Sara Ahmed on the perfomativity of disgust (from The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2004): “To name something as disgusting is to transfer the stickiness of the word ‘disgust’ to an object, which henceforth becomes generated as the very thing that is spoken. The relationship between the stickiness of the sign and the stickiness of the object is crucial to the performativity of disgust as well as the apparent resistance of disgust reactions to ‘newness’ in terms of the generation of different kinds of objects. The object that is generated as a disgusting (bad) object through the speech act comes to stick. It becomes sticky and acquires a fetish quality, which then engenders its own effects.”
November 7th, 2020, Tom

David Graeber (1961-2020) on What Would It Take (from his The Democracy Project. A History, a Crisis, a Movement, 2013, p. 193): “We have little idea what sort of organizations, or for that matter, technologies, would emerge if free people were unfettered to use their imagination to actually solve collective problems rather than to make them worse. But the primary question is: how do we even get there? What would it take to allow our political and economic systems to become a mode of collective problem solving rather than, as they are now, a mode of collective war?”
September 7th, 2020, TomT.J. Demos on why cultural practitioners should never surrender, via tranzit.sk: “For artists, writers, and curators, as art historians and teachers, the meaning-production of an artwork is never finished, never fully appropriated and coopted, in my view, and we should never surrender it; the battle over significance is ongoing. We see that battle rise up in relation to racist and colonial monuments these days in the US, the UK, and South Africa. While the destruction of such monuments results from and is enabling of radical politics, it’s still not enough until the larger institutions that support and maintain their existence as well as the continuation of the politics they represent are also torn down. This is urgent as well in the cultural sphere, including the arts institutions, universities, art markets, discursive sphere of magazines and journals, all in thrall to neoliberalism, where we must recognize that it’s ultimately inadequate to simply inject critical or radical content into these frameworks, which we know excel at incorporating those anti-extractivist expressions into further forms of cultural capital and wealth accumulation. What’s required is more of the building of nonprofit and community-based institutions, organizing radical political horizons and solidarity between social formations.”
August 21st, 2020, TomIn the section “showcase,” one document or object from the HaFI archive will be displayed and briefly contextualized each month.
see German post.
January 2nd, 2021, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
December 22nd, 2020, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
November 28th, 2020, Archive / Showcase... regarding aerial reconnaisance photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau taken during World War II
October 30th, 2020, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
September 30th, 2020, Archive / ShowcaseSee German post.
August 30th, 2020, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
July 16th, 2020, Archive / ShowcaseSee German post.
June 30th, 2020, Archive / ShowcaseSee German post.
May 30th, 2020, Archive / ShowcaseWe would be very interested in getting this stock from you. Please let us know if it is still available.
April 30th, 2020, Showcasesee German Post
March 31st, 2020, Archive / ShowcaseSee German post
February 29th, 2020, Archive / ShowcaseA list of previous digitisations from the holdings of the HaFI
February 3rd, 2020, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
January 6th, 2020, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
December 16th, 2019, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
November 12th, 2019, Archive / ShowcaseSee German post.
September 27th, 2019, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
August 31st, 2019, Archive / Showcasesee German post
July 30th, 2019, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
June 30th, 2019, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
May 26th, 2019, Archive / ShowcaseAgainst Cinema, against Culture
April 30th, 2019, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
March 22nd, 2019, Archive / ShowcaseSee German post.
January 12th, 2019, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
January 7th, 2019, Archive / ShowcaseSee German post.
November 17th, 2018, Archive / ShowcaseAs history continues, more and more marks are left on the surface of the earth.
October 18th, 2018, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
September 30th, 2018, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
August 30th, 2018, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
July 23rd, 2018, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
June 30th, 2018, Archive / ShowcaseSee German post.
May 31st, 2018, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
April 30th, 2018, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
March 30th, 2018, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
February 10th, 2018, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
January 22nd, 2018, Archive / ShowcaseSee German post.
December 30th, 2017, Archive / ShowcaseNews from the archive: INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO PULL OFF POLICE HELMETS and UNTITLED OR: NIXON COMES TO BERLIN, both made in 1969.
November 30th, 2017, Archive / Showcasesee German post.
October 31st, 2017, Showcasesee German post
September 30th, 2017, Archive / ShowcaseSee German post.
August 31st, 2017, Archive / ShowcaseSee German post.
July 1st, 2017, Archive / Showcase