Search results

Momentography of a failure brings essays, timelines, film, photography, and a series of conversations together to deal with Ethiopia's controversial urbanisation and the transformative space of the city. It explores the gradual transition of rural-urban space, inner-city migration, emerging and disappearing spaces, and commoning in public space. Momentography of a failure is established at the verge of a hyper-documented world, a hybrid space of digital sociability. While the media production, its reception, and distribution was pluralized by digitization, practices such as "media-sharing" and "citizen journalism" established new conditions for visibility, reinvented the authorial image, and promoted yet another dematerialization of authorship. The author camouflages in the cloud(s). Adoption, appropriation, and recycling are standardized. Authorship becomes secondary to content and alternative models of authorship are formulated: co-authoring, collaborative creation, interactivity, and strategic anonymity, in which cultural activism is reinforced. Momentography of a failure sets out on this point and draws up a multidisciplinary artistic and urban research platform that calls for practicing forms of participatory citizenship through collaborative thinking, creation, and reflection. Momentography of a failure is a network of artists, urbanists, writers, and activists that stand where aesthetic-artistic practice and sociopolitical activism come together to explore failure--and its various realities--and claim, reaffirm, and dream alternatives

"The History of the 'Slave of Christ' : From Jewish Child to Christian Martyr offers the first critical editions and English translations of the two Syriac recensions of this fascinating text, which narrates the story of a young Jewish child, Asher, who after converting to Christianity and taking the name ʻAbda da-Miḥa ('slave of Christ') is martyred by his father Levi in a scene reminiscent of Abraham's offering of Isaac in Genesis 22. In a detailed introduction, the authors argue that the text is a fictional story composed during the early Islamic period (ca. 650-850) probably in Shigar (modern Sinjār). Building upon methodology from the study of Western Christian and Jewish texts, they further contend that the story's author constructs an imagined Jew based on the Hebrew Bible, thereby challenging the way that previous scholars have used this text as straightforward evidence for historical interactions between Jews and Christians in Babylonia at this time. This ultimately allows the authors to reevaluate the purpose of the text and to situate it in its Late Antique Babylonian context"--