In 2006, Ofer Zur argued that reducing someone to a role shaped by past experiences can limit their ability to regain control of their lives. Social support remains essential, but responding to suffering also requires facing complexity and recognising individual agency rather than relying on a single explanation. Nigel […]
In Focus
In Focus
A phrase that sets the language of gestures in motion
For anyone unfamiliar with Mandarin, the expression can be used to ask for help, point out an address on a map or attract a taxi driver’s or shopkeeper’s attention. It also opens contact from either side: visitors use it, and hosts say it to travellers and customers. Luis Melián […]
Alfredo Jaar’s clarinet call
A new study by Florencia San Martin looks at the work of Alfredo Jaar and the political valency of his visual, mostly installation, art. Sean Sheehan Jaar’s work challenges political indifference with images and gestures that solicit more than passive spectatorship. Five years after moving to New York […]
Barbarism never left, it just took a pause
Media companies remain silent and the opposition clings to digital platforms while completely abandoning community work. In this vacuum, through networks of solidarity, complaints and an Erasmian spirit, citizens must face stigmatisation, blacklists of inconvenient people and extrajudicial executions Germán Ayala Osorio* The regime that was recently installed […]
Architecture between exile, prison and memory
Miguel Lawner, an architect and civil servant under Salvador Allende’s government, was arrested following the 1973 coup and confined on Dawson Island. There, together with other prisoners, he restored an abandoned church before going into exile and then returning to Chile in 1985. Carmen Esquivel In that area […]















