MIT Press THRESHOLD 50 : 

NSK’s State in Time and Liminality as a form of Political Resistance

ABOUT THRESHOLD JOURNAL:

Established in 1992, Thresholds is the annual peer-reviewed journal produced by the MIT Department of Architecture. Each independently themed issue features content from leading scholars and practitioners in the fields of architecture, art, and culture. The Thresholds advisory board, composed of internationally recognized figures in various fields of art culture, drives the development of each issue through intellectual support and the pursuit of high-quality submissions from fine arts, design, graphics, media arts and sciences, film, photography, and more.

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION (Jola Idowu, Antonio Pacheco, Ardalan SadeghiKivi, Meriam Soltan):

 AT THE THRESHOLD OF
 BEFORE AND AFTER

What is a moment in time if not a marker between past and present? We might be surprised to find that what comes before and what follows any given instant are often not so different from one another—time and events have a way of finding a certain consistency, a rhythm and flow that can tend to resist change. But then, suddenly, all hell breaks loose. The power goes out; dams break; tires go flat; governments collapse. To quote a statement famously attributed to Vladimir Lenin, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Meant to reference the punctuated equilibrium of history and to give primacy to the chaotic tumult of revolution, it bears noting that inflection points can happen by other means as well. For Thresholds 50: Before | After we parsed history for subtle moments of massive change, for instances where the beginnings of upheaval and long-running transformations might be found. Our goal? To look at a collection of in-between moments that hint at the future and remind us that the past is sticky, persistent, and, in many ways, always with us.

Through a collection of new peer-reviewed essays, short essays, and critical creative works, Thresholds 50: Before | After helps uncover how inflection points play out in real time, in hindsight, and across media. Inflection points can be both literal and spatial, as Amy A. Foley writes in the case of doorways. This spatial dimension can expand also to the desire of a speculative future that forces us to imagine a different urban reality, as Andrew Witt and Hyojin Kwon explore in relation to the aerotropolis; or a reality invoked and mediated by representation, as Barbara Prezelj writes about the flap. Christopher Alton, Eric Robsky Huntley, and Zulaikha Ayub further explore representation through maps and extraction, and Joelle Deeb and Samer Said use speculative images as a tool that critiques and reimagines architectural ruin and destruction in Syria. Inflection points, however, can also be intangible instances and moments in history that complicate linear understandings of progress. These muddled spaces of before and after can result from new technologies, as Shane Reiner-Roth describes; or from contact between different cultures and traditions, as Andrea Knezović posits. Lisa Haber-Thomson offers that matters of law, as in the case of precedents, mark major turning points in the frameworks that guide thinking, and Batoul Faour sees inflection points as cyclical happenings flowing from overlapping occupations that leave traces exploited by later forces.