Time and the Everyday in Slow Cinema examines the phenomenon of Slow cinema, a style defined by its lingering focus on quotidian activities and extended durations. Rosa Barotsi argues that while the style emerges from a tradition of durational filmmaking and resonates with movements advocating for deceleration, it is also deeply entangled in the structures of late capitalism, creating a dynamic tension between radicalism and conservatism. This book situates the trend between artistic innovation and institutional commodification, ultimately raising critical questions about spectatorship, cinematic time, and the politics of cultural value.

Practically anything can be a model of or for something else. What characterizes models is rather their specific reductive relationality, which often promotes understanding but is always generative rather than merely representational. The essays in Breaking and Making Models engage with the normative and performative qualities of models, their aesthetic and political dimensions, and their world-making potentials. Bringing such perspectives into a broad interdisciplinary dialogue, this book explores ways to work creatively with models.

This chapbook examines the aestheticization of plants in colonial discourses and charts visualizations of art histories that use the tree as a metaphor. In doing so, Miriam Oesterreich considers how ‘tropicalized’ tree forms have been reappropriated to portray a more ‘worlded’ art history. In the mid-twentieth century, prominent visual artists including Miguel Covarrubias, Alfred Barr, and Ad Reinhardt featured trees of art as canonizing illustrations of Western art history. Using Pablo León de la Barra’s poster Diagrama Tropical/Nova Cartografia Tropical (2010) as a starting point Branching Out discusses works by contemporary artists from Latin America and the Caribbean to look at the subversive potential in reimagining plant images and metaphors.