Welcome to this very special 61st issue of The Funambulist, which proposes an introspection after ten full trips of the magazine around the sun. As I will explain further in this introduction, this issue does not intend to be a self-congratulating one—or, at least, not just that. Being self-congratulatory would somewhat imply a conclusion to this editorial effort when we’re actually just getting started! We learn along the way, providing that we take the time to be open to do so, and so this issue is an opportunity to pause and reflect on what we did well, but more importantly, what I did not do well enough on. But before we get into that, please indulge me in using this space to tell the story of The Funambulist through my own memories.
On August 13, 2015, in the e-flux headquarters in New York’s Lower East Side, I was joined by early contributors and friends Sadia Shirazi, geunsaeng ahn, and Minh-Ha T. Pham to launch the magazine’s first issue, Militarized Cities. Back then, the magazine was already based in Paris, but after five years spent in New York, it was important for me to launch this new project with the community with whom its spirit had grown in the previous years. Indeed, The Funambulist magazine might be ten-years-old today, but the editorial platform is significantly older. In September 2007, while I was in my final year of architecture studies in Paris, my friends Martin Le Bourgeois and Martial Marquet invited me to join them in writing posts on the blog they had set up for the first-year students of our school. Some of the earliest readers may smile, reminiscing about this ancestor of the magazine entitled Boîte à Outils (toolbox), which quickly extended beyond our school’s readership—and in doing so promptly switched from French to English. Martin and Martial were both teaching assistants in our school, while my full-time internship (while also working on a thesis with Martin) was preventing me from taking on teaching work. I thus found in this little blog a space to fulfill what was then a drive for pedagogy, and very eagerly engaged with this format.
Back then, the architecture discipline was very much centered around a process of “starification” that led numerous architects to benefit from the logics of globalizing capitalism, becoming famous into the mainstream. Questions pertaining to the political responsibilities of architects for their complicity in various regimes of domination (racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, carceralism, settler colonialism…) were marginalized—usually less through hostility than pure indifference. Two notable exceptions in my view back then were the work of Eyal Weizman, who had already published A Civilian Occupation (with Rafi Segal, 2005) and the seminal Hollow Land (2007), as well as Bryan Finoki’s Subtopia blog, which were both ruthless in the way they were holding architecture accountable for its complicities, in particular with the Israeli settler colonial regime in Palestine. In 2007, Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, and Eyal created the Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR), which, alongside the Forensic Architecture research agency (created two years later by Eyal), has forged a new generation of architects, who put their skills to expose the role architecture plays in colonialism.
Of course, these references are from my own imaginary back then and should in no way be considered as an objective historization of how the architecture discipline was politicized in recent times. I was reading those people’s work and was trying to think with them because they had access to the European and North American infrastructure of knowledge production and diffusion—although it’s important to note that Sandi and Alessandro were living in Beit Sahour, Palestine. There is no doubt that many architects around the world without access to this infrastructure were working on equally groundbreaking research and projects.
My brief time living in Bombay in 2009 allowed for a slight diversification of this imaginary, as did my move to New York later that year. In 2010, we ended Boîte à Outils and I started The Funambulist in continuity of this effort. The architecture discipline was still very much centered on the notion of depoliticized authorship and photos or renderings of new architecture projects were avidly consumed on dedicated websites. I remember committing to make the blog boring for five-second attention span consumers by favoring text over images. Back then, it was still very much aimed at an architecture audience—although the shamelessness of publishing three or four 800-word opinion texts weekly is characteristic of the white man’s self-confidence, I confess that I never thought for a minute that non-architects would have any interest in these half-articulated ideas. The creation of The Funambulist is concomitant with the writing of my first book, published by dear Ethel Baraona Pohl and César Reyes Nájera, Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence about architecture’s violence and its political instrumentalization, in particular in Palestine. By then, thanks to the generation above mine, the process of politicizing architecture was manifest even if still marginalized.
