L'Internationale Online, Newsletter #32, December 2025. To build, to weave, to strengthen ...
L'Internationale Online, Newsletter #32, December 2025. To build, to weave, to strengthen ...
I'm Nick Aikens, managing editor of L’Internationale Online. In his MA Forum lecture at HDK-Valand yesterday artist Adam Broomberg talked saliently about the need to develop strategies of image making and art practice that could form, strengthen or heal communities during times of ever-deepening fracture. What he termed ‘counter surveillance’ techniques could offer myriad ways to deepen and complicate relations with people, sites and histories. His words resonated when I thought through the evolving research and publishing project of L’Internationale Online. Indeed, many of the recent contributions that move through forms of sonic assembly, reflections on museum, collections and place, or acts of generosity, point to the need for, and models of, cultural practice that build, weave and strengthen relations.
I will carry Adam's proposition into the New Year and the work ahead. For now I would like to thank deeply everyone – contributors, readers, and friends – who have engaged with L’Internationale Online and the wider confederation in 2025. LIO is taking a short holidays but will be back in January with a new e-publication from our Land Relations strand and contributions from Rana Issa, Natalia Arcos and Louis Henderson, amongst others. Rest well.
Joséphine Baker in Barcelona at the première of the show Not Yet at the Teatro Cómico (1927–28). Photograph: Merletti
In the second in a three part series, co-inciding with MACBA's Project a Black Planet exhibition, researcher Tania Safura Adam continues her excavation of the Black archive in Spain. In 'Jazz without a Black body politic' she explores the complex, often contradictory role of jazz in Spain since the 1920s and until today: as a form of solidarity and support for Black communities, as part of the avant-garde and as an art form that has been whitewashed and appropriated by the middle classes, overlooking its emancipatory, Pan-Africanist drive.
Onkar Kular, 'Dek Bass', video still, 2025
In 'Housing Music'Onkar Singh Kular compiles a track list, assembling and sampling from his long term research into sound system culture and Black musical genres of reggae, dub, jungle and bhangra – as sonic, aesthetic and spatial practice.
Until Liberation III is the third twelve hour listening session by the Learning Palestine Group. Comprising diverse sonic material sourced online, the session weaves together times, struggles and sounds. This iteration brings together material recorded since the beginning of the genocide, as well as articulating the current conjuncture with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
Marcel Broodthaers, Décor: A conquest, 1975. Photograph: C. Clinckx. Exhibited in M HKA as part of the retrospective 'Soleil Politique', 4 October 2019 - 19 January 2020
In 'The Fifth Estate: On Museums, Public Imagination and the Vanishing Space for Collectivity', written in the context of the Flemish government's announcement to redraw the Flemish museological landscape, curators Philippe Pirotte and Els reflect on the status of the museum in today's political climate. Lamenting the current appetite for managerialism and efficiency they call for a recognition of the vital and generative relations between collections, contemporary art, place and collective imagination.
SCK cohort at Mbolo Moy Dole Association, November 2025. Photo Amanda Macedo Macedo
In her dispatch from the second edition of the School of Common Knowledge, held in Barcelona and Madrid in November 2025, Amanda Macedo Macedo offers a series of 'Notes on Generosity', weaving reflections on the experiences, , propositions and contradictions that permeated the school.
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Museum of the Commons is a four-year programme (2023-26) comprising exhibitions, public programming, heritage exchange and institutional , organised by the European museum confederation L'Internationaleand its partners.
