ETC. Magazine #5 2026 / Full Circle

No matter how many times we vow not to repeat the mistakes and injustices of the past, we seem to do it regardless. In its fifth issue, ETC. Magazine turns its attention to cycles – personal, political, historical – and asks what it means to come full circle. This issue explores the unstable terrain between the past and history: the former subject to nostalgia and mythologisation; the latter to institutional selectivity. How much do structures of power shape remembrance and commemoration? What role do archives, memorials, and collective memory play, not only in mourning, but in mobilising? And how much of what we know about the past is fictionalised, mythologised or otherwise misshapen and manipulated? Despite claims that we live in unprecedented times, there is much we could learn from history, past dynamics of power and forgotten stories. Full Circle invites artists and writers to consider the loop between memory and amnesia, past and present, reliving and erasing. In this issue, we ask whether we are doomed to repetition or can we return to the past in order to rethink the future?

PRESENTED ARTISTS