischer Ausgangspunkt ist die Darstellung des Eingeschlossenseins in den Filmen Parasite (2019) und Dogtooth (2009). Beide Filme erzählen mit düsterem Humor verflochtene Geschichten über Erfahrungen des Einschlusses in sozialen Hierarchien (Parasite) und patriarchalischen Strukturen (Dogtooth) sowie über den unmöglichen Versuch, aus diesen Ordnungen auszubrechen. Wir lesen diese Erfahrungen als langweilige Dystopien, also als Dystopien, die in den Alltag eingeschrieben sind und eine grausame Realität normalisieren. Wir nutzen die fiktionalen Erzählungen von Dogtooth und Parasite für eine kulturgeographische Analyse, die das Eingeschlossensein neben seinen räumlichen und materiellen Bedingungen als eine affektive Atmosphäre (Anderson 2014) versteht. Aufbauend auf der zunehmenden Stadtforschung über Affekte und Emotionen vermittelt dieser Zugang, wie das Eingeschlossensein sich als alltägliche, dystopische Erfahrung normalisiert. Wir argumentieren, dass eine Analyse affektiver Atmosphären die unsichtbar gewordenen Gewalterfahrungen des Eingeschlossenseins greifbar machen kann., This article investigates the relationship between spatial enclosure and dystopic everyday lives in fictional film. Our empirical point of departure is the representation of enclosure in the films Parasite (2019) and Dogtooth (2009). Employing a strikingly dark humor, these films depict the experiences of violent enclosure within social positions (Parasite) and patriarchal structures (Dogtooth), as well as the attempts to escape these orders. We frame these experiences as boring dystopias, i.e. as dystopias in which horrible realities have been normalized as a part of everyday life. Drawing on a growing scholarship in urban studies around affect and emotion, we use these fictional narratives for a cultural geographic analysis. Beyond its spatial and material conditions, we also seek to understand the affective atmosphere of enclosure (Anderson 2014). The use of affective atmospheres facilitates an analysis of boring dystopias by rendering the invisibilized violence of enclosure tangible.

The transformation of Chinese cities has engendered new forms of spatialized urban inequality. Research on these processes of segregation has captured the attention of urban researchers, generating a large and varied body of work. Yet its influence on urban theory remains constrained, reflecting the concern with the parochialism of urban theory. A review of segregation research on Chinese cities presents several intertwined findings: Chinese cities are framed in terms of their difference, mostly in contrast to Euro-American cities. This framing renders findings intelligible for an audience familiar with Chicago, but perhaps not Shenzhen. In translating the findings, the research often resorts to a methodological nationalism, which contextualizes Chinese cities in terms of their “Chinese-ness,” a reductionist heuristic that elides the diversity of these cities and construes residential segregation as incommensurate with the experience of cities elsewhere. The effect of this is to limit the potential of this research to contribute to a “more global urban studies,” by inscribing a kind of exceptionalism into Chinese cities.

This article investigates the relationship between spatial enclosure and dystopic everyday lives in fictional film. Our point of departure is the representation of enclosure in the film Parasite (2019). Employing a striking dark humor, the film depicts the experiences of violent social and spatial enclosures, as well as the attempts to escape these orders. We frame these experiences as boring dystopias, i.e., as dystopias in which horrible realities have been normalized as a part of everyday life. Drawing on a growing urban studies scholarship around affect and emotion, we advance a cultural geographic analysis of enclosure through film analysis. Beyond its spatial and material conditions, the paper contributes to understandings of the affective atmospheres of enclosure. It concludes that affective atmospheres render the invisibilized violence of enclosure tangible, enabling a structured analysis of boring dystopias.

Dieser Artikel untersucht das Verhältnis zwischen räumlichem Eingeschlossensein und dystopischem Alltag in fiktionalen Filmen. Unser empirischer Ausgangspunkt ist die Darstellung des Eingeschlossenseins in den Filmen Parasite (2019) und Dogtooth (2009). Beide Filme erzählen mit düsterem Humor verflochtene Geschichten über Erfahrungen des Einschlusses in sozialen Hierarchien (Parasite) und patriarchalischen Strukturen (Dogtooth) sowie über den unmöglichen Versuch, aus diesen Ordnungen auszubrechen. Wir lesen diese Erfahrungen als langweilige Dystopien, also als Dystopien, die in den Alltag eingeschrieben sind und eine grausame Realität normalisieren. Wir nutzen die fiktionalen Erzählungen von Dogtooth und Parasite für eine kulturgeographische Analyse, die das Eingeschlossensein neben seinen räumlichen und materiellen Bedingungen als eine affektive Atmosphäre (Anderson 2014) versteht. Aufbauend auf der zunehmenden Stadtforschung über Affekte und Emotionen vermittelt dieser Zugang, wie das Eingeschlossensein sich als alltägliche, dystopische Erfahrung normalisiert. Wir argumentieren, dass eine Analyse affektiver Atmosphären die unsichtbar gewordenen Gewalterfahrungen des Eingeschlossenseins greifbar machen kann.

The approaches proffered by Teo et al. in ‘Theorizing with urban China’ are constructive ways forward that also provoke a number of questions about the qualitative distinctions between generalizing and universalizing when it comes to theory. While supportive of the gestures to think with elsewhere, to generate theory for the mid-range and to work with researchers who are embedded in the contexts of study, some specifications are desired: If not everywhere, then which specific elsewheres are relevant? How big is the middle of mid-range theorization? How deeply embedded should collaborators be?