Rab-Rab: journal of political and formal inquiries in art starts a new course with issue 6. “We plan to use the journal as a platform to support, gather, discuss, and propagate the experiences of people who want to organize against capitalism, nationalism, chauvinism, and all other kinds of reactionary ideologies. There are testimonies, interviews, statements, theses and studies – as in all previous issues – but from now on, politics will outweigh form.”
In this issue are interviews with musicians Milena Solumun, Ben Watson & Jair-Rohm Parker Wells discussing their experiences with organizing. Kaisa Lassinaro looks at a library collection of feminist and lesbian literature, and asks what it means to read these materials with explicit political and Marxist references? Ghassan Halwani gives a condensed summary of a long and ongoing activist interaction with archives through the defamiliarization of memoirs from the Civil War in Lebanon; beyond the ideologies of liberal reconciliation.
There are two interviews with filmmaker Doruntina Kastrati. Kastrati’s film about workers who were seriously injured and, in some cases, died while working for a one euro hourly pay rate on the highway in Kosovo for the most powerful companies.
An article by Rastko Močnik on the ideologies of contemporary art. Močnik’s real target is the prevalence of reactionary and conservative ideas in contemporary art practices which, historically, were established by relativizing the revolutions of avant-garde art.
As a supplement to this issue, there is the first English translation of Walter Benjamin’s text on Lenin, actually Benjamin’s review of Lenin’s letters to Maxim Gorky, originally from 1926. Translated by Esther Leslie, who also annotated the text, Benjamin’s review portrays a different Lenin, one whose personal life is not detached from his revolutionary politics; the Lenin of subjective politics.
Rab Rab Press is located in Helsinki, Finland. They publish materials as an intervention to the existing fields of art & publishing activities.
Designed by Ott Kagovere. Rab-Rab Press, Helsinki: February 2021
