Progressive culture since 1954
Laying bare the false dichotomy underpinning objections to the presence of politics in art, Cole’s work points to the truth that political needn’t be synonymous with dogma or laboured didacticism. By this metric, Black Paper is far more than just a raised fist.
Moving from the Empire of Cartographers and back to Melbourne, Monkey Grip in hand, I walk down streets coextensive with a novel that can only chart what they are and yet can never coincide with their reality. To walk down Easey Street is now never just a walk down Easey Street: for it’s possible that, somewhere in the tarmac under the pinkish-yellow sky, a scrap of writing on which Nora rides her bike might be seen.
To depoliticise is itself a political act. But to politicise central banking is not to change anything, really. It is merely to reveal what has always been there, and acknowledge that all policy, whether fought out in public or cloaked in technocracy, creates winners and losers.
Zelda D’Aprano held onto the chain with the devotion of a worker who sifted through the words of bosses to find that reason to obey, she held the chain with the ease of a woman holding a handbag of unfair payslips, she held the chain with the strength of her father’s will to survive the Nazis and the drive of her mother’s hope to share our burdens.
Francia won her place as vice presidential candidate without giving any political concession, radicalising the reach of the political project: and making proposals that made visible the violent racist, sexist and classist co-constitutive and ongoing foundations of Colombia’s state and political-economic project.