The second volume of the journal investigating movement-based listening practices that take the forms of militant inquiry and political education, edited by the international sound art and popular education collective Ultra-red, is dedicated to the "Learning Circles for Palestine."
Contributors reflect on the current Palestine conjuncture several years after solidarity actions spread across university campuses around the world. It is now clear that the crackdown on student activism was a pretext for the dismantling or capturing of public institutions. The move against dissent also provided common ground for neofascists and liberals to enforce a consensus with imperialism.
The second volume ofUltra-red begins by pairing poems from Palestine with poems detailing the attacks on pro-Palestine students on university campuses. The journal then moves into its main feature: a dozen conversations with student and community groups. Each conversation is framed as a learning circle in which reflections shape critical questions and mark contradictions that speakers (and journal readers) continue to consider in the present moment. These learning circles come to the journal largely from contexts where Ultra-red members are involved in anti-capitalist and anti-racist base-building in Los Angeles, New York, London and in Novi Pazar. Additionally, we hear reflections on the Palestine conjuncture from the Bethlemen-based scientist and public-educator, Mazin Qumsiyeh as well as Palestinian Liberation Theologian and popular-educator, Omar Haramy. Through a list of listening protocols, the journal also offers a guide for readers to pursue their own learning circle for Palestine.
The journal continues with a special section titled, "The Case of Apartheid South Africa and Israel." This section combines historical and personal reflections on the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa with a photo essay on anti-apartheid solidarity in the U.K. from the 1950s to the 1980s. Both articles underscore the historical links between South Africa's apartheid government and the state of Israel and the alliances established between anti-apartheid and Palestinian liberation movements.
The journal concludes with new dispatches from ongoing militant investigations. We read about Southern Italy where activists attempt to build a movement across multiple struggles from anti-extractivism to farm workers. A dispatch from the direct democracy movement in Serbia. And, an oppositional research detailing the role of neofascist operatives in pursuing hegemony in the U.S. by targeting poor people's movements and capturing university infrastructure and curriculum.
This volume of Ultra-redis edited by Dont Rhine and Robert Sember in collaboration with Zissel Aronow, Janna Graham, Chris Jones, Zoe Kisselbach, Elliot Perkins, and Araceli Veloz, and it includes numerous contributors.
Ultra-red is an international sound art and popular education collective with twelve members based in Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, and multiple locations in the UK.
Activist art has come to signify a particular emphasis on appropriated aesthetic forms whose political content does the work of both cultural analysis and cultural action. The art collaboration Ultra-red propose a political-aesthetic project that reverses this model. If we understand organizing as the formal practices that build relationships out of which people compose an analysis and strategic actions, how might art contribute to and challenge those very processes? How might those processes already constitute aesthetic forms?
In the worlds of sound art and modern electronic music, Ultra-red pursue a fragile but dynamic exchange between art and political organizing. Founded in 1994 by two AIDS activists, Ultra-red have over the years expanded to include artists, researchers and organisers from different social movements including the struggles of migration, anti-racism, participatory community development, and the politics of HIV/AIDS.
Collectively, the group have produced radio broadcasts, performances, recordings, installations, texts and public space actions (ps/o). Exploring acoustic space as enunciative of social relations, Ultra-red take up the acoustic mapping of contested spaces and histories utilising sound-based research (termed Militant Sound Investigations) that directly engage the organizing and analyses of political struggles.
