Everything that is recounted in these escapes is seen and lost sight of through the mists of history, it is a flap of burning existential truth caught up in the never-to-be-specified web of collective events: the agony of Italy's colonial adventure through the warped lens of a ‘family history’; the trial of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's director, reconstructed in the form of an audition for a play; the rambling confession of the first dissociated terrorist of the German revolutionary left in the 1970s; Russian imperialism repeated in farce in the exploits of an actor called to replace Vladimir Putin on official occasions; the May of ‘68 concentrated and dissolved in the claustrophobic “chamber drama” of a Parisian police station.
In a continuous confusion between background and figure, the individual continues to be, as Georg Büchner said, ‘just foam on the waves’ and the anachronism of the theatre the only place where his scream can still echo.

Attilio Scarpellini, critic, writer and, dramaturg. One of the founders of the Lettera 22 association of journalists and one of the main supporters of the Independent Theatre movement, he has written on the pages of Diario and the online weekly La differenza. He edited the magazine Quaderni del teatro di Roma and collaborated on the theatre column of doppiozero. A dramaturgy tutor at Elvira Frosini and Daniele Timpano's ‘Corpo scritto’ workshop, he has taught at the University of Rome La Sapienza and at the Da.re school of advanced dance training. His writings include L'angelo rovesciato. Quattro saggi sull'11 settembre e la scomparsa della realtà (Idea, 2008), La fortezza vuota. Discorso sulla perdita di senso del teatro (with Massimiliano Civica, Edizioni dell'asino, 2014), Il tempo sospeso delle immagini (Mimesis, 2020) and Figlio di cane (Mimesis, 2024). He talks about images and books at the microphones of Rai Radio 3.

Belma Goralija left suddenly. I didn't have time to meet her in her house or at the café, as I had thought. Nor did I have time to return to Sarajevo, where she lived. Accessory was the pandemic that cancelled the plane ticket I had bought two years ago. Now I regret this lost time and I am shocked at the voracious time of human nature in which our days flow. We will not be able to meet, talk, listen. I will no longer be able to write what I should have written. Then I and anyone else may ask: what to do with the time that remains? Just that time, our time that we have left to live. Before it was the time to run, to write, every day. Of telling others what life daily life disclosed. Today it seems to me the time to grasp the memories of those we have met, because they have something or perhaps a lot to teach. This verb seems beautiful. "The time that remains" pass through their faces, their stories, by what they have taught us. The index of the book will be the letters of their names.

Filippo Landi was born in Rome in 1954. He graduated in Political Science at the University La Sapienza in Rome. In 1978 he participated in the founding of the weekly "Il Sabato". He joined RAI in 1987. Correspondent in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait during the First Gulf War, then in former Yugoslavia and Sarajevo, during the years of the siege, in Kosovo and Albania. In 2001 he returned to the Middle East, as RAI correspondent in Cairo and from 2003 in Jerusalem, where he remained until 2014. On his experience in Kosovo he wrote Un treno per Blace (La Meridiana, 1999).

There is the ocean. There is the sycamore, and the jujube too. There is the war. There are mothers, daughters. And there is the habaryar, the little mother. There are Mogadishu, Rome, the Europe of hers and the Europe from the African history. Ubah Cristina Ali Farah's world unravels in a complex and clearly contemporary space, marked by profound references to an ancient wisdom and an often, but not always, dreamlike dimension. The first collection of short stories published in Italy includes the entire literary journey of Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, as well as a series of poems and an unpublished play. The refinement of her language emerges powerfully, showing the international stature of one of the most interesting Italian writers on our artistic scene.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a Somali and Italian writer and poet. Winner of the Lingua Madre Prize (2006) and Vittorini Prize (2008), she's the author of three novels: Madre piccola (Frassinelli, 2007; 66thand2nd, 2022), Il comandante del fiume (66thand2nd, 2014; 2022), Le stazioni della luna (66thand2nd, 2021) and the ekphrasis La danza dell'orice (Juxta Press, 2020) inspired by a work by Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu. In 2018 he worked on the rewriting of Antigone directed in Palermo by Giuseppe Massa and the libretto of the community opera Silent City for Matera 2019, directed by James Bonas with music composed by Nigel Osborne. He is a consultant for UNDP Somalia on the Oral History Histography for Peacebuilding project.

