If the forced collision of dramatic characters and public situations is understood as a metaphor for art, then according to Mailand / Innenhof, art’s role seems to be that of a troublemaker. However, the “theoretical and practical creation of situations,” which echoes a situationist self-understanding, doesn’t only target scientific or political events. It also aims at the so-called cultural sector, and thus at itself.

…what goes beyond the performance as surplus action becomes the real content of the film, its driving purpose. The actors don’t only play a version of themselves in Olho da Rua, they act at their acting as well and in such a way that the indications of confidence or doubt that flash across their features are never so clear. Is the feeling theirs or another’s? Is it real or feigned for the camera? Do they themselves know?

Politically, melancholia may be more destructive than idealism, but aesthetically, doesn’t melancholia, as a kind of negative idealism, seem almost natural?

C. Philip Mills reviews Skinamarink

For moderns, art is the appearance of suffering from the unrealized potential of freedom, i.e., the appearance of freedom’s task.

“The category of experience connects original composition to translation. Just as poets shape their experience into a poem, the translator shapes a more specific experience, the experience of the original poem, into the translation.”

“Critique is an exploration of conditions of possibility for freedom in transformation.”

n+1 Editor Marco Roth responds to Caesura’s Issue 0 prompt.