prefiguration

It’s a prefiguration — of how to think, how to collaborate, and how to stay sane when the private is gone.

Since the early 20th century, Cycladic figures have had iconic power for contemporary artists, as an ancient prefiguration of abstraction.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a prefiguration of Romanticism; it is already Romantic. Rather, he goes straight to contemporary music, straight to Alban Berg.”

This future-facing prefiguration manifests one way that nostalgia isn’t destined solely to invite us into false romances with the past — it can also illuminate traditions that have long been operating in the margins.

Avineri imagines them strolling through the spa and “sharing their ideas about history, past, present and possibly future,” in a “dramatic prefiguration of the encounter between Zion and Kremlin.”