This operation begins with a decapitation on paper. Cut the C from Cosmopolis: city - chop, capital - chop, centre - chop; career, canon, comfort, concentration - you name it. Chop chop. The body survives, disoriented, and keeps crawling.

Now we have osmosis and polis: movement across a selective membrane between different concentrations with “osmosis”, while “polis” keeps habitation and its political quarrel lodged inside this circulation and makes it everybody’s business. Something along those lines.

Osmosis almost sounds generous until you remember the membrane.

Some modern cosmopolitan fantasies arranged the world around the city (come here and the world comes to you!). The more timely, already exhausted refrain goes something like “Berlin is over.”* Its address is exchangeable: London, Paris, New York (you name it again), but the complaint is not simply that the rent went up.

For a while, refusal had use-value. Antagonism and nonconformity fed the city’s image, then returned as culture, tourism, soft power, property value.

A historic compromise: misbehaviour tolerated while it produced aura. Tendency rolls in permutation. Meanwhile the city grew another nervous system and sold it as another freedom. Stay put; the world comes through the screen. Fine print: unruliness, stripped of its decorative function, meets cancellation, policing, defunding, eviction. The world still circulates; the deal has simply gotten worse. Atlantis in reverse: not a city submerged beneath the sea but one sinking upwards into the cloud of its interfaces.

Turns out the head was never quite where the neck suggested. Hence the decapitation. Alas, some say heads must roll.

Back to the membrane. While Cosmopolis promised the world in one place; Osmopolis begins where that promise thins out. Everything circulates; not everything passes. Images outrun bodies; capital outruns rights.

For the time being, let our headless word Osmopolis earn its keep somewhere in this seam: a working proposition for the afterlife of a cosmopolitan promise of permeability, now dispersed across screens, filters and selective passages.

Neither the city after the city nor its pastoral opposite. A field between room and landscape, image and object, tool and body, private life and political demand.

The works gathered here move through some of these conditions: selective passage and blocked circulation; landscapes projected, worn, found or carried; rooms, thresholds and domestic machinery turned into scripts; bodies, tools, signs and interfaces changing jobs; memory lodged in objects; political histories travelling through other voices; material and digital lives leaking into one another.

Phillip Zach

Curator of the exhibition

Diedrich Diederichsen, “The War on Bohemia”, Artforum, december 2025.*