Metaxy Journal

Spaesamento e orientamento. Il museo della città come spazio di riconoscimento

2025-04-09T21:21:25+00:00

This essay examines the role of civic museums in helping people navigate the complexity of modern cities, which
are often fragmented and disorienting in a postmodern context. Drawing on the ideas of Calvino and Foucault, it explores the city museum as a heterotopia—a space for identity reflection and collective memory. The focus is particularly on how this institution has evolved in Italy. While historically serving as a place of preservation, the civic museum is now being reconsidered as a space for engagement, participation, and social cohesion.

Conoscere, riconoscerci e valorizzare: Relazioni circolari tra arte, cultura, persone e luoghi

2025-04-09T21:27:19+00:00

Today, the world faces challenges that threaten the integrity of cultural heritage and society and require a collective response and a shared vision of the future. UNESCO has introduced a systemic approach to interpreting settlement contexts as ‘living heritage’, paving the way for the definition and experimentation of new collaborative management models. In this context, the circular economy model is closely interconnected to the recovery of cultural heritage as a common good, due to its regenerative capacity of relations between communities, culture and places. The contribution analyses some case studies in which the recovery project has been interpreted as an operational tool of the UNESCO approach, leading to creative crossovers at the cultural, social, environmental and economic levels. In these cases, art has been the driver for the recovery of memory and collective identity and for the implementation of circular governance models.

El reconocimiento de la imago mundi a través de la ciudad

2025-04-09T21:37:21+00:00

People living in the same place and in the same space of time have the same idea of the world. This imago mundi leaves its mark on the configuration of the city. The religious man conceives space as non-homogeneous, with divisions, where the sacred manifests itself and founds the world. The city grows around this hierophany, protected by a wall that separates the sacred from the profane. In the
ancient and medieval city this centre generates the urban fabric and the wall contains it. With urban development, scientific and technological advances and the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, the city grew without limits. The demolition of the walls, which allowed the city to grow, signified progress and freedom, but it also broke down the established separation between the sacred and the profane.
The non-religious man living in the contemporary city no
longer feels the sacred world, which is also manifested in
the morphology of the city.

Abitare i nuovi mondi. L’esistenza dei luoghi nel mondo virtuale

2025-04-09T21:48:03+00:00

All humans exist within a localized context that is to say, every aspect of human existence occurs in relation to the place. In this article, I propose to interpret the conceptualisation of the place through the lens of Norberg-Schulz's genius loci, by comparing genius loci’s
characteristics to Heidegger's theory of dwelling, observing in particular the human ability to attribute meanings to the place they inhabit. The aim of this paper is not only to demonstrate that the relationship with genius loci is dwellingoriented, but also that such relationship pertains to aspects of reality that go beyond mere materiality, such as virtual worlds and particularly video game worlds. I suggest here that applying the conceptualisation of the genius loci to the virtual world allows for its phenomenological understanding
with reference to the human modalities of existence and their relationship with the places they inhabit.

Ribât es-Salâm. Drammatica dell’ospitalità nell’opera teatrale Pierre e Mohamed di Adrien Candiard

2025-04-09T21:52:55+00:00

The aim of this article is to present and interpret the play Pierre and Mohamed by Adrien Candiard from the point of view of hospitality as a “style”, proposed by Christoph Theobald, which consists in the absolute concordance between form and content, a way of inhabiting the secular and postmodern world. Our aim is to demonstrate that hospitality thus experienced is a “theological locus” for the 21st century, a place of God’s presence in the frontiers of the human. We choose to start “from” the play Pierre and Mohamed by Adrien Candiard, with the aim of revealing how it is “within” the drama of hospitality that the way “towards” peace presents itself.

