Frieze Magazine - memos to the world, in homage to Italo Calvino

Frieze Magazine has commissioned a series of short essays - memos by artists, writers, curators and scientists written to the world after the Covid-19 crisis. In homage to Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), they are divided into six categories: 'lightness', 'quickness', 'exactitude', 'visibility', 'multiplicity' and 'consistency'. Take a look and follow Frieze for the memos yet to be published.

'Kara Walker on the Post-Lockdown World' was written in response to 'exactitude'.

Every day in ‘lockdown’, we are asked to consider the effects of social distancing – as if segregation weren’t already a reality

https://frieze.com/article/kara-walker-post-lockdown-world

Elvia Wilk on 'How to Write in a Pandemic' was written in response to 'lightness'.

Describe a global crisis in 600 words? Too hard. But isn’t everything else irrelevant right now?

https://frieze.com/article/how-write-pandemic

Sarah Manguso on How Lockdown Is Re-Inventing Slowness was written in response to 'quickness'.

Retro pleasures are a smokescreen that fails to conceal the painfully quick dismantling of institutions that have lasted centuries

https://frieze.com/article/sarah-manguso-how-lockdown-re-inventing-slowness

Image: Kara Walker, THE SOVEREIGN CITIZENS SESQUICENTENNIAL CIVIL WAR CELEBRATION, 2013, cut paper and adhesive on wall, installation view at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 2020. Courtesy: the artist, Sprüth Magers, London/ Berlin/ Los Angeles and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York; photograph: Timo Ohler