A striking aspect of Aukland-Peck’s piece is the way it traces a connection between naturalism and environmental exploitation via imperial networks. By grounding the discussion of Shell’s advertising campaign in a discussion of its historical emergence as a company trading in exotic seashells from across the British empire linked to existing domestic interest in seashells and fossils by naturalists, Aukland-Peck establishes naturalism itself as part of the lineage of Shell’s exploitation of imperial networks for later intensified forms of environmental extraction. There is no overstated claim here however: the move from seashells to oil and kerosene is clearly an economic one, with a kind of nostalgia for the oceanic constituting a thread of continuity with Shell’s seashell-trading origins, most obviously in the company name and logo. However, the connection between British domestic interest in the natural landscape through collecting and landscape painting and the growth of a commercial network which ravaged both imperial and domestic environments is striking, not least because of the poetic connection Auckland-Peck makes between the seashell as an exotic product for trade in the first instance, and as part of the substrate from which oil is extracted in the second. While imperial collecting was always extractive, this linkage between a set of practices at least seemingly oriented around an interest in “nature” and the groundwork it laid for later intensive environmental exploitation is an intriguing avenue of inquiry.

In her recent book on Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a British logistics worker with the Partit Obrer d'Unificació Marxista (POUM) during the Spanish Civil War, Anna Funder examines a passage from George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia in which Eileen sits alone in the Hotel Continental's lobby at night. Located on the major promenade of Las Ramblas in Barcelona, the hotel occupies a central location in a zone scarred by conflict and was a site of skirmishes during the war (1936-1939), acting at various moments as an avenue for collective movement, a no-man’s-land in street battles, and a space to be defended. Thinking about Eileen moving through the city, I respond to Anderson-Cleary’s discussion of representations of women by the Spanish left to consider how we might imagine milicianas and other women active in the war as being present on the frontlines and the city streets together.

Volume two of react/review: a responsive journal for art and architecture explores the spiritual, monstrous, cosmological, and otherworldly within or as forms of political action or resistance. Considering how spiritual themes are entangled with political action or resistance invites new attention to a range of subtle distinctions between manifestations of the “spirit,” whether as methodology, content, and/or the effect of a work. Reproducibility, with its attendant notions of mimicry, copying, and dissemination, also emerges as a key analytic in the contributions to this journal. These ideas are reflected in DJ Morrow’s balloon recreation of Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son, which appears on this volume’s cover. Like the original on which it is based, Morrow’s piece engages with the monstrous and the political in a moment of crisis. However, its playful use of an everyday medium simultaneously veils and unveils the violence of the scene, demonstrating the power of mimicry to produce new configurations of the macabre and otherworldly. Relatedly, processes of aesthetic reproduction addressed in this compilation also reveal class, race, gender, and cultural identity as factors shaping the form in which the “spirit” emerges in the shadow of political action. Contributing authors address the modern and contemporary eras, engaging with a range of topics from Black life in the Bay area and anti-racism, to monsters in Spanish art, anti-totalitarian politics, cosplay, and the aesthetics of queer Chicana zines, as well as National Socialist black metal bands. Contradictory and subversive ways of knowing and being emerge through these studies as they integrate the supernatural and immaterial into art historical discourse, allowing us to recognize the spirit in the shadow.