Essere artisticamente umani più-che-umani. Brainstorming

2025-04-09T21:56:36+00:00

The more-than-human (pluriverse), i.e., a hyper-complex, inter/intrarelational, inter/co-implicated world with which man is entwined in a fluctuating tangle of forces, overlaps, slippages, actions and feedback, in its manifestation, points to the obsolescence of binarisms, dichotomies, (anthropo)centrisms and hierarchies and thus contextually to a more-than-human human. But how is/ becomes a more than-human human? Is there such a thing as a catalyst for this process? The question is so irreducibly complex that the least inopportune way to address it seems the brainstorm. One or even more brainstorms in which materialisms, posthumanisms, ecotransfeminisms, ecocriticisms, anthropologies, aesthetics cross and slide over each other, suggesting that, perhaps, it is artistically
that the anthropopoiesis of the more-than-human human.
takes place.

Il paesaggio alla prova della sfida ambientale. Per un approccio estetico

2025-04-09T22:01:51+00:00

The paper explores the relevance of the concept of landscape in times of ecological, social and cultural crisis. In an era dominated by emergency and immediate action, the landscape

is often replaced by the term "environment", considered more objective and quantifiable. Political ecology tends to privilege the scientific and technological language, neglecting the contribution of the arts and literature, just as some critics argue that the notion of nature and landscape, linked to an aesthetic and contemplative approach, It perpetuates anthropocentrism and hampers ecological transition.

Despite the criticism, the landscape remains necessary and it is possible to rethink it through a phenomenological approach that sees the landscape as an embodied and immersive aesthetic experience, an original and vital relationship between man and nature. Only through this deep and participatory connection can we orient our actions towards long-term sustainability.

La disabilità dell’esistenza

2025-04-09T22:04:50+00:00

Accompanied by the reflections of the book Beasts of Burden by Sunaura Taylor, the article highlights how animal condition and disability are often associated and the fact that this world, in its architectural and power structures, is built and designed to measure only for normal functional and human subjects. There is therefore an exclusion of all those subjects who do not belong to these categories, operating a real dis-ability of all the others. The article also proposes to replace the concept of inclusion - showing the deceptive fallacy contained in it - with that of sharing. Desire, the source of all inspiration for life, must be included in a project for the future that involves every form of life. This is the task of art today: to redraw the perspectives of reality, keeping in mind that, as Sartre says, existence itself is by nature disabled because it is based on nothingness and devoid of meaning, and that this condition, therefore, is not detached from any living individual.

Danza come incontro. Tra paticità, risonanza atmosferica e transpassibilità

2025-04-09T22:12:59+00:00

This paper aims to explore the relationship between human and non-human from the perspective of the dancer. This question will be addressed through the illustration of the short film Bakelite (2023), which will be taken as an example of dance’s ability to show the precarious, even conflictual nature of the coexistence of human and non-human entities. This aspect will be explored through a phenomenological and neo-phenomenological approach, namely through the Straussian notion of pathicity, the neophenomenological concept of lived corporeality and Henri Maldiney’s notions of encounter and transpassibility. This approach, which will also make use of Butler’s interpretation of the concept of performativity, will allow us to highlight the plural, dynamic and metamorphic nature of our existence and the need, in order to reconfigure the coexistence between human and non-human, to open ourselves to the transformations that the other exerts on us and that are constitutive of our way of feeling, being and acting.

Vul-nerabilità nell’opera d’arte come spazio comune. Una riflessione attraverso la filosofia di Michel Serres e l’Arte di Raija Jokinen.

2025-04-09T22:18:55+00:00

The theme of vulnerability interrogates and solicits both the philosophical thought of Serres and the art of Jokinen, preparing definitions and works that give voice and form to a poetic sensibility, comparable to that of a mother, which prefers perception to rational thought, listening to and observing the world from the bowels, and accrediting the dimension of vulnerability (it is not by chance that vulnus and vulva share the same etymon, vul-) as the opening that, by breaking down the warp without completely spoiling it, generates an opening of possibility, a creative discontinuity that in the philosophical approach translates into a rethinking of the subject-object dualism and in the work of art as a common space catalysing the relationship between inter-acting subjects.

