Templates for Liberation

This publication presents the perspectives of five contributors who consider this present moment. The first contribution is from the artist, who weaves the themes of her exhibition in and out of time and place with poetic deliberation and no loss of nerve. Kali Rubaii proposes templates for resurgency from Anbar, Iraq, through a consideration of the material realities of home and self-determination in the face of unrelenting devastation. Françoise Vergès deftly identifies the forces of oppression, spelling out the template in her text, ‘There will be nothing like peace until we abolish racial patriarchal capitalism’. Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri generously welcome the reader into their epistolary text, ‘Dear Rheim’, the format and urgency of which channel disparate notes of resistance across the world. Each text herein embraces the utilitarianism of the template project: radicality, the authors make plain, is utterly reasonable. Documentary photographs taken by Ann Bragdon, Alkadhi’s mother, in Iraq in the 1970s provide an intimate perspective on the region. They also offer a visual cue that liberation knows no temporality, affirming a statement in Alkadhi’s text that might serve as an apposite subtitle for this volume: ‘Time and place determine the intersection of our mutual resolve: a growing collectivity that outlasts this transitioning increment.’