… Maybe it’s an unwarranted leap over a practical, emotional response to the current COVID-19 lockdown and the surrounding aura of panic, but the whole situation of late – read: avoiding contact with strangers, sudden decrees that give off notes of authoritarianism, etc. – has me thinking about my own fixation on the subject and its borders in a different light, through the framework of sovereignty. The interlocking, at times wholly conflicting, sovereignty of nations amid a global health crisis and the economic one to follow; the sovereignty of individual states and regions, of metropolises like New York City; the sovereignty of the subjects blithely traversing them; and the sovereignty of subjects who purport to traverse them slightly less blithely: artists. …

– This text appears in Spike #63 . You can buy it in our online shop –