Lo specchio teriomorfo: vedersi nell’alterità animale.

2025-04-09T22:21:38+00:00

The phenomenological dimension of other species has always been a source of self-reflection and imagination for humans. In some ways, animality has become a construct that humans have used to define themselves in opposition (dark mirror), in others a place of inspiration (epiphany). Darwinian evolutionism has questioned anthropocentrism, but at the same time has brought out a ferment of opposing ideas on the concept of animality, which has influenced art, philosophy, and anthropology. Artistic movements linked to post-humanist thought have seen in the theriomorphic hybrid a new way to represent the existential condition of contemporaneity.

Il mimetismo secondo Caillois. Primi appunti per un’indagine

2025-04-09T22:24:14+00:00

Roger Caillois (1913-1978) dedicated some books – in particolar in the 1960s Méduse et Cie and Le mimétisme animal – to a particular interpretation of animal mimi-cry. In these texts it is possible to find two lines of argument. The first elaborates a con-ception of the universe as an immanent and finite natural unity, in which forms and mo-dels are recurrent, and in which a spontaneous and autonomous aesthetic tendency is at work. The second rejects any explanation based on the search for utiliy and advantage, and affirms the absolute reality of interspecific imitation. Mimicry is thus associated with notions such as expenditure, fascination and the search for invisibilità a san end in itself. This paper aims to highlight some critical issues inherent in this conception of mimicry, and to promote the recognition of an implicit meaning in the economy of rela-tionships between species in the explanation of this fact.

“Poner ante la vista”: Sensibilidad y acción humana en Aristóteles

2025-04-09T22:27:24+00:00

In this text, I wish to reflect on the possibility of sensibly "perceiving”— especially through hearing and sight —some signs related to human actions in order to answer the question: How does an action look? And, based on this, how can we evaluate it? To do so, I will analyze some passages from Aristotle's Problems concerning the perception of movement and action, and then relate them to the theory of dramatic composition in the Poetics. Finally, I will explain why the imitation of actions present in dramatic art is a valuable resource for understanding the complexity of practical life, precisely because of its ability to present action in all its unity and organicity. The intention is to show how exemplarity, contemplation, and evaluation of human actions contribute to the formation of the "vital meaning."

Geo-estética y vida: Reflexiones sobre habitar la arquitectura urbana en el Antropoceno

2025-04-09T22:30:31+00:00

In this article we explore the philosophical and conceptual foundations of the geo-aesthetic line of research. Forming a clear and distinct idea of its analysis, scope and motivations. We will show that geo-aesthetics is closely related to the Heideggerian idea of “inhabiting”, which gives it support to establish itself as a critique of the Project of Modernity and the Anthropocene.

La experiencia estética de la vida fáctica

2025-04-09T22:33:02+00:00

The present text seeks to elucidate the way in which factual and everyday life can constitute an aesthetic experience. To this end, the first section is devoted to a general exposition of the birth of aesthetics and the relationship that this philosophical discipline has with art and beauty. Subsequently, the concept of experience is analyzed starting with Martin Heidegger and the implications that the influence of the modern tradition has had. After that, it delves into the aesthetic experience that occurs within factual life and, finally, the relationship between aesthetic experience and art and the way in which art has been distanced from the vital processes of human existence. The objective is to demonstrate that the aesthetic experience traverses our being-in-the-world, and, in this sense, factual life is already an aesthetic way of inhabiting the world, just as art reflects life.

Aísthêsis es vida: Una aproximación “estética prosaica” a la escatología ante las primeras amenazas de prevalencia de la Ciudad de México

2025-04-09T22:39:05+00:00

The article explores the connection between aesthetics and life by examining the “prosaic” “aesthetics” of feces and “scatology” (σκατός), as well as “eschatology” (ἔσχατος) related to “last things".

