Abstract: In each issue, the "Theory & Criticism" section invites one of the winners of the Art Theory and Criticism prize, awarded by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, to test ideas and hypotheses which question, and even go beyond well-marked intellectual paths.This freedom seeks to arouse audacity (in the invited author) and curiosity (in the reader).It is the little "&" which opens up interpretations of the relation between "theory" and "criticism", be it a theoretical criticism, such as "Criticism in the Face of the Anthropocene" formulated by Vincent Normand (n°42), or rather a critical theory, aware of its challenges and limits.These variable nuances of methods tally with the diversity of the projects undertaken.And yet, on closer examination, we realize that it is probably the relation to history which continuously reverberates, like a rope stretched between all this promising research: be it the fantasies of Homo ludens which are expressed in playground architecture, as examined by Vincent Romagny, the extendable time-frame of writing by and about oneself which Sophie-Isabelle Dufour has studied through the writings of Bill Viola, or the deliberately "chopped" and redistributed history of Ray Johnson's collages, as retraced by Julie Borgeaud.The layers of these different histories are underpinned by legitimizing discourses, and by ambitions and conflicts which need to be revealed.After the shortsightedness of the unicist and linear history of modernism, the 1980s broadened the perspectives, towards a historicization where the "universal"-read, Western-claim was replaced by a relativist and plural criticism, underwritten by a chorus of voices which had for too long been forced to remain silent.Starting out from the case of the British artist Sonia Boyce, Sophie Orlando has had the courage to root her research precisely in this gap, dovetailing the micro-and macro-history of a paradigmatic turn which is still deeply topical.