The overarching question—was it ever really a question?—which has been the defining challenge of the current issue of A Prior, which comes to us via our invitation to the Documenta 12 Magazine Project, has been: “is modernity our antiquity?” Many months of reading, talking, travelling and writing have passed since, and the fruits of those activities are now gathered here in the pages of A Prior #14. Of course, we are still not sure whether we have ever come in the vicinity of squarely addressing (let alone answering) said question, and it both pains us and pleases us that we still have no clue whether modernity has indeed become (or has ever been) “our antiquity.” There is no way of finding out. The question has given rise to yet more questions: what modernity or, more poignantly, whose modernity? Surely not that of the art connoisseurs descending on the sleepy, provincial town of Kassel every five years? Perhaps this has been the point all along. Indeed, it is tempting to read into this continuing fracas over modernity’s legacy and discover proof—if proof were ever needed—of the glaring robustness of so many of modernity’s defining features, and of the unscathed relevance of the concept of the modern (as opposed to the postmodern) for contemporary debate in the twin realms of art and global culture. The utter confusion that has arisen out of the aforementioned questions, and the zeal with which so many of the debate’s interlocutors have devoted themselves to its relentless de- and reconstructing, has made it abundantly clear that modernity, if it can be considered ‘antique’ at all, is a very lively antiquity indeed. (Postmodernity may rather strike many of us as more obviously antiquated than its thetic nemesis.) In short, it appears that the question whether or not modernity has become our antiquity is in many ways itself a typically modern one.

Let us be reminded here that the modern era has been obsessed by the idea of crisis (that is, its own crisis) since its very inception; indeed, ‘crisis’ (change, meltdown, perdition, revolution, transformition, transition) is the only constant quality that has defined this world’smodernity throughout itsmany upheavals. If, it again seems that our relation to modernity is currently experiencing a crisis, then this may well go to show modernity’s splendid good health. Indeed, the very fact that we may now train our eye on the spectacle of modernity as if it were a deserted square in an ancient Etruscan necropolis or bombed-out Prussian merchant town, strikes us not just as the persistence of crisis, but more as the constancy of our ‘awareness of crisis’ as modernity’s defining characteristic.

We have tried to address this vast complex of questions in a variety of ways. One has consisted of travelling to Kaliningrad—the birthplace (back when it was still called Königsberg) of Immanuel Kant, the philosopher who gleaned the marvel of ‘critique’ from the modern consciousness of ‘crisis.’ Of course, many places in the world could embody this idea of crisis as a fact of both history and everyday life—‘crisis’ being the ‘norm’ for an overwhelming number of urban centers in the ‘developing’ world. (Hannah Arendt, another famous native of Königsberg called ‘process’ qua development the key term of the modern age).Yet Kaliningrad seemed somehow special to us, not only because it has been home to two thinkers who could be said to exemplify the endeavor of modernity. But above all, because our collaborators —the Danish artist Joachim Koester and his fellow travellers Anders Kreuger and Claudia Sinnig—were drawn to Kaliningrad because as a city built on the confusion of what is past (‘antiquity’), present and future—an emblem, so to speak, of our own acute ambivalence in the face of the big question at hand.

Sven Augustijnen, a young Belgian artist, took another direction in his research and thinking on modernity: rather than looking far afield, at “other people’s modernities,” Augustijnen takes us deeper inside modern Belgium and its former colonies. An artist who questions ways in which reality is perceived and history is written and made, Augustijnen has conducted elaborate research on the colonial history of Congo, tracing the thin lines between truth and fiction, the manipulation of words and data, power structures and the ways in which media have always been entangled in these. In his extensive archival research, Augustijnen has paid particular attention to the unresolved position of Moïse Tshombe (1919–1969) who was a leading figure in post-colonial Congo. His project for A Prior presents magazine articles and covers from Pourquoi Pas? and Spécial, both journals dating from the 1960s which covered the persistent ‘crises’ that enveloped the Congo post independence. Another key figure emerges in these magazine pages: the Belgian journalist and editor Pierre Davister. Here, the plot thickens. Cast somewhere between fabrication and reality, Augustijnen’s docudrama reads like a mystery but it should not be mistaken for fiction: it happened!

As co-editor of this issue, Augustijnen also invited Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius and theMIT scholar Larissa Harris whose conversation leads to a close reading of Narkevicius Revisiting Solaris (a remake of Andrej Tarkovsky’s enigmatic 1971 film adaptation of the novel by futurologist Stanislaw Lem) and extends the time travel involved in questioning modernity as antiquity. While writing this, we receive a message from Sven regarding Narkevicius initiative to transfer a monumental sculpture of Marx’s head from Chemnitz to this year’sMünster Sculpture Project:

Just heard on Klara news that the mayor of Chemlitz is sticking to his guns and that Marx stays right where he is.