The outsiders we didn’t see coming and who are taking over the world

What you are about to read is the editorial by the director of Rivista Studio Valentina Ardia, published in the new issue Don’t call it a province. If you want to purchase a copy, go here, to our online store.

The future is not being written in the anesthetized centers of the world as we know it. It happens obliquely, in that off-screen space that for decades we believed to be motionless, confined to the rank of the periphery of history or culture. The outsiders we did not see coming are instead here, demonstrating that the margin has ceased to be a place of exclusion or pure nostalgic pastism to become the true center of the global imagination. Mapping this periphery is not an exercise in provincialism, but the only way to understand the complexity of the present. It is the decoding of an unprecedented cultural redemption that composes, tile by tile, the mosaic of the periphery as the new center of the contemporary.

“I have always thought of the province as a place par excellence from which one can look at the world, perhaps precisely because the boundaries are more blurred and reality presents itself less codified than in large metropolises.” In this reflection by Luigi Ghirri, the methodological manifesto of the issue you have in your hands is condensed. What remains outside the frame, the unseen, is as important as what we show. If the limit, as philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy wrote, is not a line that separates but the space in which identities meet while maintaining their singularity, then the periphery becomes the place where the unexpected organizes itself before becoming global’s. It is the dimension of “staying” explored by anthropologist Vito Teti in his essay The Sense of Places: those who remain in marginal territories perform a political and cultural act, capable of rethinking our roots. But it is a dynamic staying, which claims the right to escape and connect. A drive that reflects in the analysis that Kit Mackintosh has written for Rivista Studio. A critic and pioneer of invisible musical geographies, Mackintosh has traversed the places and stories of the underground before their debut in global pop, deriving a single, sharp certainty: the underground will never end.

Bringing the gaze closer to us, this urgency measures itself against specific territories and geographies. This is emphasized by writer Giulia Scomazzon when she explains how necessary it is to stop treating the province as an aesthetic of destruction with an inescapable fate. Her investigation dialogues (without fear of confrontation) with the horizon evoked by director Francesco Sossai in his Plain City, where the province manifests itself through a precise poetics of space: secondary roads, fogs that erase the boundaries of the land, peripheral walls, and isolated farmhouses. In this rarefaction, the margin ceases to be isolation and becomes a space of choice, a stronghold where reality resists banalization. This new atlas of proximity finds a perfect visual counterpart in the gaze of two artists who have given the theme of the issue a profound social value: Alessio Bolzoni illustrates the eight central stories through a photographic portfolio that shifts his investigation of the body into a visual series made of suspended places, people, liminal spaces, capable of breaking the usual clichés. Aitor Laspiur instead signs a fashion story immersed among the architectures and contrasts of the Basque province, exploring the silent and anthropological dialogue between the human being and the surrounding space. Both remind us that the province has ceased to be the anteroom of the mainstream: it is, finally, the place from which the present is rewritten.