Through “phenomenology”, “poetics”, engineering design, and psychoanalysis, the article aims to demonstrate how “prosaic aesthetics” reveal the “sensitivity” (αἴσθησις) of Mexico City's inhabitants from the Spanish conquest to the threats of the city's prevalence.

The phenomenological foundation of “poetic aesthetics” and “prosaic aesthetics” are initially established in the text. The article presents the precursors of the poetics of the “Spanish Golden Age” and the applications of the poétique de l'espace and the poétique de la merde. The article also explores the foundations, “registers”, and “modalities” of “Prosaic Aesthetics” or “Everyday Aesthetics”. From these perspectives, the article analyzes the sensitivity acquired by inhabitants of Mexico City. It concludes with a reflection on the aesthetic implications of life in the city.

Estética de la vida cotidiana. La prudencia como movimiento hacia la vida bella

2025-04-10T09:09:58+00:00

Faced with the question of the ways of apprehending life as Philosophy has tried to do throughout its tradition, one line stands out that conceives of it on the basis of its possibilities of unhiddenness, as true life. The unhiddenness of life has led to interpreting it in a wide range of senses that congregate in the care of life. Such a perspective was highlighted by Aristotle, mainly in his Nicomachean Ethics, and later taken up by Martin Heidegger in his early Freiburg lectures. This article seeks to return to Aristotle, but now with the aim of addressing the unhidden character of life as a possibility of embellishment based on some winks given by Franco Volpi

PASSAGES Propos d’ouverture de la Journée d’Étude sur l’Éphémère dans l’art (Université Catholique de Lyon, 5 mai 2023)

2025-04-10T09:17:03+00:00

This paper explore the theme of ephemerality in art, analyzing how works of art, despite their fragility and transience, manage to question the meaning of human time. From the historical ambivalence towards the ephemeral, citing classical authors like Horace and Ovid, and the biblical tradition that oscillates between the eternity and fragility of the work, to the contemporaneity which sees a fascination for ephemeral creation, integrating death into matter and assuming the contradiction of creating something significant in a fleeting support. This reflection questions the ephemeral in art, recognizing the beauty of transitory works and the wisdom that comes from accepting their fugacity.

La danza effimero con Michel Serres: chrono/choro/somatofania

2025-04-10T09:20:30+00:00

Short, momentary, temporary, transient, precarious, and labile are adjectives that the current ecological, climatic, war, political, economic, and social contingencies have accustomed us to employ almost compulsively and indiscriminately by now, and that, beyond everything, are synonyms interimplicit with and in the ephemerality. Which deserves reconsideration in its literalness as epì heméra (for a day), that can take place through a sort of its double, not quite mainstream but nonetheless suggestive and perhaps even effective, such as the artistic one of dance. Therefore, it is worth pausing to try and see which streaks/implications of the ephemerality itself the dance ephemeral conveys and/or produces: the neuralgic concretions that the latter seems to me to involve and permeate, in a perspective of recognition/rediscovery/awareness, are time, space and the body, evidently interimplicated.

Paesaggio urbano e passages Estetica della metropoli ottocentesca nel Passagenwerk di Walter Benjamin

2025-04-10T09:23:17+00:00

Paesaggio urbano e passages Estetica della metropoli ottocentesca nel Passagenwerk di Walter Benjamin

Arte-più-che-umana. Genesi, inclinazioni, traversate. Nota alla giornata di studio arte-più-che-umana, Parma, 8 maggio 2024

2025-04-10T09:25:48+00:00

Arte-più-che-umana. Genesi, inclinazioni, traversate. Nota alla giornata di studio arte-più-che-umana, Parma, 8 maggio 2024

La santità ospitale dei luoghi Note a Segni dei luoghi. Vivere lo spazio, abitare il senso di Emanuele Borsotti

2025-04-10T10:02:22+00:00

La santità ospitale dei luoghi. Note a Segni dei luoghi. Vivere lo spazio, abitare il senso di Emanuele Borsotti