Rosa Mercedes / 02

Mutual Aid. This edition of Rosa Mercedes provides ongoing observations and commentaries on the visual politics and related issues of the current crisis.

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Exhibiting Embarrassment (Journal of Visual Culture & HaFI, 48)

What is highlighted in the present discussion are the possibilities offered by bringing to light not just what has been secluded but also the opportunities that emerge from revealing their structures of seclusion. It might well be worthwhile promoting a discourse such as that which has emerged around embarrassment. By DAVID DIBOSA

March 1st, 2021 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Ceci n’est pas un coup

"Lie," "fraud," "perpetrator," "victim," "forgery," "deception," "censorship," "deprivation of liberty," "betrayal," "violence," and, yes, "conspiracy" — these are not arbitrarily chosen expressions of everyday culture, but juridifying terms used for rhetorical weaponization in all parts of the political sphere. By FELIX REIDENBACH

February 9th, 2021 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Full Automation, Full Fantasy

Notions of ‘regulation’ or ‘control’ meet with the long-venerated dreams of automation, to naturalise as the work of algorithms, not people. By JESS HENDERSON

January 25th, 2021 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Portal-ness. Towards a cosmology of rift

Burdened with a doubtful reputation, the practice and attitude of escapism may eventually prove to hold an adequate response to the dire realities of the present and the time to come. By TOM HOLERT

June 27th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Involuntary Euthanasia

We read Arendt’s words as an undeniable exhortation to what may be may transpire when the economic and social crisis exacerbated by Covid-19 soon manifests in full. By LUIS FEDUCHI

June 23rd, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Corona heroes. An obituary

The more piercingly the crisis sirens howl, the greater the hunger for dedicated emergency workers, determined people of action and indomitable freedom fighters. By ULRICH BRÖCKLING

June 12th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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The disgusting image and the virus

Comparing the corona-phenomena to previous epidemic occurrences allows us to gain a grain of understanding and to make sense of the void, of absent bodies. By ANTOINE SIMEAO SCHALK

May 23rd, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Exiting the lockdown, with the help of chance

Those resistant to the idea of sortition as a substitute for election are often surprised when it is made clear to them that the use of random selection is a standard and reliable practice in many representative democracies. By LUIS FEDUCHI

May 16th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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COVID-19 Movement V: Grave

The confusion and turbulence of COVID: that is the place we all share now. It’s the first movement of the sonata, grave. By PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN

May 5th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Social distancing without a society

April 2020 saw gatherings of the American right-wing that declared they demand to “re-open the economy,” as they call it. These protests were payed for by the wealthiest donors to the US Republican party. By JOSHUA SIMON

April 29th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Figures of entanglement

We may ask, whether in the current, transitional period of social distancing, where intermingling, contact and proximity have become anathema, the notion of entanglement is already accruing a new set of connotations, regardless whether we understand it in a concrete or metaphorical sense. By ERIC C. H. DE BRUYN

April 29th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Soothing? Regressing? ASMR and the new normal

"She is wearing a lab coat and a face mask and is saying, in the softest tone possible, that she is about to take a nasal swab to test for the virus. It’s scary and soothing at the same time." By TOM HOLERT

April 19th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Infection of a liberal weekly

Interaction designer Christian Lässer is able to render evident (and visible) how the topic of the epidemic has gradually taken possession of Die Zeit – up to the full blown monopolization of its editorial content.

April 11th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Tele-nausea: losing the presence

There is "a good chance that the large-scale experimentation with telepresence, which has long met with much resistance, will encourage its lasting adoption" (André Gunthert). By TOM HOLERT

April 3rd, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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The new ekphrasis of the V-shape

The V-shape recession, a sudden deep trough, followed by a quick surge, for few, and the Germans with their economic strength and infamouis intransigence when it comes to economic solidarity most certainly among them, is becoming analogous to the V-ictory-sign (in the wake of the V-irus ...) By TOM HOLERT

April 1st, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Virus and infection – the trouble with analogies

It seems as if Suely Rolnik has already in 2005 anticipated the effects of the virus that is currently chokeholding the world: For the already discriminated minorities, including the predominantly black service providers and domestic workers recruited from the favelas, are now considered particularly at risk. By SABETH BUCHMANN

March 31st, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Locked into the present

Albeit everyone seems to believe otherwise, every crisis has a history. Hence this crisis has a history as well. BY MARK TERKESSIDIS

March 27th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Collectivize Facebook

In our compromised and entangled ways, we try to keep going, trying to transmutate heteronomy into shades of autonomy. By SVEN LÜTTICKEN

March 26th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Therapeutic nihilism

Beneath the current debates and statements about the "costs" of lockdowns and social distancing, beneath Trumpian disengagement from medical cure (in his attempt to decouple the health catastrophe of the pandemic from the "problem" of ecomomic repression and de-growth), there lurks the most vicious vision/version of "therapeutic nihilism." By TOM HOLERT

March 25th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Medical internationalism

This weekend's news about 65 Cuban doctors, nurses and technicians arriving in Milan to support the Italian health system's struggle against the coronavirus are a forceful reminder of Fidel Castro's medical internationalism. By TOM HOLERT

March 23rd, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Reconfiguring liveness

Perhaps live streaming should be reduced to the bare minimum: to tutorials around health and medical issues, to tele-meetings of the infected and vulnerable with their loved ones, to non-commercial online courses in the newly decentralized educational systems. By TOM HOLERT

March 21st, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Pandemic vision

What if the irreversible situation in which the "world community" is now being united, forced to reimagine itself, has entailed a sudden leap in visibility regarding the global accumulation of crises - not primarily as a result of tireless research, political organizing, artistic productions etc., but rather as a correction of the collective sensorium on a gigantic scale? By TOM HOLERT

March 20th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Remote relations, cultures of distance

Among the most unsettling attributes that have quickly gained notoriety (and poignancy) due to the the current crisis' new linguistic conventions  and discursive framings can be counted "from a distance" or "remote". by TOM HOLERT

March 19th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Modelling the epidemic

In the current situation (and any comparable state of emergency caused by an epidemic) much of the existing hope hinges on the statistical and epidemiological sciences that model an event like this by means of computational processing. By TOM HOLERT

March 18th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Image of exhaustion

A photograph of nurse Elena Pagliarini, fallen asleep, that was taken last week at the end of one of her shift at 6 a.m. in the emergency room of the hospital of Cremona, a particularly badly affected town in Lombardy. By TOM HOLERT

March 17th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Towards the end of visual capitalism

By now, as to be expected from a news situation as engrossing as this one, the compulsion to reach an (or even the image) of the pandemic (if not the world history of pandemics), is tantamount...By TOM HOLERT

March 16th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Mutual aid

Pëtr Kropotkin's anarchist-anti-capitalist-commonist-animalist notion of "mutual aid" has been gaining traction for a while already...

March 15th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Corona ethics

An insightful contribution by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos on the socio-ethical dimensions of the crisis...

March 15th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Against quarantine

Angela Mitropoulos' article "Against Quarantine" is an important intervention in the debate around the COVID-19 crisis...

March 15th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02
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Dashboarding the crisis

As the Coronavirus crisis is evolving, it becomes harder to tell what kind of image the most publicised image of/on the crisis is exactly... By TOM HOLERT

March 15th, 2020 — Rosa Mercedes / 02