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 14, from the publisher:
Fifty years ago, Michel Foucault, in La volonté de savoir (1976), described how the mechanisms of the examination of conscience belonging to the pastoral tradition of the 17th century progressively extended to all areas of society, marking the threshold of a biopolitical modernity. Here, the ‘will to knowledge’ is not the subject’s drive for research, but the injunction to bring into the field of knowledge-power those borderline domains of life that had been previously excluded from it: death, birth, sexuality. By the mid-Seventies it was already clear that power was no longer a matter of limitation and denial, but of injunction and stimulation of life. Thus, a few years after Foucault’s work, we encounter another text on the inexhaustible drive towards knowledge, its infinite resources of seduction, its lethal traps. With The Name of the Rose (1980), Umberto Eco constructs a thriller whose origin lies in the will to knowledge, with a book at its centre and, surrounding it, the desire of the aspiring initiates in opposition to the strenuous defence mounted by the custodians of tradition; for the reader, meanwhile, a comparable journey unfolds through the multi-layered plot of coded quotations, in one of the greatest examples of a dialogic textual machine, as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it. Eco’s novel, structured around the space of a library, becomes – like the ephemeral Strada Novissima, conceived by Paolo Portoghesi in 1980 for the Corderie dell’Arsenale in Venice – a bastion of postmodernity. The design of the architecture that preserves books and documents is, whether pursuing the real or the fantastic, whether through new foundations or the revision of the existing, an exercise in the relationship between bodies in motion through space, objects, and written discourses that set minds in motion: a challenge, therefore, that seeks a balance between the calculated weight of paper and the elevation of thought. Again – and above all – libraries are places of the imagination that produce other images, propose new paths; precisely because they are real, they reveal even more evident connections between tangible things and the images of the world. Books, like characters in a story, wait to be animated, consulted, forgotten, only to be rediscovered, to become the subject of discussion between acquaintances or strangers. Between the disturbing and the poetic, the monumental and the fragile, the ephemeral and the eternal, the will to knowledge challenges and mocks us.
Authors: Sara Marini, Angela Mengoni (Editorial); Umberto Eco (Quote); Emanuele Arielli (Ring); Thanasis Lagios (Ring); Luca Merlini (Extra); Federico Squarcini (Essays); Adalberto Fernandes (Essays); Antonello Marotta (Essays); Matteo Trentini (Essays); Alessandra Gabriele (Tutorial); Guido Mario Morpurgo (Projects); Giulia Cordin, Eva Leitolf (Projects); Filippo Lorenzo Balma (Tales); Redazione Vesper (Tales); Corrado Di Domenico (Journeys); Nicoletta Grillo, Hilde Van Gelder, Joeri Verbesselt (Journeys); Alice Covatta (Journeys); Fosco Lucarelli (Archives); Miriam Pistocchi (Archives); Mingru Han (Archives); Adekunle Adeyemo (Archives); Riccardo Segradin (Archives); Andrea Gritti (Fundamentals); Luca Zecchin (Fundamentals); Niloofar Amini (Fundamentals); Anna Ghiraldini (Fundamentals); Alberto Grassetti (Fundamentals); Camila Mancilla (Fundamentals); Miriam Rejas Del Pino (Fundamentals); Alessandro Canevari, Francesca Paoli (Fundamentals).
