Eleven conversations taken from as many issues of Fata Morgana. Eleven conversations which synthesize the project behind the journal which was born in spring 2006. At the time it was decided against having an editorial comment because of the conviction that if the journal was going to succeed it would speak for itself. However, the time has come to say a few words. A journal is first and foremost a collective gesture whose outline creates a field. The gesture made by Fata Morgana, which at...

24 conversazioni apparse su Fata Morgana con grandi figure della contemporaneità, studiosi e artisti che parlano del cinema facendone un luogo del pensiero e una forma di vita. Un viaggio in cui il cinema e l’immagine, più di ogni altra forma d’arte, si riscoprono indissolubilmente legati alla complessità del nostro presente. Per la prima volta riunite e tradotte in inglese in un’unica pubblicazione, queste conversazioni offrono al lettore una costellazione unica di autori e temi per pensa...

In his private life, as well as in his work and political attitudes, Michel Foucault often stood in contradiction to himself, especially when his expansive ideas collided with the institutions in which he worked. In Francois Caillat's provocative collection of essays and interviews based on his French documentary of the same name, leading contemporary critics and philosophers reframe Foucault's legacy in an effort to build new ways of thinking about his struggle against society's mechanism...

Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–1929) is a prescient work of mixed media assemblage, made up of hundreds of images culled from antiquity to the Renaissance and arranged into startling juxtapositions. Warburg’s allusive atlas sought to illuminate the pains of his final years, after he had suffered a breakdown and been institutionalized. It continues to influence contemporary artists today, including Gerhard Richter and Mark Dion.In this illustrated exploration of Warbur...

What would a sculpture look like that has as its task to touch thought? For the French philosopher and Art Historian, Georges Didi-Huberman, this is the central question that permeates throughout the work of Italian artist Giuseppe Penone. Through a careful study of Penone’s work regarding a sculptural and haptic process of contact with place, thought, and artistic practice, Didi-Huberman takes the reader on a journey through various modes of thinking by way of being. Taking Penon...

A noted French thinker's poignant reflections, in words and photographs, on his visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.On a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Georges Didi-Huberman tears three pieces of bark from birch trees on the edge of the site. Looking at these pieces after his return home, he sees them as letters, a flood, a path, time, memory, flesh. The bark serves as a springboard to Didi-Huberman's meditations on his visit, recorded in this spare, poetic, and powerful boo...

Seeking out the minor lights of friendship in a time of fascismDante once spoke, in his Divine Comedy, of the miniscule lights, in the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno, who, contrary to the great lights that shined bright within the sublime circles of Paradise, frailly wandered in the somber pockets of glimmering light within the darkness. Pliny the Elder was once preoccupied by a type of fly named pyrallis or pyrotocon, which was only a...

The transitional situation that we are experiencing, which brings together a book culture with a culture of the screen, is gradually shifting us from a graphic reason to a computational one. In the same way that writing has made it possible to generate a particular mode of thought, where lists, tables and formulas have played a primordial role in the modeling of knowledge. With digital technology, other systems of knowledge are being invented, shaping of information and its transmission. I...

What Is a People? seeks to reclaim "people" as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular" and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those w...

Want to paint more like Manet and less like Jackson Pollock?Students of art hailed Classical Drawing Atelier, Juliette Aristides’s first book, as a dynamic return to the atelier educational model. Ateliers, popular in the nineteenth century, teach emerging artists by pairing them with a master artist over a period of years. The educational process begins as students copy masterworks, then gradually progress to painting as their skills develop. The many artists at every lev...

Ateliers have produced the greatest artists of all time—and now that educational model is experiencing a renaissance. These studios, a return to classical art training, are based on the nineteenth-century model of teaching artists by pairing them with a master artist over a period of years. Students begin by copying masterworks, then gradually progress to painting as their skills develop. Classical Drawing Atelier is an atelier in a book—and the master is Juliette Aristides, a cla...

What is it to be a work of art? Renowned author and critic Arthur C. Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part memoiristic meditation, What Art Is challenges the popular interpretation that art is an indefinable concept, instead bringing to light the properties that constitute universal meaning. Danto argues that despite varied approaches, a work of art is always defined by two essential criteria: meaning and embodiment, as well as o...