Bones help keep us together, holding space for our identities and reminding us of our ephemerality. But what happens when they become an everyday spectacle, viscerally exposing the heightened vulnerability of a part of the world?

A frail boy clutched in the arms of his mother, his crumbling skeleton cutting through his pallid skin. Hordes of people going multiple days without food, running amok for a small bag of flour. Tiny bodies, contending with the monstrosity of Israel's siege in Gaza, remain barely tethered to life through skin and bone. In this week's dispatch, bones become a provocative clue: The 2025 Folkestone Triennial unfolds as an archaeological excavation in response to our current geopolitical disorientation.

Elsewhere, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler's 'Calculating Empires' at the Venice Biennale 2025 strips history to its bare bones as it charts colonial infrastructures from the 1500s to our precarious present. The speculative cityscapes in CJ Lim and Luke Angers' 'Dreams + Disillusions' are an x-ray of the city, exposing the bones of ideology, memory and myth. An interview with Owen Hughes Pearce of Pearce+ discusses a localised, elemental approach to architecture in which building is an act of commitment. And care.

While the ground underneath us buries traces of our histories, ghosts and futures, how do we redo the world above?