Laura Harris wrote one of our favourite ever essays: What Happened to the Motley Crew? Her book Experiments in Exile: C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness shows how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and attempt to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms that constitute what she calls “the aesthetic sociality of blackness.”

Fernando Zalamea is a Colombian mathematician, philosopher, cultural critic and writer living in Bogotá. He opens up the vast spectrum of modern and contemporary mathematics and the new philosophical possibilities they suggestto any of us who have ever read an epic novel, been moved by a piece of art, or wonder about the complexity of human understanding and social life. His thinking — as summarised in English in his book Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics (Urbanomic x Sequence Press 2012) — weaves together strands of the modern and postmodern, the rational and the romantic into a synthetic universality, endlessly revisable and updatable, and puts forward an idea of the trans and transmodernity as a term to encompass our unfolding epoch.

Image Description: Two white origami geometric paper whales are sat perched on a low wooden coffee table. One is larger than the other. The small one sits in front and they face in opposite directions with their tales pointing upwards. On the coffee table there are glasses of water and a closed book with a bookmark sticking out.