It was the concept of the ocean as a global commons, free for everyone—first formulated by Hugo Grotius in his 1609 treatise, Mare Liberum—that stimulated a free global market. Today, the free market and the free ocean both suffer from rigorous, exploitive use. Solution 295–304: Mare Amoris proposes nine new practical, technological, and metaphysical scenarios of how to fall in love with the sea, and, eventually, have the sea fall in love with us.

Jumana Manna’s work in film and sculpture explores how power is articulated through relationships, often focusing on the body and materiality in relation to narratives of nationalism and histories of place. This book includes stills from her film Wild Relatives (2018), a meditative documentary capturing the transit of seeds between the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway and the fields of the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.

Mexico’s relationship with archaeology is a complex one. In addition to studying the distant past through its material vestiges, it is deeply engaged in more recent aspects of politics, education, national identity, and public works. These Ruins You See shifts between politics, history, heritage, and identity in an attempt to find, in the present, the vestiges of archaeological practice.

Duskdust is an artist book by Susanne Kriemann. It takes as its starting point the former industrial site of limestone mining at Furilden peninsula on the northeastern coast of Gotland, Sweden’s biggest island. It is informed by the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with photography, labor, and archaeology and includes photographs taken during her residencies and site visits, archival material as well as text contributions by invited authors.

Beyond the lunatic fringe views regarding the end of the world, a more constructive reading of the phenomenon is found in new age circles claiming that 2012 might be the beginning of a higher consciousness in humanity, coming to the realization that, in fact, Western systems have not brought prosperity and fulfillment to everybody as once imagined.