Art does not feel like abstracting from nature, but, at the same time, it is not content to record it. It engages in a contest, with matter, but remains, perhaps as never before, on its own plane. This way of doing things was recognised in the most elegant way by Tolomei, in the letter we […]

Translation and editing by Matthew Didemus and Filippo Scafi The respect and devotion, we may well say, for the “concept” of water is also manifested in the design of the vessels that are to contain it; especially if they are intended for ceremonial functions, such as political banquets, etc. They also insist, on the presumption […]

Translation and editing by Matthew Didemus and Filippo Scafi “I am convinced that Battisti’s notion of the real is what finally binds together much of this otherwise eclectic book. He uses the word in reference to the city of wood behind the classicizing stone facades, the breaches in decorum that distinguish the nonheroic sculpture of […]

translation and editing by Filippo Scafi and Matthew Didemus Chaosmotics presents the first English translation of excerpts from 1962 L’antirinascimento by Eugenio Battisti, a deep and multifarious study on the value of Renaissance in order to shed light on the relation between folkloristic belief and the development of humanistic rationalism. That is: a problem of […]

Original: Roger Caillois, «Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire », Minotaure, no. 7, 1935 Roger Caillois is a peculiar figure of the 20th century intellectual scene. Surpassed in fame by his friend and colleague Georges Bataille, with whom he founded the Collège de sociologie in Paris in 1937 and with whom he shared the experience of Acèphale, […]