The tropics are imaginary lines drawn across the Earth: invisible thresholds where the sun, at its highest point, seems to pause before reversing its course. Our present seems to inhabit such a threshold: the natural, social, and institutional structures that have sustained a dominant way of producing and relating to one another are now revealing their limits, while others begin to emerge and organize themselves from the margins. The crisis inherent to this transitional state places the paradigm under strain and intensifies polarity. In the social realm, polarity implies the impossibility of inhabiting common spaces; in nature, by contrast, it represents a principle of attraction: the tension between poles enables movement, exchange, and the flow of energy. Against this backdrop, the new edition of Polar and Tropic brings together local, Nordic, and Southeast Asian collectives and independent spaces that, from geographically and sociopolitically distant positions, articulate networks of collaboration and solidarity. The program questions the mechanisms of value that sustain the hegemonic model of contemporary art, in which the object/artwork and the supposed autonomy of the artist operate as forms of accumulation and concentration. The practices presented shift the emphasis toward the processes and relationships that sustain communities and territories, both within and beyond the art circuit. The program observes how these practices behave when they enter a fair, transforming the system of exchange and the very definition of what is considered an art object. As the market presents itself as an abstraction for emerging practices and the established system appears to be coming apart, the moment calls for imagining and putting into practice alternative infrastructures and other ways of producing and relating to one another. | 