The years 2011–2015 were somewhat of a turning point. The 2011 Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian, Yemeni, and Bahraini revolutions, as well as the Occupy movement in the US and Britain, and the Movimiento 15-M in Spain centered spatial politics in a way that felt different. For me, it meant that The Funambulist should now be less involved in the politicization of architecture, and more in the spatialization of politics. The people I have to thank for generously including me in their conversations are the editors and contributors to the Critical Legal Thinking platform founded in 2009 by Gilbert Leung and Illan Rua Wall: thinking of space, politics, and the law felt like a productive framework. Back then the texts I was writing for The Funambulist and otherwise were done in evenings and weekends, during spare time outside of my full-time job in an architecture office. In 2013, this time drastically increased all of a sudden as I was laid off from that same job. After securing my visa—I’m forever grateful to Sunil Bald and Yolande Daniels for their help with this—and starting a part-time job with one of my mentors, Madeline Gins, I started a podcast. By then, it was called Archipelago; today it is simply The Funambulist Podcast. It aimed at multiplying the lines of learning and associating the politics of space with the politics of bodies, for which I still had so many shortcomings. In this regard, I am immensely grateful to the people I interviewed, who overlooked these shortcomings and had the patience to deploy their brilliance. Writing this, I distinctly remember the recordings of episodes with Mimi Thi Nguyen, Sophia Azeb, Donna Murch, or Miriam Ticktin, whose works are still with me today—Sophia will even go on to be our most recurrent contributor!
A community of potential contributors was thus built around “the politics of space and bodies,” which would be the subtitle to The Funambulist magazine. This new project occurred when, on returning to Paris, I was trying to figure out a way to work full-time on it. Such an endeavor required an economic model, and a magazine relatively quickly emerged as the most enthusiastic scenario. The business model was resolutely built on the idea of subscriptions, both for the economic stability it would bring to the project—avoiding the stress of wondering whether an issue would “sell” more than another—and for the explicit support a subscription allows to manifest for readers. Based on seven years of assembling an audience, the magazine quickly secured its own funding, including my salary. The growing rate of subscriptions has been slow but very steady throughout this past decade (3,750 in English, 600 in French, and 70 in Spanish as of July 2025), allowing us to be serene about the magazine’s near future at any given moment.
Starting 2017, I could trade the “I” for a “We” as other people came to work part-time for the magazine, one after another: Noelle Geller, Flora Hergon, Nadia El Hakim, Margarida Nzuzi Waco, and Caroline Honorien. In 2021, the magazine was ready to hire its first full-time employee, in the form of our dear Head of Communications Shivangi Mariam Raj, who came from Delhi to join me at the office. It was shortly before my two-month parental leave when Zoé Samudzi took over for me, and brilliantly guest edited our 37th issue, Against Genocide (September-October 2021). Thanks to this experience, Zoé is now the most empathetic friend when I share with her stories of committed contributors dropping out at the eleventh hour or, even more stressful, ghosting me until I finally have to move on to find someone else!
Zoé and many others (Anaïs Duong-Pedica, Hajer Ben Boubaker, Joao Gabriel, Sinthujan Varatharajah, Ana Naomi de Sousa, Karim Kattan, to cite only a few) have been central to elaborating the editorial line of the magazine, not just by their textual contributions to it, but also through our regular (weekly for some of them) exchanges.
Between 2019–2024, current and former team members met once a year for two days to reflect on how the magazine could do better and think of future projects together. One of the recurrent collective wishes was to publish the magazine in languages other than English. If I’m honest, back then I saw the idea as appealing but mostly thought of it as wishful thinking: how could we find enough money to take on such an endeavor? In the fall of 2022, a New York lunch with friends Ruthie and Craig Gilmore triggered the elaboration of a solution: what if the economic model for each linguistic version consisted in having it pay for its own extra costs (translation, printing, distribution)? Another important idea to make this project happen consisted of building the magazine layout in such a way that only the black plate of the offset print would need to change between the versions—the cyan, magenta, and yellow one remaining the same. In operational terms, this meant that all photos, drawings, or more generally any item that would not be black ink on white paper would need to remain scrupulously the same between the various versions of the magazine. You can flip the pages of this issue and will notice that (besides the cover), all text is written in black and none of it is on colorful backgrounds—the most illustrative example in this issue would be Nicolás Verdejo’s graphic novel which had to accommodate this model to exist in three languages.
One year after the initial idea, the project became a reality with issue 50 (November-December 2023) being published in both English and French for the first time, thanks to the demanding translation work of Virginie Bobin, Rosanna Puyol Boralevi, and Caroline Honorien, who were later joined by Amina Belghiti and Line Ajan. In six months, we reached the number of 500 print subscribers necessary to break even, and the francophone version of the magazine became somewhat sustainable in time. In November 2024, following a preparatory visit in Mexico, we launched a hispanophone version translated by Mexico City-based Valentina Sarmiento Cruz and María Vignau Loría, as well as Medellin-based Felipe Guerra Arjona. These three versions allowed us to commission more texts in French and Spanish, since two translations are budgeted per contribution, no matter the language it is written in.
