Public 58 Spring 2019 Smoke: Figures, Forms

PUBLIC 58 proposes smoke as a pressing figure of our global present that calls forth a capacious counter-archive of knowledge and sociality. Tracking smoke’s figural and material sojourns across the domains of ecology, aesthetics, ethics, and politics, contributors to this issue consider the genres of relationality and forms of destruction that smoke signals and produces. Smoke engulfs and indiscriminately incorporates, engendering common spaces and common worlds, while it simultaneously signals the still-unfolding histories of exclusion and dispossession that render racialized and colonized populations structurally over-exposed to smoke’s pathways and thereby to premature death. Smoke divides and it entangles; it obfuscates vision while giving depth to landscape by delineating a shared or general horizon. Smoke directs our attention at once to the contemporary devastation of the world and to the ongoing creation of otherwise worlds that remain imperceptible to the logics of the dominant order. SMOKE: FIGURES, GENRES, FORMS explicates these generative tensions by addressing the formal and conceptual challenges that smoke poses to received understandings of visuality, connection, place, duration, violence, and solidarity. Bringing together artists, scholars, and writers, PUBLIC 58 invites readers to consider how thinking with smoke may open otherwise ecologies and habitable atmospheres of collective existence.