The second season of Overmorrow’s Library is dedicated to world-building, world-ending, and travel across worlds. Federico Campagna presents a new selection of books that might help us to appreciate the fragility of ‘worlds,’ and the art of creating new ones through a particular use of our imagination.

When an unexpected invitation to write a text on French artist Benoît Maire landed in my inbox, I realised it had been more than ten years since I last engaged with his work. Back then, I was living in London and running a curatorial project space called FormContent while Maire was often visiting the city for various exhibitions. As part of the research towards the writing commission, I was invited to spend a few days in Rome at Villa Medici, the French Academy situated at the top of Trinità dei Monti. Benoît Maire is currently one of the 2021-2022 Visual Arts ...

The word “classic” in the title of this special issue of Selva might seem to some a misnomer. Rather than consistently use any of the rich traditions of the concept from various sub-discplines of art history—say, Mesoamerican or Chinese—or address the contested self-identification of the academic field of “Classics” itself, I have thought about the operational role of this word in all the different art histories I have worked with. (I was for a few years responsible for creating and managing a non-Eurocentric introductory art history course with the help of colleagues and collaborators. My level of engagement in various ...

The second season of Overmorrow’s Library is dedicated to world-building, world-ending, and travel across worlds. Federico Campagna presents a new selection of books that might help us to appreciate the fragility of ‘worlds,’ and the art of creating new ones through a particular use of our imagination.

The second season of Overmorrow’s Library is dedicated to world-building, world-ending, and travel across worlds. Federico Campagna presents a new selection of books that might help us to appreciate the fragility of ‘worlds,’ and the art of creating new ones through a particular use of our imagination. In this episode, Federico Campagna interviews Dr. Francesco Strocchi, author and scholar of Roman history, on the intellectual life of the late Roman Republic.

In the February 2009 issue of e-flux journal, Luis Camnitzer suggested in his essay “Art and Literacy” that a core problem in education (particularly for artists) can be traced back to an early stage when one is taught to read and write, in that order. On one level, it is simple common sense to suppose that one can only begin to write after learning how to read. But, at the same time, this ordering also takes for granted that consumption must necessarily come before production—only after you consume knowledge will you then be capable of producing it. It is a fundamental ...

Musicologist and producer Francesco Fusaro discusses world-building music across the centuries.

Markus Hansen attempts to recreate Albrecht Dürer’s drawing of six pillows by photographing his own pillows. “I retraced the depth and suppleness of the pleats and studied the nature of their volumes and folds with my fingertips.”

The second season of Overmorrow’s Library is dedicated to world-building, world-ending, and travel across worlds. Federico Campagna presents a new selection of books that might help us to appreciate the fragility of ‘worlds,’ and the art of creating new ones through a particular use of our imagination.

In the year 1974, the United States of America was in crisis. We had lost an ill-conceived and disastrously mismanaged war in Vietnam and were about to withdraw in defeat. Following the Yom Kippur War, the Arab oil-producing states initiated an embargo on oil shipments to the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan, in retaliation for their support of Israel, and this triggered an energy crisis in most of the industrialized world. Economic growth in the U.S. slowed to near zero. In August of 1974, Richard Nixon would become the first U.S. president to resign in disgrace, and his successor Gerald ...

Measurement standards shape space, enforce power, and mold elaborate fantasies. Art historian Emanuele Lugli traces our preoccupation with exactitude back to the Middle Ages.

Natural Magic takes as its point of departure a historical period—the mid-sixteenth century—in which the scientific method, magic, and philosophy still had processes, knowledge, and interests in common. The exhibition unfolds throughout three rooms—Space 1, the Vaults Room, and the Protocol Room—interconnected by devices that trick visitors’ senses, through which Leonor Serrano Rivas generates a cosmos governed by its own rules and logic. To use the Renaissance terminology of magia naturalis for naming inventions, these devices are “instruments of the imagination” that give rise to alternative experiences of the world by pushing time-space boundaries.