The anniversary impulse derives perhaps from the notion that the unconscious, as psychogeography teaches us, is not only structured as a language but also in time and even as a space. Therefore, a conference on a conference in the same room and 60 years after the event took place is maybe not such a bad idea. As it would turn out, it is not clear which of the conferences, in a historical meaning, could be categorized as tragedy and which as farce.

But dealing with Situationism could, if you believe Asger Jorn, be quite a risky affair, as he himself described it as the most dangerous of all -isms from the moment you start believing in it. This self-collapsing reasoning might be one of the conflicting affects that the fifth conference legacy leaves us with. The contradiction also impacts on the way the events can be historicized; there seems to be a conflict in looking back on someone who is looking to the future. It might feel as if they are looking at us with an injunction. Perhaps there is an inherent guilt in a prophecy that has failed. But what if it did not fail, what if it is still in the making? From an anachronistic view, the absence can be transformed into latency of presence which would be Jorn's comparative-vandalist approach towards history.

When the fifth conference dispersed into a traveling dérive in 1961, it meant that some members of the SI ended up in Hamburg where they continued their discussions. They came to formulate the mythic Hamburg Theses which effectively ended the first phase of the movement, meaning that a stronger position against art within its modern context was established.

The works in this book can be read as fragments of the conference aftermath where the actual gap in the movement's ideology is the focal point.

Did the conference in 2021 put something to its final rest or was it a resurrection? Probably neither. In the haunted house of Volrat Tham there was no corpse or ghost but rather something not living, not dead, the undead.

The contributions in this publication can be read as a response to immanent divergence in art, value, labor and capital that has somatized into situations. Recuperation is still unfolding but we are looking at new symptoms on which the participants of the book are scouting.

Ambrosius Fjord