Introduction

The thirteen essays presented here were part of a suite of twenty-four texts originally commissioned by Cabinet for The Encyclopedic Palace, the catalogue accompanying the 2013 Venice Biennale. The catalogue was as hefty in price as it was in weight, and so these and the other excellent essays included in it were not easily available to our best readers—you. 


For this issue, we have selected the essays that addressed themselves most directly to the theme of “Knowledge,” that did not engage with cultural and political circumstances that have changed since the original commission, and that have not been republished elsewhere. It should be noted that certain texts have been slightly modified from the versions published in the catalogue.