As we have often said when discussing this plurilingual project, the languages we have in mind for it (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Hindi…) are all hegemonic languages that imposed themselves in various forms of coercion. It is therefore important to balance this effort with other “non-hegemonic” languages. In this regard, one of my favorite issues remains to be our 53rd (May-June 2024) Threads of Translations, which saw a text written in Ayuujk by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, translated into Albanian, Armenian, Bahasa Indonesia, Bambara, Basque, Bosnian, Guyanese Creole, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hawaiian, Inuktitut, Irish, Koshur, Kikongo, Kurdish, Lao, Mapuche, Mauritian Creole, Maya, Mongolian, Quechua, Rroma, Shona, Somali, Swahili, Tagalog, Tamazight, Tamil, and Uzbek. This issue was not a resounding commercial success as many people probably thought that there were better ways to spend their money than buying an issue with 30 times the same text in languages they could not read for most of them. But this is where the magazine’s economic model built on subscriptions also proves very useful.
When subscribing, readers accept to place their trust in our editorial curation and to receive issues they might have not ordered individually. One needs to measure the beauty of this model: this means that when I reflect on a future issue’s topic, at no moment does the question of whether it would “work” or not come into consideration. This allowed for issues dedicated to the Algerian Revolution, the Subcontinent (edited with Shivangi Mariam Raj), or even one for a 8-14 year old audience to exist without fear that such a specific framing might compromise the economic health of the magazine.
In late 2024, the team increased its size with our office manager, Assia Tamerdjent, as well as Sofía Kourí taking charge of our hispanophone communications for half-a-year before this work fell on the shoulders of Daniela Páez Delvasto. A full-time job at the office involves a 32-hour-week over four days, in hoping to set an example against jobs that justify long unpaid extra hours of work to serve a broader ideal (ironically, one dreaming about the end of exploitation), or against the idea that “passion” jobs do not count working hours the same way as rent-paying ones. Admittedly, I do not apply these principles so well for myself (although becoming a parent has made me better at it), which I’m reminded of while writing these words from the office… on a Saturday. I also know that setting up the right structures for people who work with you does not guarantee a comfortable and pressureless working environment. Fatigue, stress, the occasional frustration, and self-centered considerations can easily transform you into someone with whom it is not so pleasant to work with. The challenge then is to be accountable for it…
I’ll end this overview of the past decade with our most recent endeavor (partially supported by the Graham Foundation), The Funambulist Constellations, which brought together three of our contributors from afar (Harsha Walia, Leigh-Ann Naidoo, and Lina Attalah) along with seven of our contributors living in France (Sihame Assbague, Meryem-Bahia Arfaoui, Hajer Ben Boubaker, Dawud Bumaye, Suvetha Suthan, Marie Ranjanoro, and Amzat Boukari-Yabara) in order to create kinship and future solidarities between the communities they organize with, and the antiracist movement in France. Twenty years after the 2005 banlieues uprising following the death of teenagers Bouna Traoré and Zyed Benna, and two years after the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, we spent a day together between Clichy-sous-Bois and Nanterre in conversation with local organizers. Feeling strong from the relations created that first day, we invited the public to join us at DOC (a squat in the periphery of Place des Fêtes in Paris) for two days of workshops, collective meals, and public discussions. We aimed at creating kinship, and kinship was created.
Editorial Blind Spots and Shortcomings ///
As I mentioned at the beginning of this text, this issue is first and foremost an introspective one, examining what I could have done better these past ten years. By this, I neither mean a self-flagellation nor an ideological self-criticism. Simply, this is a means to be accountable to the standards and objectives we set for ourselves for this project. For instance, one of these objectives is a commitment to internationalism. On the one hand, the editorial line benefits from the structurally-determined (administrative and financial) relative ease for me to travel and enter into relationships with communities in struggle around the world. This can explain the centrality of the United States, Palestine, South Africa, India, Algeria, Mexico, Japan, or Kanaky in the magazine for instance (a third of what we publish have to do with these eight geographies), which helps contribute to a tangible internationalism, rather than an abstract one. This internationalism is also informed by mind-opening encounters with comrades and friends from Armenia, Tamil Eelam, Hawaiʻi, Kurdistan, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, or Madagascar to cite only a fraction of additional geographies (where I have not had the chance the visit) mobilized in the magazine’s editorial line. On the other hand, the overreliance on my own political imaginaries means that my own blind spots and shortcomings become those of the magazine itself.
These blind spots are of two types: the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. Of the latter, I only know that they are legion, and at times, through an encounter with an idea, a text, a movement, a person… one enters the realms of the known unknowns, i.e. regions of knowledge I can identify as fundamentally foreign to my imaginary and knowledge. From there, the necessity to find entrance doors becomes more pressing, but my commitment to the magazine’s audience is to never commission a piece for the sake of checking boxes. A topic is ready to be addressed in the magazine when I feel we have someone right to commission and an interesting editorial question to ask them.
