Resistance, atmospheres, play, and the construction and deconstruction of political imaginaries. The margin-hidden, subterranean-reveals a critical topography, deviations, and reflections on the future of particular cultures. In this issue, artistic research, aesthetics, ethnography, and anthropology emerge as lateral trajectories that propose emergency exits, and foreground the potentials of fragility and utopia. With this issue, we not only present the strategic opportunities that art and anthropology can develop, but also assume a political stance by confronting cultural appropriation and violent historical legacies.
The urban and the rural are explored as dimensions of political space. Within these two mappings, stratifications and the interweaving of topography and community come to the fore. An Essential Condition by Niside Panebianco is a photographic project that examines the displacement of Calabrian communities from inland villages toward the coasts, analyzing the sense of “doubleness” and the fragility of a collective identity suspended among the ruins of the past. The rural is presented as a political position. Beatrice Ferrara and Leandro Pisano introduce the Manifesto of Rural Futurism, a challenge to dominant narratives of rurality that employs technocultures and deep listening to imagine “other” futures for marginalized territories.
On the other side, yet on the same front, the urban is overturned by the interventions of the Swiss collective Hotel Regina, discussed in Landscape and Urban Space in the Artistic Practice of the Hotel Regina Collective by Cecilia Blanco and Lorenzo Sacchi. These attempts to reappropriate urban space through Hotel Regina’s “playful-constructive” gestures open the discussion to Roger Sansi’s analysis of public art experiments in the periphery of Barcelona. By questioning the ideas of utopia and idiocy and uncovering their potential as forms of political dissent, Utopia and Idiocy: Artistic Experimentswhat in the Periphery of Barcelona succeeds in breaking through, demonstrating how a rupture in the consensual order of urban planning can outline new horizons of negotiation.
Sonic In-betweenness. Acts of Devotion in Public Spaces, Egypt by composer Valentina Ciniglio offers a vertiginous sonic tour of Egyptian devotional practices, recorded over five years, where sound becomes more than a mere physical phenomenon, possessing instead the power to create a juxtaposition of temporalities that shapes individual experience. The relationship between sound and bodies opens onto anthropological reflection, as articulated by Francesco Ronzon in The Noise of the World, where sonic atmospheres define the quality of lived spaces, from a Zen temple in Japan to the Bolhão market in Porto.
In this issue, the sense of contemporary rituality is set against the most extreme forms of political ideology. Playing with Fire by Enrico Budri investigates the peculiar relationship between joking, souvenirs, and fascism in Predappio, analyzing how the objectification of historical symbols in consumer “anti-rites” transforms memory into a form of the “cold irony of History.” Revisiting the work of Oreste Zevola in Africa, Francesco Marano explores issues of cultural appropriation and artistic projects that seek a social stance within processes and practices. Continuing along a critical trajectory of visual ethnography on stratified, participatory, and material levels, Martina Isernia presents the work of the Atelier dell’Errore: Language at the Margin, a laboratory that transforms neurodivergence and error into creative resources and tools of resistance against the standardization of cultural centers. The issue culminates in Giacomo Zaza’s internal perspective on Cuban video art, understood as a critical consciousness capable of deconstructing political imaginaries. In Introspective Cuba. Reflections on Artist Video as Critical Consciousness, ideological constraints intersect with metalinguistic experimentation. Video art becomes a field for investigating ethnic and cultural belonging, with particular attention to Black and mestiza identities and to the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade.
We consider these grafts and contaminations not merely as methods, but as genuine political and poetic instruments for exploring contemporaneity, encouraging engagement in research that challenges the rigidity of traditional classifications in order to embrace complexity.