Artun

Early 20th century (1927) beaux-arts train station

#trainstations #beauxarts #urbanspace

📷 Toronto International Film Festival Third Floor. A space for writing and bricolage, for critical thought, and new ways of being and seeing in the presence of Agnès Varda.

Aşklar ve Hayaletler: Kadınlık, queer kimlik ve gri alanlar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKlgT0RJ09Y

#books #booklaunch

'Life is possible again’ - #GogolBordello

Gogol Bordello’s new #album is out this month and they are playing in Toronto tonight. Tomorrow Feb 21st they will be in Detroit, #Michigan.

"Gogol Bordello is the band that only gets better with time. Their old stuff is great, but their new stuff is awesome”

“Gogol Bordello is an American #punk #rock band from the #LowerEastSide of Manhattan.”

📍 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqkXonvel6o

#liveconcert #tour #LifeIsPossibleAgain

📌 On #Tradition, #Queering Official Memory, and The #Creative Process

In 1962, James Baldwin wrote in the essay "The Creative Process"

"When a tradition has been evolved, whatever the tradition is, the people, in general, will suppose it to have existed from before the beginning of #time and will be most unwilling and indeed unable to conceive of any changes in it."

📍 https://openspaceofdemocracy.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/baldwin-creative-process.pdf

#JamesBaldwin #politics #memory #entrenchment #change #futures

#worldaffairs

📷 artun faliro

Robin sighting in Toronto, a sign of spring?

yes and no

#Robins travel in the winter from the north to southern states and warmer climates but some Robins stay in the north, depending on food availability, and those who traveled to the south might return back to north with spring.

Robins have a wide wintering range because of their downy feathers that help them live through snow. Both food availability and temperature can affect their whereabouts, and migration in the winter and the spring.

“But the oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed themselves; mystification is one of the forms of oppression;”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

#Book review: The Feminist Art of Walking (Morag Rose, Pluto Press, 2025).

📍 https://thesociologicalreview.org/reviews/the-feminist-art-of-walking-by-morag-rose/

“At the outset, Rose adopts a cautious stance toward famous walking figure of the flâneur, urban wanderer. Rose calls out how the notion of the flâneur has historically been “male, wealthy and able-bodied."

She calls on us to consider how walking can function as activism, weaving together histories, memories and the present within urban landscapes.”

#books #critique #ableism

#PlutoPress

And yet, and moreover, one witnesses, in late capitalism and neoliberal academia, inclusion without equality, disingenuous inclusion without redistribution of power; these rhetorical cloaking devices instrumentalize inclusion without structural change to manufacture consent to 21st century extractive systems such as uncritical infinite growth & vicissitudes of markets.

Inclusion is just, principled and genuine when it includes structural change, equality and equity, and redistribution of power.

Between the city and the island. Canoes in a space and #pause of #interregnum.

On this thread, I will be sharing in the future collective #moments that conjure up a social and political #theory, in these times of interregnum, polycrisis, and with unwavering #hope for a democratic world and equal rights.

📷 artun faliro

Post-development? Arturo Escobar and other post-development thinkers’ ideas unpack the history and very purpose of development, and inform new and critically-grounded ways forward in the contemporary moment.

“Through #Foucault, Escobar came to the conclusion that development planning was not only a problem to the extent that it failed; it was a problem even when it succeeded.”

"Perhaps no other idea has been so insidious, no other idea gone so unchallenged,"

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2012/nov/05/arturo-escobar-post-development-thinker

There are no right answers to wrong questions; #inclusion without #structural #change, without #equality, is a rhetorical #cloaking device, smokescreen, to maintain structural inequities, and historical & contemporary material injustices.

Another world and #structural #change are possible by refusing the empty platitudes for band-aid solutions, disingenuous pleasantries, and cultures of scheming for professional ladder-climbing that cloak the structural causes-of-causes of global inequalities.

#DonnaHaraway

#MoreThanHumanWorlds and why they matter for living in a #ThickPresent

“To live well with each other in a Thick Present means #environmental #multispecies, multiracial, multi-kinded reproductive and environmental justice.”

People making snowpersons and more-than-human-worlds in Riverdale Park, Cabbagetown, Toronto, Ontario
February 14, 2026

📍 #Zeitgeist in a Thick Present: “I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic.”

— Donna Haraway

On making kin and more-than-human worlds 🐌 🐢

The Los Angeles Review of Books (2019)

📍 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/making-kin-an-interview-with-donna-haraway/

Donna Haraway: I think LGBTQI people from all sections of society, as well as many Indigenous Peoples and African-American communities, have been the most innovative in the United States in terms of building and sustaining really interesting kinds of kin networks, often against great odds.