The Counterpower of Piracy: Malta, the Mediterranean, and the Politics of the Sea by Sofia Baldi Pighi
The sea surrounding the Maltese archipelago has long been both a route of danger and a corridor of opportunity. Piracy endured for almost three hundred years, enriching Malta while igniting countless diplomatic tensions. At its peak, Maltese corsairing employed around 4,000 people and operated a fle
The Art of Confusion: How Markets Transformed Exclusion into Value
For decades, the art world has thrived on a grand misunderstanding: mistaking incomprehensibility for depth. All it takes is an opaque language, a curatorial text heavy with empty words, and what would otherwise be trivial suddenly gains the weight of importance. Contemporary art has turned confusio
The Digital Frontier of a New Artistic Underground
Every collapse hides a possibility. The fall of the contemporary art market (especially its upper tier) is not the end of art, but the exhaustion of a system that has mistaken visibility for meaning. What follows is not silence, but a slow reconfiguration, a search for new forms of expression capabl
Ghosts, Holograms, and AI: Emi Kusano’s EGO in the Shell
What separates being from system is becoming almost imperceptible. Inspired by the visionary Ghost in the Shell, Emi Kusano’s first solo show in New York examines this uncertainty in the age of AI. In EGO in the Shell, she explores how algorithms capture, filter, and refract us, rendering every ge
The Collapse of the Contemporary Art Market: When Value Loses Its Narrative
For years, a fissure could be felt beneath the polished surface of the contemporary art market, an invisible yet growing crack made of excess, saturation, and fatigue. Today, that crack has become a fracture. Auctions are slowing, sales are falling, galleries are closing or even converting into non-
Cinema After Cinema, The Last Film We Will Ever Make: Where creation becomes simulation and authorship evolves into new forms of possibility
Cinema has always been a paradox, suspended between industry and intimacy. It is a machinery of colossal scale, yet capable of delivering the smallest tremor of human vulnerability. What we now confront, however, is not simply another technological shift within its history, sound, color, digital edi
Sandra Mujinga, Skin to Skin at Stedelijk Museum, an Interview by Matteo Giovanelli
On September 11th, the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, NL) opened Skin to Skin, the new solo show by Sandra Mujinga, a portal to a unique parallel world. Conceived as a void, the exhibition room presents itself as a green space, translating the concept of the digital green screen into physical reality.
Bytes, Data, Backups, Uploads, Reviews, Photographs: The Role of Documentation and Preservation in Contemporary Art
We might say, exaggerating just a little and using this as a provocation to open the article, that all contemporary art is, ultimately, documentation. This is not a mere semantic shift but an observation rooted in the very nature of artistic languages, which arise and evolve with a specific function
The Power of Cute: Review of the 13th Berlin Biennale by Sofia Baldi Pighi
From rhetoric to whisper, the 13th Berlin Biennale adopts a deliberate posture of political engagement. It looks sideways, renounces slogans and the monumentality of frontal denunciation, and instead prefers a critical discourse whispered in the ear. This edition investigates fugitivity, understood
From Relational Aesthetics to Aesthetic Relations: On the Value of Interaction in Contemporary Art
When Nicolas Bourriaud published his seminal text Relational Aesthetics in 1998, his thesis emerged as a necessary departure from the object-based and self-referential forms of 1980s art. The artwork was no longer conceived as a closed entity, but as a generative device for human relationships, capa
