Frida Sandström

Frida Sandström is a cultural critic, art theorist, and researcher in political aesthetics. She currently focuses on the transformation of cultural critique within late avant-garde practices amid the historical conjunctions of anti-colonial and feminist thinking during the 1960s and 1970s. Sandström has been an associated and postdoctoral researcher at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (11/2025-09/2026), a Paris-Rome Fellow at Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History (Rome), and at DFK Paris – German Centre for Art History (2023-2024) and a visiting PhD student at CRMEP – Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University (2021).

She completed her PhD thesis Dropout Subjects: Jill Johnston’s and Carla Lonzi’s Disintegration and Deculturalization of Art Criticism as Social Critique in 1969 at the University of Copenhagen in 2025 and her research has been published in journals such as Radical Philosophy, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Kultur & Klasse, and Afterall, and in anthologies published by Brill, De Gruyter, and Klim. Sandström publishes art criticism internationally and edits Paletten Art Journal since 2015.

The term deculturation historically encompasses seemingly paradoxical dynamics: for Frantz Fanon, it named the forced alienation or ‘auto-reduction’ of a colonial subject’s native culture, while for Carla Lonzi, it addressed the willful unlearning or withdrawal from compulsive gender roles. This project proposes that this apparent contradiction is in fact a dialectical dynamic characterizing a crucial aspect of political resistance led from the experience of subjective embodiment. In doing so, it unpacks how deculturation was mobilized in critiques of legal, political, and cultural forms of subjectivation — and subjection — in the anti-colonial practice of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as when imported into the 1970s sexual liberation movements.

In a moment where recurring poly-crises recall the auto-reductive ‘deproduction’ (Thaemlitz) of subjectivity of the 1970s, the project introduces the dialectics of deculturation as central to the legacy of abolitionism and avant-garde thinking in cultural boycotts, strategic separatism, and ‘human strikes’ (Tiqqun, Claire Fontaine) active today.