• iconography
• motive
• painting
• God

• Video art
• performance art
• identity
• human–animal communication

Over the past two or three years there has been much talk in the social and human sciences about a materialist turn. It is clear that this is not, however, a complete revolution back to older forms of materialism, even if some of their traces are still resonant. The new materialists are self-consciously positioning themselves in the wake of an earlier cultural turn towards linguistic modes of cultural analysis that included radical forms of constructivism, but also in response to new challenges and opportunities that are emerging through novel ways of understanding matter and handling objects.

My essay has two main parts. The first provides an overview by considering some of the ways a new materialism is being pursued, the sources from which it draws inspiration and the kind of vocabulary that is being used to invoke volatile process of materialisation. This includes a sketch of the new materialist ontology, with...

• materialist turn
• materiality
• material aesthetics
• thing/thingness
• anthropology

To move with the world (and with this movement attaining skills, knowledge, aesthetic experience and developing collaborative networks) here describes specific skills that are, of course, connected with cognitive work. However, to move with the world can also be understood as a specific exploitation of the human capabilities of movement. The relational aspect of movement today stands in the centre of exploitation. Movement of the body is therefore exteriorised. It is no longer inhabiting the interiority of the body as in 20th century Fordism, where exactly through the interiorisation of the movement it was possible to be a part of the bigger social machine. Subjectivities are flexible because their bodies are organised through constant protocols of acceleration and organisation of everyday and common movement. This kind of distribution enables experimentation with temporality where change is accelerated and spectralised. There is no time for hesitation when you ‘move with the world’....

• walking
• politics
• mobility
• capitalism
• Post-Fordism

Voice 2: So the house from the inside would also suggest the thing that is outside. It would suggest another object as it were, from the inside.


Voice 3: And on the smallest scale, the people who live in a house are separate entities themselves; they reproduce the state of the world outside, and sometimes, when they go out into it, they become like it and are apart. But inside the house they are also together. To simply reaffirm their separateness from the world would be to fall back on the oldest of clichés, the house as nest; the inside of the house would remain undivided and no new questions addressed. But the real question is, When the members of the family come back into the house are they together or separate, both from each other and from the world?


Voice 2: In this context, the house becomes a semipermeable membrane between...

• postmodern architecture
• architecture
• house
• spatial turn
• theory of architecture

Theater as a live art has a peculiarly complicated relation to time, and to the present, especially because sometimes it proves to be a mimetic art, and sometimes not. Not only is it a matter of the temporality of the theater itself, and then of the time of the play, and of the performance but it is also – and this since the original Greek dispensation of theater – a question of the time of the city, of the polis, of the community, if such a thing exists. 


The object of this paper is theater as the production of contemporaneity, a temporal phenomenon which also turns out to be corporeal and political. The material consists of two theatrical performances; one by Dario Fo, titled La Fame dello Zanni (The Servant’s Hunger) and performed in what appears to be a university lecture hall in 1977 for RAI Due, Italian state television, and the...

• art criticism
• art
• aesthetics
• contemporary art
• poetry