Vesper is a multidisciplinary biannual scientific journal published by the Department of Architecture and Arts at the L'Università Iuav di Venezia. It looks at the relationships between forms and processes of thought and of design and although it's fair to call this an academic examination of the arcane, it's also a project that will attract anyone with a curious mind.
Vesper hosts a wide spectrum of narratives, writing and stylistic differences, ‘privileging the visual intelligence of design, of graphic expression, of images and contaminations between different languages.’ The journal is conceived as a series of thematic issues, each one divided into sections to offer diverse perspectives and to search out reverberations between ideas and reality change, connections between tangible facts and their potentials, transformative prospects and collective perception.
About Vesper #11 from the publisher:
The eleventh issue of Vesper, entitled Miserabilia, aims to focus on spaces and spectres of misery in imagination and reality. Two assumptions underlie it: the removal of the space of existence of misery in the concrete and immaterial context of the West in favour of 'measurable conditions of poverty', and the presence of buildings in cities as evidence of a past in which poverty was a matter of governance and planning.
Misery in Western societies is today unthinkable and unrepresentable, unspeakable and invisible, exiled to a historical, geographical, cultural elsewhere. Yet, in the past, misery took majestic forms in Italy, for instance, from the Great Schools of Venice to the almshouses for the poor. Monuments gave way to the anonymous architecture of service centres or temporary structures responding to emergency situations. If the monumentality of misery expressed an aesthetics, the architecture of poverty rejects it in the name of functionality: today the space of misery is emptied of phenomenology, evidence, quality, quantity, scale, extension, discourse.
Misery is therefore a question of space and spatiality, in the reality and in the collective consciousness. Where misery is not represented or representable, it does not disappear at all: in anonymity it rather ends up being internalised, expressed at the most in blaming and indebtedness, even in the criminalization of poverty, which is counterbalanced by the moral immiseration of affluent neighbourhoods, increasingly isolated and closed to the rest of the city. The result is an urban space in a permanent state of crisis, where the spectre of impending poverty everywhere ends up legitimizing an art of governing emergency and precariousness. Only the boundless, discarded, forgotten space persists as an environment in which misery can settle, set up camp, recognise itself.
