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To understand the intricate interconnection between politics and affects, I examine a performance of the berlin-based artist collective Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (Center for Political Beauty, ZPS), in which artist activists staged a horseback ride to fasten a manifesto of ten theses of political beauty on the façade of the German Bundestag. Interconnecting theories of political difference (Marchart 2010), which differentiate between the ontological realm of ‘the political’ and ontic realizations of ‘politics’, and political theories of affect, I approach the affective dimensions of political difference as affective politics. Building on Bargetz’s (2014) “political grammar of feelings”, I situate the performance’s temporary institutions and interruptions of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, as well as ‘feeling politics’ and ‘politics of feeling’ respectively, as affective encounters to experience or enact political beauty. Political beauty, in an antagonistic framework that foregrounds contingency, conflict and absence, mobilizes affects as inherently ambivalent and contentious. As a challenge to the diagnosis of an inevitable post-political condition, I discuss the potential of political beauty as affective politics to potentially re-politicize politics. Borrowing from Derrida (1994), I conduct a spectral reading of ZPS’ ten theses and carve out three analytical vignettes – beauty, vitality and longing – to conceptualize political beauty as oscillating between the desire and hope for political change, which can never be fully satisfied, and a dismissal of (political) ugliness and death. In the end, political beauty escapes a definition because it is, after all, nothing but an impossible project for politics and affects of an unknown future.

Place-making is a policy exercise rooted in a politics of both space and time. By examining the temporal sequencing of discursive relations and governance networks in the cultural redevelopment of Güterbahnhof Moabit in Berlin, this article demonstrates the fallacy of place-making via artist proxy. It documents the hidden expectations of artist stakeholders and the overextension of their capacities in their municipally delegated and self-assumed roles as “strategic” and “collaborative” partners with local government in place-making processes. It argues that contrary to collaborative and participatory governance ideals, artists are often singularly responsibilized by civic leaders to realize place-narratives for a community rather than with them, which creates a fundamental barrier to community engagement.

In this paper, we investigate five activist-artistic approaches to argue for a sensory politics of the Anthropocene. Our aim is to highlight the affective and speculative potentials of art by examining how artists engage with the senses to make air pollution and its political implications visible, tangible, or otherwise experiential. The paper touches on widerreaching discourses on the politics of sensing, sensible politics, and sensory studies. Rather than situating air pollution within a policy framework, such as that of the international sustainable development goals, we locate our arguments within recent scholarship on postpolitics and the Anthropocene. Despite its epistemological slipperiness, we consider the Anthropocene to be a potent heuristic as well as a rich resource of ideas, data, and collaborative and antagonistic potential for artists working on issues of air pollution. The five case studies are each grounded in an explicit engagement with at least one of the five basic senses and include works by Amy Balkin, Hanna Husberg, Zane Cerpina and Stahl Stenslie, Lingling Zhang, Kitchen Budapest and Baltan Laboratories (NL). Clustered into three lines of argumentation, we demonstrate the ways in which these works contribute to the politicization of air: first, by framing air as a contested common good that problematizes the commodification of clean air; second, by integrating artistic research and environmental communication strategies; and third, by providing sensory experiences of the complicated constellations of agency and perception in the interscalar phenomenon of air pollution. Although our analysis is not exhaustive, three particularities could be identified in the works: an openness to other forms of knowledge and communication; a potent critique of the Anthropocene; and a radical questioning of ‘the political’. In conclusion, we argue that art can mobilize a sense of urgency and empowerment towards a multi-sensory politics of the Anthropocene.