Editorial
by Michela Arfiero




These past months I’ve lived in a white landscape, a territory seemingly without edges, where I couldn’t find a vanishing point to define the space around me. In the reflected light of the snow, even the line of the horizon eluded me. This period, spent among the various shades of white, was nonetheless marked by a precise boundary: the freezing level. A line to be crossed. Even now, I struggle to set the boundaries of space: the tall trees shed their leaves, and what I see is a dense visual tangle, crossed by sounds. I grew up in the provinces, and being “on the margins” sounded like a clearly defined geographic and social position, even if unstable. “Two worlds—and I come from the other one. The threshold here is not between world and world, nor between soul and body, it is the living cut…” Reality is a nothing but a surface, and everything true happens elsewhere—in the words of writer Cristina Campo, I find a way of inhabiting the margins: those of the visible, and those of experience.

Twenty-four by thirty-three centimeters and four millimeters define the margins of a page of selvàtico. In this second issue of the magazine, thoughts, stories, words, visions, and photographs unfold around the idea of margins—not so much as social critique, but more as metaphor—tracing both physical and poetic territories: the boundaries between self and world, between life and death, between silence and speech, between form and matter. The contributions do not treat margins solely as perceptual limits; rather, they expand and reinterpret the concept. They counter the idea of margins as peripheral—therefore secondary and dependent—with a perspective capable of seeing across long distances, along multiple trajectories, through reflection or rebound, and certainly not directed only toward some hypothetical center. A bit like the Kepler space telescope which, launched into orbit in 2009, led to the discovery of thousands of exoplanets and multiple planetary systems, or the TRAPPIST telescope which, in 2017, identified a star system similar to our own, located about forty light-years from Earth. But then there is also the essential and ever-present thought: that every species depends on its environment, and if that environment disappears, so does the species. And that there are margins we must draw, defend, and protect: the habitats of wild animals, those of Indigenous populations, everything that escapes and resists gentrification.

If I need to get rid of them, I try to bring them back—physically and mentally—I project myself into a Corridor by Bruce Nauman: narrow passageways one must walk through, forcing an awareness of the body, pushing it to the edge of comfort.
Nauman doesn’t just represent margins: he builds them, activates them, and turns them into a subject. In Columbus (2017) by Kogonada, too, space, lines, and the edges of modernist architecture in the Indiana city become protagonists, resonating with the characters’ emotional states and inner trajectories; reflecting on the relationship between built environment and state of mind. And if marginal thinking starts to feel too closed in again, I try to place myself in a wild space—or I imagine myself sitting in front of a large painting by Robert Ryman, or getting lost in an installation like Dream House, where continuously shifting sound waves blend and blur me with reflections of pink neon light. Perhaps margins could be osmotic edges: if, as Eduardo Kohn writes, we are energetically and physiologically dependent on other living beings, then our thinking is just as intertwined—with birches, dogs, dolphins, or fungi—as our metabolism is with the matter we take in for nourishment.
Margins.

  • Donna Haraway,  Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016.
  • Cristina Campo, Diario bizantino in La tigre assenza. Adelphi, Milano 1991.
  •  Cristina Campo, L’opera in frammenti. Adelphi, Milano 1987.
  • NASA – Kepler Space Telescope, a mission launched in 2009 for the discovery of exoplanets using the transit method.
  • TRAPPIST-1, a planetary system discovered in 2017 via the TRAPPIST telescope (and later observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope).
  • Bruce Nauman, Corridors, installation works from 1969–1970.
  • Kogonada, Columbus. Film, 2017.
  • La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Jung Hee Choi, Dream House, installation ongoing since 1993. Tribeca, New York. www.melafoundation.org
  • Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.