I wrote about the early days of THE STATE, whether cultural production can have terroir, and the biennialisation of the book form for a special Orit Gat-edited issue of Red Hook Journal on the future of online art publishing:
When Rami Farook, Ahmad Makia, and I first started THE STATE—a publishing practice concerned with post-coloniality, technology, and the future—in late 2011, we were sure only of what we didn’t want to be. We were determined not to be straitjacketed into a tired regional politics of representation. To become yet another publication from the Middle East that spoke only about the Middle East, in an extension of the same dynamic that puts the burden on people of color to explain and solve race. We too wanted to speak from that cozy position of universality accorded to whiteness, Westernness, and—though it took us a while to see it—people who through choice or otherwise have jettisoned their birthplaces in favor of a global mobility. We wanted to explore the transition from analog to digital media and the sensuous architecture of this “printernet” with a crash course in what would come to be called International Art English along the way. Deracinated, placeless, and decidedly not local; we may as well have been in Brooklyn.
The piece is available to read online here.