In the past, such a process has been engaged when it came to thinking with the Armenian resistance (in particular during the 2020 Second Artsakh war to resist the Turkish-backed Azerbaijani army’s ethnic cleansing), to reflecting on whether colonialism was the right framework to analyze Russian invasions and occupation in the Caucasus, Crimea, and many parts of Siberia. Other examples could be about determining a useful way to read the complexity of the war in Kivu, understanding the responsibility of the Cuban state on the hardships experienced by its people, or unpacking the apparent contradiction between national symbols and decolonial praxis in Abya Yala.
Up until now, I have talked about blind spots strictly in a geographical way, as if distance had necessarily something to do with them. Yet, often, they mostly consist of a reading grid that is missing from our analyses. In this issue, we asked ten loyal readers to become guest editors and address a particular blind spot they identified in the magazine’s editorial line thus far by commissioning and editing a text for it. Some contributions that emerged from this process show clearly that blind spots don’t have to be thought only geographically: in fact, questions of ableism, rethinking authorship, international adoption, motherhood, or on organizing against obstetric and gynaecological violence have been seldom if at all been dealt within the magazine’s sixty first issues. The pieces contained in this issue are, of course, in no way a fix to these holes in the magazine’s editorial lines, but rather reveal a few of them that can keep us learning and unlearning on our paths.
However, realizing what my blind spots are is not enough to reflect critically on the magazine’s editorial line. Thinking otherwise would suggest that what cannot be considered as a blind spot is always something well-understood and aptly approached. Of course, that’s often not the case. Our best pieces emerge from long conversations with the authors, who hear the editorial commission behind the commission and enhance it with their own “expertise” (for lack of a better word). One of my favorite examples is the editorial work done with Floridalma Boj Lopez for her text “Naming, a Coming Home: Latinidad and Indigeneity in the Settler Colony” in our 41st issue (May-June 2022) Decentering the US. My original commission to Flori was based on an intuition (informed by conversations and readings) which could be summarized as such: could we say that the concept of Latinidad embodies a US-centric idea that flattens all distinctions between people who originates from the south of the settler colonial border? Shouldn’t we, instead, insist on the indigeneity of the people who are the most targeted by the US border regime? This was an invitation to not only read the United States as a settler colony with regards to the land itself, but also as a colonial fort whose border regime poses a militarized and deadly obstacle to Indigenous mesoamericans in their continental migration practiced since time immemorial. Flori, herself a Maya person from Guatemala living north of the settler colonial border in Los Angeles, took this commission to heart and my intuition seriously; but wrote the text with a significantly higher degree of nuance and detail. Later on, in October 2023, Flori was kind enough to give me a visit of Boyle Heights, the well-known Chicanx neighborhood of eastern Los Angeles, and showed me some of the ways indigeneity is indeed claimed by some of its inhabitants. This manifests in particular by the development of a mythology around a precolonial Aztec glory, regardless of whether people actually originate from this specific ancestry and, importantly, without consideration for the imperial dimension of Aztec domination during the 15th century within a region that encompasses large parts of today Mexico’s southern half. The way in which indigeneity can be read as an essential component of Mesoamerican people’s political identity in the US is therefore something that can be questioned and debated in a more precise way than my preconceptions suggested.
I’m using this specific story as an insight to the editorial necessity of always questioning our certainties, and even our intuitions—as well as accepting how good intuitions can embody something rather obvious to many people. The political reality these certainties and intuitions describe, although possibly accurate, often lacks a higher degree of complexity. Taking seriously this complexity is a sine qua non condition to reach an ambitious editorial goal that consists in publishing contributions that have an equal value for people distant (in a geographical sense) from the situation described in it, and for people who are embedded in that same political reality. That’s the spirit of internationalism. Ultimately, as I’ve described many times, a healthy approach to knowledge can be summarized as “understanding that we don’t understand.” I know that this compass helps me every day and I see in it a good way to end this text, though not without thanking every single person who has been supporting the magazine these past ten years, with a special shoutout to the few dozens of subscribers who have not missed a single issue since the beginning! To the many names cited in this introduction, I would also like to add our copy editor, Carol Que, our regular “consultants” Anaïs Antonio and Suzanne Labourie, our regular translator from French to English, Chanelle Adams, as well as our seven former interns between 2018–2024, Tomi Seji Laja, Ella Martin-Gachot, Sara Clark, Amel Hadj Hassen, Mika Yassur, Charlotte Sohst, and Noëlle Maltet. Have a lovely read! ■