This monograph devoted to the artist-director duo Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi traces a large part of their work from the early 1970s to the 1990s. Thanks to a conversation curated by Sergio Toffetti and Daniela Giuffrida, it reconstructs the thread of a journey that begins with Angela Ricci Lucchi’s training in Salzburg with Oskar Kokoschka and the early film experiences of Gianikian; films that use found objects to focus on the themes of memory. The meeting of the directors’ artistic practices and their respective lives has fostered attention on the theme of the “catalogue”: the true pole around which Gianikian|Ricci Lucchi’s poetics revolves and unfolds. In addition to the aforementioned interview, the book includes texts by Alberto Farassino, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Scott MacDonald, and Michel Hommel, and is completed by texts by the filmmakers featured in the book.

What are the origins of the construction of power, of the use of violence as a conscious instrument, of bloodshed as the foundation of the collective, which form the basis of the thought and practices of our civilisation? When Rome decided to build the Capitol, a human head with an intact face was discovered beneath the foundations. It was as though the soldier depicted in the foreground of the work by A. Caron (1521-1599) opening the book, standing in triumph on a round podium, had just found it. The exhibition shows how one shows a trophy. One might say that these battles, these assassinations take place on the plinth, on the very supports of the monuments. These fundamental battles are the subject of this book, called the Libro delle fondazioni (Book of Foundations). Foundations of stone walls on flesh, foundations of the city, of its history, its culture, its spectacles, its politics: but also of our own. An essay in the philosophy of knowledge, this book is a search for reality distorted by ideological formations, and traces the possible outlines of a knowledge and a thought constructed outside the fury of verbal struggles and the delimitations of power. These are the terms of a culture, nature, civilisation, which here, in negative and in positive, find a new determination.

“Considering equality as a value to be realised obscures the sense of the equality we currently experience: when men are equal, decisions of collective interest are taken by majority vote according to the principle ‘one man one vote’, but nothing suggests we may attribute the virtue of justice or knowledge to this majority”. Castellano's essay offers an in-depth investigation into the political power of truth and the theory of pluralism.

The book, like Giulio Paolini’s works themselves, is coherently suspended between the visible and the invisible, the defined and the unresolved. Once again the artist looks at the riddle of his work as a participatory author and critic, in a dynamic progress, preserving intact the attitudes of wonder through which he fascinates the spectator with whom he identifies. In his book, the artist uses seven rooms – as many places of refraction, reference and accumulation, where anything can happen – to allow or suggest to the reader, who is mirrored in the work, the activation of an exchange of role and experience, to explore what happens outside and inside himself. The book features the photographic collaboration of Paolo Mussat Sartor.

The scientific community has begun to question one of the pillars of modern thought: Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. If it is a slow, continuous process whereby one species gradually changes to a new one, as Darwin believed, why are there missing links in the fossil record? Based on their detailed research, two eminent palaeontologists, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould concluded that a species, once evolved, rarely undergoes change and that the evolution of a new species occurs only periodically, in relatively rapid bursts. Strutture del tempo by Niles Eldredge (the article he wrote with S. J. Gould in 1976 is appended) is the most complete and compelling exposition of what has been called the 'theory of punctuated equilibria', known in Italy only through a few elementary and popular essays.
Niles Eldredge was born in Brooklyn in 1943, is a paleontologist and curator of the invertebrate collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Together with Stephen J. Gould he developed the theory of punctuated equilibria, one of the most original in contemporary Darwinism. His most recent books include Strutture del tempo (Hopefulmonster, 1991) and l canarino del minatore (Sperling & Kupfer, 1994). For Einaudi he published Ripensare Darwin. Il dibattito alla Tavola Alta dell'evoluzione ("Biblioteca Einaudi", 1999), La vita in bilico ("Einaudi Tascabili", 2000) and Perché lo facciamo ("Gli struzzi", 2005).

A journey – via Venice, Lugano, Berlin, Aix en Provence, New York and Venice again – into Carpaccio’s fragmented body of work. A journey through stories, myths, methods and ideas; an adventurous and fervent journey. A journey into Carpaccio’s work that is part of a cycle on painting (M. Serres has written about other painters: Poussin, Vermeer, Latour, Turner, Bonnard, and on sculpture), which in turn is part of a cycle on art, in an even larger cycle on the form of mental production. These are the patient stages of a long journey undertaken more than twenty years ago. All of Serres’s philosophy is presented in the form of a journey, a journey full of the passions and tribulations of Hermes/Mercury, god of crossroads. Hermes passes everywhere in space and time, between the formal and physical sciences, from their birth in antiquity to their current state; he crosses the critical pass that separates and unites the “hard” sciences and the humanities; sciences, stories and myths; sciences, art and the history of religions. Each stage corresponds to a book or part of a book, in the cycle entitled Hermes e altrove (Hermes and elsewhere). As the movement proceeds, the picture becomes more coherent. A global image emerges as an open promise. Is it perhaps that of a modern-day philosophy?