Futebol and Myths of the Brazilian Way of Life

A review of Alex Bellos's Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life (Bloomsbury, London, 2002)

MIGRATIONS / MEDIATIONS. Promoting Transcultural Dialogue through Media, Arts and Culture

This special issue – stemmed from a three-year-research program funded by Università Cattolica that provided encounters, reaserch networks and opened perspectives and collaborations –1 starts from the assumption that migration is a historical and natural phenomenon, but its definition is political, linked to the time frame and socio-economic context, and influenced by the media, as the infrastructure that constitutes the world, in material and symbolic ways. Today, both social interaction and cultural reproduction pass through the media. Whether analog or digital, media contribute to the process of construction of reality by people, as well as to the formation of shared imaginaries and social representations. By suggesting to us what and how to think, old and new media – together with a multiplicity of institutions, subjects, sources, tools and communicative practices that coexist rather than replace each other – shape our common sense of the world2. Sometimes fueling fear of the other and legitimizing its criminalization, sometimes stimulating curiosity and empathy3 toward the other and the elsewhere

REIMAGINING NARRATIVES ON MIGRATION The Role of Media, Arts and Culture in Promoting Transcultural Dialogue

In the last decade, the representation strategies and discursive practices enacted by a wide range of state and non-state actors have been presenting irregular migrants crossing borders as an ‘emergency’ to be managed in terms of a wider social, cultural and political ‘crisis’. These media representations of migration and asylum seeking as a ‘crisis’ have outstripped the reality of the situation. In order to go beyond this depoliticised politics, that is based on detached forms of compassionate care and technocratic control, it is essential to enhance an alternative vision of solidarity that is capable of recognizing the other as a human being and unveiling the harsh oppressive conditions of the global and local structures of injustice. Thus, moving away from othering and alarmist, depoliticised representations of the others, the article calls for the need to challenge current narratives and discourses and to create and construct alternative one

Ambient Images

The digitization of the image has intensified the transformation of the relationship between humans and images. The proliferation of tools for the production of images and acceleration in their distribution has meant that a blasé attitude toward visual saturation, already prominent in the 20th century, has become more widespread. Writing in 1927, Siegfried Kracauer presciently spoke of a “blizzard of photographs.” In the first decades of the 21st century this grew into an environmental flood and the multiple streams along which people circulated images, challenged many of the traditional assumptions about the status and function of the image. Then came the pandemic. Suddenly, the relationship between the personal image and the public image was reconfigured. People hung out on platforms such as Instagram and Tik Tok with increased intensity and hunger. The platforms for virtual communication absorbed and at times aimed to compensate for the loss of events, meetings, face-to-face encounters and relationships. Confinement to the domestic sphere produced ever more mundane practices of co-present intimacy across platforms. For instance, while cross-generational practices of food photo sharing have long been a significant genre, photographs of home baking became an Instagram cliché, with “sourdough” becoming Google’s top food-related search phrase in 2020. The zoom boom soon became a new malaise—zoom fatigue. This adoption of virtual platforms was a profound incursion. It altered our sense of time and space as sense-making and social performance were increasingly aimed at and organised via camera and screen. Linear biographical narratives were cross-cut and spliced in novel ways. The image was less and less a document of an external reality, but more and more part of the new forms of mediated sociality. The diminution of physical engagements had an impact on how impressions were formed, what constituted the sensory triggers for memory, as well as shifting the markers for processes of understanding and decision-making. In this environment, images do not just multiply. Their increasing number also accentuates how they are stitched together to form new atmospheres, assemblages, iterations—or what we call the production of ambient images

Glimpses of cosmpolitanism in the hospitality of art

Publisher’s version is restricted access in accordance with the publisher’s policy.Cosmopolitanism has been used as a concept to open the horizons for being in the world. This article re-thinks the philosophical and political dimensions of cosmopolitanism by relating them to the new collaborative practices by artists and the debates on the end of multiculturalism. The concepts of agency and community will be grounded in a critical examination of the networking strategies and the practice of hospitality that have been cultivated by artistic collectives such as Stalker. The aim of this article is to ‘rescue’ the account of artistic practice from the extreme version of quasi-mystical universalism and dogmatic political activism. It also seeks to argue that the abstract principles of cosmopolitanism are in a dialogue with the multicultural practices of everyday life

Does philosophy contribute to an invasion complex? Sloterdijk the antagonist and the agonism of Mouffe

The political backlash against multiculturalism alongside the media portrayal of the global refugee crisis would suggest that the spaces for cultural difference have contracted and moved into a mode of transnational crisis management. This article addresses the moral panic over cultural difference by challenging some of the philosophical frameworks that have justified naturalized negative attitudes towards migrants and dismissed the viability of cosmopolitan perspectives. In particular, the author will critically evaluate the antagonistic perspective developed in Peter Sloterdijk’s writings and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonism. To grasp the complex and hybrid forms of cross-cultural exchanges, the author argues that a more robust vision of cosmopolitanism is necessary

Spatial aesthetics essays on art, place and the everyday

Document available consists of the preliminary pages.What is the place of art today? This book explores the new processes, contexts and relations through which contemporary art is produced. It traces the complex patterns of cultural exchange and the diverse forms of social interaction that inspire artists. At a time when the contradictions of globalization are becoming more visible and new local forms of attachment are being spliced with diverse influences, it is necessary to rethink the ways we connect with others. This process of connection is central to our understanding of art. Romantic and nationalist categories that emphasized either the supreme creative genius of the artist’s ego, or the unique distillation of cultural values, no longer serve as useful models for interpreting the meaning of art. The flows and reference points that shape the aesthetic and political power of art exceed the boundaries of an individual and national identity

Modernity, modernism and the contemporary

Titled - "Modernism and Contemporary Art", in the journal Theory, Culture & SocietyThe final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Theory, Culture & Society. Problematizing Global Knowledge, 23/2-3, 2006 by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © SAGE.At the beginning of the 20th century, artists responded to the changes in the modern city with a mix of awe and excitement. Modernity was ushered in by the power of new industrial technologies. Modernism, as the cultural representation of modernity, promised to break from traditions that restricted creativity and embrace the spirit of progress