"In Cameroon, rumours abound of zombie-labourers toiling on invisible plantations in an obscure night-time economy."

Author dreaming of a future without censorship we have never got rid of. It seems, that people don‘t care while it grows stronger again.

American history is filled with stories about how to hide chauvinism and expansion behind lofty ideals of inevitable fate, of a manifest destiny to settle paradise; how to endlessly, shamelessly, and by force expand the boundaries of one’s garden. Joyce Hatto, too, had a nearly unbounded approach to reality, making nearly 120 recordings of piano concerts in her life. One of England’s greatest female pianists – or maybe not?

Post-Fordist working conditions wear a mask of openness, flexibility, and individual freedom. Criticism thus finds all the more difficult to achieve its objectives when it is literally attracted by institutions. Under such conditions, is it even possible to make art that is not part of the culture industry? Just like Kenneth Goldsmith in the opening text to this issue, these two British critics ponder the opposing tactics that, instead of attacking the concept of institutions, overpower it. Perhaps even art itself is built of nothing more than inertia.

Fritz Lang’s oceanic journey in the autumn of 1924 culminates in the same way as for many immigrants before him: with a view of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline – in other words, the future. Starting from this point in space and time, Jan Wollner goes in search of the origins of the architectural aesthetics of Lang’s most famous film, Metropolis.