IL FANTASMA DI PEPPER
Edoardo Lazzari
Il Fantasma di Pepper draws on the nineteenth-century optical device invented by John Henry Pepper. Pepper’s Ghost, the stage mechanism capable of rendering visible what is not physically present, becomes a curatorial lens through which to question the conditions of appearance and the regimes of visibility that shape presence in the contemporary performing arts.
The book stems from the experience of the eponymous festival curated by Edoardo Lazzari, extending its effects without assuming a documentary form. It emerges as a space for further investigation and creation, where practices and encounters resurface in a heterogeneous assemblage of contributions—essays, diaries, exchanges, notes, conversations—that do not coalesce into a single format but instead generate a field of resonances in which gesture and trace, body and memory, remain in tension.
[…] presence is no longer a guaranteed fact; it is an exposed, precarious, negotiated process. In this sense, every performance has a ghostly structure: it only exists for the time of the performance and survives as a trace, an imperfect memory, an echo. But it is not only that which happened that survives: it is also that which did not find a form, was left hanging, could have produced a different outcome. So the stage becomes the place where time has no closure, but it continues to put pressure on the present in the shape of interrupted possibilities.
Edoardo Lazzari
By entangling artistic contributions with critical reflections, the book constructs a constellation of voices that puts curatorship to the test as a relational practice. A conversation is placed at the end as a reflective coda on the state of curatorship in the performing arts—its material conditions, temporalities, responsibilities, and fragilities—offering a provisional and situated stocktaking that does not conclude the book but propagates its movement.
Contributors: Diana Anselmo, Irene Calderoni, Sandra Cane, Chiara Cecconello, Giada Cipollone, Piersandra Di Matteo, Veza Fernandez, Jacopo Giacomoni, Gaia Ginevra Giorgi, Renato Grieco, Tomasz Kireńczuk, Lucia Kagramanyan, Edoardo Lazzari, Anna Mülter, Domenico Napolitano, Annalisa Sacchi.
14x20 cm
336 pgs (ENG–IT)
First edition
700 copies
IL FANTASMA DI PEPPER
Edoardo Lazzari
Il Fantasma di Pepper draws on the nineteenth-century optical device invented by John Henry Pepper. Pepper’s Ghost, the stage mechanism capable of rendering visible what is not physically present, becomes a curatorial lens through which to question the conditions of appearance and the regimes of visibility that shape presence in the contemporary performing arts.
The book stems from the experience of the eponymous festival curated by Edoardo Lazzari, extending its effects without assuming a documentary form. It emerges as a space for further investigation and creation, where practices and encounters resurface in a heterogeneous assemblage of contributions—essays, diaries, exchanges, notes, conversations—that do not coalesce into a single format but instead generate a field of resonances in which gesture and trace, body and memory, remain in tension.
[…] presence is no longer a guaranteed fact; it is an exposed, precarious, negotiated process. In this sense, every performance has a ghostly structure: it only exists for the time of the performance and survives as a trace, an imperfect memory, an echo. But it is not only that which happened that survives: it is also that which did not find a form, was left hanging, could have produced a different outcome. So the stage becomes the place where time has no closure, but it continues to put pressure on the present in the shape of interrupted possibilities.
Edoardo Lazzari
By entangling artistic contributions with critical reflections, the book constructs a constellation of voices that puts curatorship to the test as a relational practice. A conversation is placed at the end as a reflective coda on the state of curatorship in the performing arts—its material conditions, temporalities, responsibilities, and fragilities—offering a provisional and situated stocktaking that does not conclude the book but propagates its movement.
Contributors: Diana Anselmo, Irene Calderoni, Sandra Cane, Chiara Cecconello, Giada Cipollone, Piersandra Di Matteo, Veza Fernandez, Jacopo Giacomoni, Gaia Ginevra Giorgi, Renato Grieco, Tomasz Kireńczuk, Lucia Kagramanyan, Edoardo Lazzari, Anna Mülter, Domenico Napolitano, Annalisa Sacchi.
14x20 cm
336 pgs (ENG–IT)
First edition
700 copies