Vesper No. 8 | Vesper | Spring-Summer 2023
Sara Marini
Vesper
Keyword
Vesper, double mirror,
shadow, twilight, blindness
The eighth
issue of “Vesper” is dedicated to the theme Vesper, and therefore
calls for a double mirror: one inherent in the figure of the number eight and
the other found in the contents and the name of the volume that contains them.
Vespers and the design of time, twilight, the duality of West and East, the
double as a condition and as a strategy, Venus and Venice, the sunset as a propitious
direction, the drawing of shadows, camouflage, Vesper Lynd and the Vesper
cocktail (both inventions from the pen of Ian Fleming) are the constellation
points that propagate from the term vesper and that “Vesper”
8 plans to illuminate.
Looking
into the twilight is equivalent to dissolving obvious differences and
distances, it confuses the boundaries of objects and tests the certainties of
the gaze, immersing the latter in the darkening of the
‘contemporary’. Blindness is a necessary condition for understanding
reality, as José Saramago has already suggested; Giorgio Agamben states that in
order to live within one’s time it is necessary to construct a
displacement, an anachronism: not to see the lights but to be able to detect
the obscurities; Umberto Eco reminds us that considering the darkness it is
possible to reconcile ‘an affectionate feeling for the concrete and a
turmoil of sublime abstractions’.
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