Vesper | Archive
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Vesper No. 1
Supervenice Fall-Winter 2019 Click on
‘contents’ to access the abstracts and the contribution in open
access download the issue in open access >> ISSN 2704-7598 ISBN 978-88-229-0416-4 DOI
10.1400/283005 cover
picture: Armin Linke, M.O.S.E. – Consorzio Venezia Nuova, ship maneuvering simulator, Venezia, 2007 |
Venice is well-known, its identity is so
familiar to be considered obvious, summarized as if it were a replicable logo:
the city shows its face leaving behind its backbone. Here gold and mud blend
together, moulding a multifaceted document. In Venice an endless
interchange between real and imaginary, original and fake, tiny and huge,
powerful and fragile endures, while we look at the city as a shimmering object.
The alter ego of what is well-known and
obvious becomes superlative, since it exceeds predetermined standards;
furthermore, it represents the inconceivable condensed in the prefix of another
language as it is revealed only when one leaves the city and looks at it from
above. Suddenly actions, projects, works and methods arise from its established
image moving the city towards another dimension, transfiguring it. This (super)
slow wind blows through Venice but does not change it: Venice continues to
offer its well-known face to the mirror that every day reflects it. Challenging
that wind to go deeply inside the object, means diving into the detours and
contradictions of Supervenice, at least for the time of a story on
paper. Venice is constantly designed and painstakingly ‘preserved’,
fortuitously born in a hostile land that denies any rules of contemporary
sustainability; since its foundation Venice has been built on desires and
fears. The city faces the remains of the largest industrial area in Europe. A
bibliographic hypertrophy lays against the material trace of 20th century
modernity: a gigantic ideal library has been created by measuring the most
erratic and moody city of the Western World. Even if Marco Polo found Venice
boring – so boring he did not want to return from his long journey
–, its stability depends on the Sirocco and the moon, like in an Oriental
environment. This primordial indeterminacy makes Venice a valuable laboratory
– that would not be possible elsewhere – to reflect upon critical
issues for up-coming future. The context changes and, with it, certainty
wavers. This is the time to reopen the paths of research and project: Supervenice
digs into an all too well-known territory in order to extract its
anachronical genealogies. The super alter ego of Venice is a giant
bubble that suspends Time while Space wavers: what remains is the space of
project.
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Vesper No. 2 Author-Matter Spring-Summer 2020 Click on
‘contents’ to access the abstracts and the contribution in open
access download the issue in open access >> ISSN 2704-7598 ISBN 978-88-229-0478-2 DOI
10.1400/283006 cover
picture: Olivo Barbieri, site specific_LAS
VEGAS 07, 2007 |
The etymology of the word author refers
to an act of creation, an act of augmentation, from the Latin verb augere.
Author instantiates creation, the expansion of the pre-existing. In 1967 Roland
Barthes declared the death of the author in his famous essay to state once more
that the crisis is that of the author as a single subjectivity and as a term
that condenses prestige, undermined by the de-subjectivation strategies of
automatism, fortuity and fragmentation of the historical avant-gardes, as well
as by the machinic act and by the reproducibility of the second avant-gardes.
Fifty years after Barthes’ paradigmatic
formula, this lack of authorship appears to be a successful brand. The
tensions between the anomie of matter, the law that establishes authorship and
the economy that makes the work possible, invoke discordant perspectives.
Artists make the self-destruction of their work the real work, and appeal is
made for the demolition of architectures, whether by a recognised author or
not, in order to re-design, or better still, re-claim the territory. Artificial
intelligence consolidates its logics and its design by progressively shedding
human ingenuity. The space of criticism becomes, finally, increasingly
ephemeral. However, there is an acceptation of criticism that is, rather than
an individual ‘signature’, an exploration and explanation of how
design makes theory.
The binomial author-matter seeks to
mark these tensions and contradictions: the featured term author is
maintained to underline the persistence of that prestigious subjectivity, at
the very moment when the rhetoric of “matter as an author”
promises other forms of authorship.
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Vesper No. 3 Wildness Fall-Winter
2020 Click on
‘contents’ to access the abstracts and the contribution in open
access download the issue in open access >> ISSN 2704-7598 ISBN 978-88-229-0533-8 DOI 10.1400/283007 cover
picture: Guido
Guidi, Sardegna_Orani 07-2011 |
The sylva returns both as an image, capable of distilling the
character of places and the modalities of crossing them, and a reality: forests
are advancing in some territories, and the concrete presence of wild and
untamed areas within cities is a constantly expanding fact. The two levels of
reading of the sylva – the one taking it as a figuration through
which to interpret reality and the other analysing it as actual space –
require a codification of the tools and modes of inhabiting such an unknown
locus.
The return of the sylvan marks the return of a new sense of the
‘archaic’, of yet another mixture of architecture and earth, a
conscious combination of the conflict between the reason and the uncanny,
adventure and comfort, memories of the city and sylvan ways of life. The term selva
denotes precise and concrete realities and multiple imaginaries but also
indicates the possible trajectory of future time as well as the turning towards
a very distant past: it is an arrow whose direction establishes the connotations
of a possible new contrat naturel.
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Vesper No. 4 Exiles and Exoduses Spring-Summer
2021 Click on
‘contents’ to access the abstracts ISSN 2704-7598 ISBN 978-88-229-0635-9 cover
picture: Stefano Graziani, Ceruleo che varia
dal blu profondo fino all’azzurro, quasi sempre passando attraverso
tonalitā di verde, Trieste, 2013 |
Two
movements, perhaps antithetical, affect space. Individuals exclude themselves,
exit (exilium, exsul, ex-solum), come out of their own land, withdraw into another circumstance,
depose power from within, shun the power that withholds. Exile can be an
individual choice, but it can also be a constraint that involves, cumulatively,
a large number. At the same time, peoples, animals, and plants are in exodus,
moving, fleeing, migrating, changing the design and the sense of territory and geographies.
Three
figures take shape from these movements: the space of the journey and the
traces of the crossing, the destination or just the place of arrival, and
finally the image of the house, of the city, or of the abandoned
‘homeland’. These figures unite the two movements: certainly in
exile the journey can be instantaneous; it can last as long as it takes to make
a decision, to refuse, to write a text, to close a door. During the exodus, by
contrast, the journey can prove to be the destination itself – in flight
one may have to stop from necessity, by force, or by choice.
Exiles and
exoduses sediment themselves in history, sometimes finding space in the
chronicle with novel accents. While the need for a gaze from the optimal
distance is reiterated, the stones of other cities are silently laid, and the
blending inheritance is renewed. The two movements perhaps tell us stories of
new and repeating geneses.
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Vesper No. 5 Moby Dick: Adventures and
Discoveries Fall-Winter 2021 Click on ‘contents’ to access the abstracts ISSN 2704-7598 ISBN 978-88-229-0714-1 cover picture: Alberto
Sinigaglia, Untitled, 2010 |
Melville’s
narrative is mentioned to suggest, recall, and emphasise ‘frontier
research’, meant as a mode of investigation literally positioned at the
extremes of knowledge, at the edge of what is known. The task of any research
is to go beyond the already known, the already given. Beyond the mainstream,
however, working at the edges means tackling controversial issues, which are
difficult to settle with established methodologies: it calls for the
‘move of the knight’. In other words, it requires experimentation
even in practice. More than that, frontier research is aimed at refuting
dominant paradigms, thereby working with a high degree of uncertainty and
failure.
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