The riot is an extraordinary setting that has played a pivotal role in the permanent confrontation between dissent and power over centuries. The deeper crises of capitalism, racial violence, and urban restructuring have convulsed us into “an age of riots” (Joshua Clover). As master fictions of the sovereign nation-state implode and hegemonic silencing and displacing of the urban poor only serves to reveal the cracks in governability, the book project will entail: politico-philosophical investigations on riots that will work through major concepts of contemporary thought and their historical contextualization; investigations on how architecture and urbanism both produce riots and are produced by them with focused reflections on housing, weaponized architecture and urban segregation; artworks and artists’ reflections on the uneven modalities of riots as a lexicon of sentient images and noise that otherwise appear to be frequently overwritten by the spectacle of violence.

Natasha Ginwala is curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin, coartistic director of Gwangju Biennale 2020 (with Defne Ayas), and artistic director of the interdisciplinary arts festival COLOMBOSCOPE, Colombo. She has curated Contour Biennale 8 and was curatorial advisor for Documenta 14. Other projects include Arrival, Incision; Indian Modernism as Peripatetic Itinerary in the framework of Hello World; Revising a Collection at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 2018; Riots: Slow Cancellation of the Future at ifa Gallery Berlin and Stuttgart, 2018; My East is Your West at the 56th Venice Biennale, 2015; and Corruption: Everybody Knows… with e-flux, New York, 2015. Ginwala was a member of the artistic team for the 8th Berlin Biennale, 2014, and has cocurated The Museum of Rhythm, at Taipei Biennial 2012 and Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2016–17. She is a widely published writer on art.

Gal Kirn works at the TU Dresden as an open topic fellow. He holds a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Nova Gorica (2012). Kirn was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie (2008–10), at ICI Berlin (2010–12), and at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015) with the collaborative project Thinking a Monument to (Sub)Urban Riots. He coedited Postfordism and its discontents (JvE Academie, B-Books and Mirovni Inštitut, 2010), Surfing the Black Wave (Jve Academy, 2012), Encountering Althusser (Bloombsbury 2013), Beyond Neoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), and Yugoslav Partisan Art (Slavica Tergestina, 2017). He has been teaching courses in film, philosophy, and contemporary political theory at the Freie Universität Berlin, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, and University of Primorska (Slovenia). His book project on partisan ruptures and Yugoslavian socialism is forthcoming at Pluto Press, while he is finishing his new manuscript on Partisan Counter-Archive.

Niloufar Tajeri is an architect, researcher, and writer. She teaches at the department of History and Theory of Architecture and City at the TU Braunschweig, and she is working on her PhD thesis at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She cocurated the public program Riots: Dissent and Spectres, Control and Ruptures with Natasha Ginwala and Gal Kirn in 2018. As a research fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, she collaborated on the research project Thinking a Monument to (Sub)Urban Riots, which was exhibited in Stuttgart, Ljubljana, and Nova Gorica, 2016. She published the book Small Interventions. New Ways of Living in Post-War Modernism (Birkhäuser, 2016) . In 2008, she coedited Kabul: Secure City Public City (Archis, 2008). She taught at the Institute of Architectural Design, Art and Theory at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (2013–16) and worked as an editor and project manager for the architecture magazines ARCH+ and Volume.