This paper argues for “constellation research” and its core concept “constellations” as a paradigm in response to a series of potential hermeneutic, perspectival, and cognitive fallacies in the prevalent discourses on transformation and the making of future worlds at large. We claim that constellation research provides a particular heuristic to detect salient aspects of ground-breaking actual transformations. The paper’s intent is to spell out the heuristic model in its generality, thus...

What architectural and spatial shape should a socialist society take? This was a question of heated debate in post-revolutionary Russia, all the more so in the late 1920s and early 1930s, once the survival of the Bolshevik state seemed assured and the focus could turn to constructing its infrastructures. This essay examines one short-lived but significant episode in the history of Soviet architecture and urban planning: the disurbanist philosophy of “new resettlement,” formulated in 1929 by the...

In June 1920, the German artist Georg Scholz received an urgent dispatch to his home in the small town of Grötzingen, near Karlsruhe—an invitation to show his work in the forthcoming First International Dada Fair in Berlin. This irreverent exhibition featured more than 170 objects that its organizers referred to as “products” (“Erzeugnisse”). [1] Large format text posters and oversized photographic portraits called down from the gallery walls and asserted that Dada was enormous, expansive, and...

This cluster examines how new worlds are built in the course of revolutions, a set of actions that inevitably involves deep conflicts. For my purposes, two of these conflicts are most significant. First, those who form the “avant-garde” of either political and artistic movements may be recognized by many in intellectual circles, but certainly not by all. Second, the more radical the revolution, the wider the gap between the revolutionaries and those who cannot or will not break away from the old...

In 2000, the Indian artist Vivan Sundaram made a portrait of the critic Geeta Kapur’s bookshelf titled Marxism in the Expanded Field ( MEF, fig.1). Framed and sectioned by a beaten band of tape spelling a famous line from the Communist Manifesto, “All that is solid melts into air,” and executed nearly a decade after India’s neo-liberal reforms of 1991, MEF documents a suddenly precarious twentieth-century landscape: the aesthetics and politics of international Marxism

The Turkish War of Independence resulted in the official end of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 and dismantled the traditional, religious culture of Islam in Turkey. The ensuing secularist and modernist Atatürk Reforms are considered a revolution that aimed at transforming the cultural fabric of Turkish society. All aspects of life were reconstructed within the span of a decade: from the 1920s to the 1930s, a new civil code and alphabet were introduced, the metric and calendar system was established...

In the spring of 1927, a few months after his stay in Moscow in the winter of 1926 –27, the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin reflects on his travels and his own subsequent literary production in several letters to friends and colleagues. In a short note to the journalist Siegfried Kracauer he mentions his essay “Moscow,” albeit as a side note, and describes it as “keine volle réussite,”

The Cuban Revolution was, itself, an existential question at the heart of Tania Bruguera’s 2009 performance, “Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version),” which consisted of placing a microphone on a dais in a cultural center in Old Havana, and inviting the audience to speak openly about whatever was on their mind.

In 1925, China’s foremost modern writer and intellectual Lu Xun (1881–1936) lamented the superficial nature of modern book design, writing: “It seems that one is only capable of drawing a soldier on a horse dashing forward, as if this is the representation of the so-called ‘revolution, revolution!’” [1] For Lu Xun, unsophisticated revolutionary visual tropes failed to represent the new visual culture brought on by China’s dramatic political transformation from a dynastic empire to a modern...

This essay will compare two avant-gardes formed in 1920s Mexico as part of the processes derived from the Revolution that the country was just emerging from. Estridentismo (which can be roughly translated as “stridentism”) in visual arts and literature and Sonido 13 (“the 13th sound”) in music, were both immersed in the intellectual dynamics and currents of post-Revolutionary life, whose politics and culture portrayed the nation as a renewed historical actor now entering the world stage as an...