Turkey is a land torn between East and West, and between its glorious past and a dangerous, unpredictable future. After the violence of an attempted military coup against President Erdogan in 2016, an event which shocked the world, journalist and novelist Kaya Genc travelled around his country on a quest to find the places and people in whom the contrasts of Turkey's rich past meet. As suicide bombers attack Istanbul, and journalists and teachers are imprisoned, he walks the streets of the famous Ottoman neighborhoods, telling the stories of the ordinary Turks who live among the contradictions and conflicts of Anatolia, one of the world's oldest civilizations. The Lion and the Nightingale presents the spellbinding story of a country whose history has been split between East and West, between violence and beauty - between the roar of the lion and the song of the nightingale.
Weaving together a mixture of memoir, interview and his own autobiography, Genc takes the reader on a contemporary journey through the contradictory soul of the Turkish nation.

Kaya Genç is a journalist, novelist, and essayist from Istanbul. He holds a PhD in English Literature and he is the author of four books, The Lion and the Nightingale (I.B. Tauris, 2019), Under the Shadow (I.B. Tauris, 2016), An Istanbul Anthology (American University in Cairo Press, 2015), and Macera (YKY, 2008). He has contributed essays and articles to the world's leading magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and The Financial Times. The Atlantic selected Kaya's writing for the magazine's list of "Best Journalism Works of 2014".

The volume documents the Mineur Mineur project of the artist Bertille Bak, winner of the third edition of the Mario Merz Prize, conceived for the Fondazione Merz and curated by Caroline Bourgeois. The artist turns, with her work, to communities of people more or less aware of the characteristics of their identity and to those minorities often forgotten or repressed. The title of the exhibition itself refers to the video installation Mineur Mineur ("minor miner"), addressing the issue of child labor which still today deprives about 152 million children worldwide of their childhood. Through a fairytale language that employs artifices, Bak offers a contemporary truth made up of tragic destinies, a social story that becomes a sort of memory archive that intertwines the lives of the people with the production of a new common imagination. The volume documents the genesis and development of the exhibition, and includes, in addition to the curator's introduction text, an extensive conversation with the artist and other writings from different disciplinary fields that collect points of reflection on such an important and urgent social issue and on Bertille Bak's artistic career.

Bertille Bak, the granddaughter of Polish miners from northern France, was born in 1983 in Arras and lives and works in Paris. From 2002 to 2007, she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris where she was a student of Christian Boltanski and then continued her studies at the Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Tourcoing.
Her works can be found in numerous collections worldwide. She has exhibited in group and solo shows at institutional venues and private galleries, such as The Gallery Apart, Rome, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Maison du peuple de Vénissieux and Galerie Xippas, Paris.

First Italian translation of the writings of the blogger and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, one of the protagonists of the 2011 Tahrir Square revolution. The book comes out thanks to an international network of editors and journalists, to the author's family, to Amnesty International that for years follows the case of the writer still in prison, to ARCI and to the collaboration with the Fitzcarraldo publishing house in London that will concomitantly publish in the English translation. A volume capable of portraying the dramatic situation of Egypt in whose prisons it is estimated that over 60,000 political and prisoners of conscience are detained, subjected to torture, capital executions, unfair trial and long periods of preventive detention, in a clear violation of human and civil rights.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah, born in 1981 in Cairo, entered prison for the first time at the age of 25, in 2006. Egyptian authorities arrested him during a peaceful demonstration in Cairo. Having become the symbolic figure of Egyptian dissidence, he has spent the last six years always inside a cell, also deprived of books and writing paper. He is considered by Amnesty International to be a 'prisoner of conscience', the best known of the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Egyptian prisons. Son of the most important Egyptian family of activists and defenders of human and civil rights, Alaa embodies an entire generation of young Egyptians who put their lives and their intelligence at the service of the right to dignity, individual and collective.