We Lost Control Again recounts the twentieth-century attempt to construct an international political and aesthetic order in the wake of war, and what remains of that Babelian architecture today. 

The twentieth century bequeathed a cross-national political and legal architecture, cemented in place by the United Nations. Ideological differences were overlaid with an assumption of progress and a universalising aesthetic of ‘concrete Modernity’. However, as communism collapsed, and a digital communication and control systems took root, neo-liberal hostility to the Enlightenment values underpinning Western democracy and the rules-based international order swelled. As the aesthetic and political architectures of Modernity have retreated, the means through which planetary heating and species extinctions might be addressed have faded rapidly.

We Lost Control Again surveys the questions raised by the work of artist Rikke Luther between 2015 and 2025. Luther explores the long-range effects of this era of collapse, and the effect on social orders and the stability of the Earth system.

Esther Leslie’s “The Particulars of Concrete” sets the scene, followed by Jaime Stapleton’s “The Global Commons: In Context.” Stapleton’s essay provides an account of a concept forged during the turbulent years of the Cold War, which is now a target for both over-heated nationalists and the multinational extraction industries. Rapid heating has exposed critical weaknesses in this foundational concept. Stapleton argues that the Global Commons has become a spectacularly dangerous method for framing the interactions of human societies with the extreme complexities of the Earth system.
This point is further underscored by Rikke Luther. “Concrete Aesthetics – From Universal Rights to Financial Post-Democracy” explores the shifting cultural and ideological understandings of “concrete Modernity” through artworks, film scripts, and critical essays. Twentieth-century concrete spoke to social and economic progress in all its varying ideological forms. Later, however, that aesthetic was co-opted, and currently expresses the inequities of a post-democratic world where the social protections of Modernity are openly reviled. As control slips from voters into the hands of shareholders, Luther asks whether markets are able to truly order themselves let alone guarantee a stable Earth system.