Art and politics are fields that are strongly connected, they attract and repel each other, draw continuity, and cause ruptures. The essays collected in this volume are subject to the tension between these two forces. They are reflections on the contemporary condition, on the artistic practice, on the limits and potential of the museum: each text is located in time and space and reflects the intellectual path of Manuel Borja-Villel, head of important museum institutions, and some of his curatorial concerns, as responsible for numerous exhibitions and public events over the last thirty years. A supporter of hybridization and sharing of knowledge, in front of the inaccessible compartmentalization of knowledge, this book is committed to interdisciplinary research and the interrelation of multiple fields. And it is, above all, an invitation to reflect on art, its organizations, and its actors.

Manuel Borja-Villel, was born in Burriana (Spain) in 1957. He has been director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, director of the Museu d'Art Contemporani in Barcelona, and previously of the Fondació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. He holds a BA in Art History from the University of Valencia, Spain, and a PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Curator of XXXV Bienal de São Paulo, he currently lives in Madrid.

Something’s happened, an event shrouded in mystery: around midnight, a night like any other night, all Palestinians have disappeared, vanished into thin air. Nobody knows where drivers, farm labourer, doctors, nurses, elderly and young people have gone. What if there were no more Palestinians? What could happen to the Israelis? What could happen in everyone’s life if there was no more the enemy, the scapegoat, the alibi? The Palestinian writer Ibtisam Azem presents one of the most groundbreaking novels of the Arab literary scene.

Ibtisam Azem, a Palestinian journalist and writer, has published two novels in Arabic: Sariq al-Nawm (The Sleeping Thief, 2011) and Sifr al-Ikhtifaa (The Book of Disappearance, 2014), both for Dar al-Jamal (Beirut, Baghdad and Freiberg am Neckar). The Book of Disappearance finally arrives in the Italian version. Born and raised in Taybeh, in the north of Jaffa, Ibtisam Azem has studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later at the University of Freiburg in Germany. She works as a journalist in New York for the Arabic newspaper “al-Araby al-Jadeed” and as co-editor in chief of the “ezine Jadaliyya”.

The first album by the WADI ensemble, born of the collaboration and the support of Fondazione Merz, Almendra Music, and hopefulmonster editore.

The Leiðarvísir musical project (in Icelandic “itinerary, guide”) is the response of a world which does not surrender to the inevitability of the climate and civilization catastrophe, among pandemics and increasing social precariousness. To the spirit of a widespread alarm Leiðarvísir opposes a vision which is ancient and very contemporary at the same time, aimed at remapping the paths of sensitivity and imagination.

Through the compositions, improvisations and interpretations of the Wadi musicians, the original sound story of journeys which have really happened in the past, a remote and close one, unravels: the astonishment of the Great North by a geographer of the 4th century B.C., the impossible escape to the Middle East in 1939 of two European female writers and photographers, the itinerary of a monk in the 12th century from the heart of Iceland to the Holy Land, the explorations of the probes sent by today’s humans beyond the boundaries of the solar system.

A mystery novel loved in Algeria and already praised by French critics finally arrives in Italian. On a “national night”, men and boys move circumspectly, like shadows in search of salvation, certain, however, that they cannot survive a tragic destiny, made up of gunshots, executions, murderers. It is the night that Algeria has lived through all the nineties, overwhelmed by one of the bloodiest of civil wars. In an Algiers loved and described in great detail, Adlène Meddi breathes life into the youngsters, the alter egos of his generation, the protagonists of 1994, the Algerian writer’s latest detective story.

Adlène Meddi, born in 1975 in El Harrach, a suburb east of Algiers, is a French-speaking Algerian journalist, reporter and writer. He studied journalism and media sociology at the University of Algiers and EHESS in Marseille. Since 2009 he has been editor-in-chief of the weekly El Watan. He also collaborates with Le Point magazine and the Middle East Eye website. In 2002 he published his first thriller, Le casse tête turc with Barzakh. In 2008 he released La prière du maure, also through Barkakh, while in 2016 together with Mélanie Matarese he wrote Jours tranquilles à Alger, published by Riveneuve. His third polar, 1994, released in the original language in 2017 again through Barzakh, won the Transfuge Prize 2018 as best French-language thriller.

There is no more time: democracy must make an effort of imagination and must reinvent itself if it seeks to respond to the challenges and changes of recent years. John Keane, one of the most innovative political scientists on representative democracy and its global evolution, is convinced of this. The author of numerous texts of international importance, John Keane proposes a radically new interpretation of the destiny of democracy in the twenty-first century. And he has coined a new definition to deal with: monitory democracy.

John Keane, born in Australia in 1949, lives in Sydney. He is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Sydney and at the Research Centre for Social Sciences in Berlin (WZB). Keane is also a member of the Royal Society of Arts, founder of the Research Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD), external adviser to the United Nations and member of the American Institutions of Democracy Commission. His texts include: The Life and Death of Democracy, Global Civil Society?, Vaclav Havel: a political tragedy in Six Acts, the award-winning Tom Paine: a political life e Media and Democracy, which has been translated into more than twenty languages. Potere e Umiltà. Il futuro della monitory democracy is in its first Italian edition.

Push the Limits is the volume that ties in with the group exhibition curated at the Fondazione Merz from the 7th of September 2020 to the 26the of February 2021.

The book is more than just a catalogue and illustrates an all-female art project. The curators, Claudia Gioia and Beatrice Merz, invited seventeen internationally renowned artists to take part in Push the Limits: Rosa Barba, Sophie Calle, Katharina Grosse, Shilpa Gupta, Mona Hatoum, Jenny Holzer, Emily Jacir, Bouchra Khalili, Barbara Kruger, Cinthia Marcelle, Shirin Neshat, Maria Papadimitriou, Pamela Rosenkranz, Chiharu Shiota, Fiona Tan, Carrie Mae Weems and Sue Williamson.

Page after page, the reader can immerse himself in the exhibition through the images and essays by the curators and Maura Reilly, Paul Mason and Manuel Borja-Villel, and into the search for a language capable of narrating the present.

In addition to providing further insight into the work on display and the current projects of the seventeen artists, Push the Limits also collects their photographs, drawings, film suggestions, excerpts from books and other suggestions.

A polyphony of signs and experiences whose imagination speaks to us of the ability to bring all those realities that are ‘beyond’ to the threshold of thought: a publishing ‘happening’ of culture and life.