Editorial
by Michela Arfiero




There are mornings when it seems to me that the day originates directly from the dreams of the previous night. Origins, for me, have always had something nebulous about them: wrapped in myth, they shift across a vast landscape of our knowledge. At times I feel them close, at others I chase them through ancient traces, through ruins, as something that precedes me and at the same time awaits me. Yet it is clear to me what does not fall within my perception of origins, and it is not the legitimacy that the past exerts over the continuity of the present. Not even modern thought has managed to fully dissolve this archaeology—not of knowledge, but of power—through which, by looking back and constantly turning to the so-called “roots,” dictators justify invasions, identitarian nationalists commit massacres, and certain populists claim to assert ownership over our origins.

I choose not to seek its meaning in dictionaries, but in the thought of others—in their words, in their portraits, in their gestures. Certain materials return—ceramics, for example—forms that recur in design, or places such as the island of Salina or the Botanical Garden of Padua, which trace narratives between collective and personal origins.

In these pages the presence of Goethe inevitably hovers, along with his intuitions. As an irregular botanist, he found in the union of drawing and writing, of thought and form, the traces of that famous archetypal plant: the original module from which all vegetal forms can be generated.

I wonder whether origins are connecting threads. I think of the Big Bang, which would have set the universe into motion as a singularity, something that has no “before.” We have no doubt that the evolution of the universe began 13 billion and 800 million years ago from a state of extreme density and temperature. And yet, we do not have definitive proof that it was truly a singularity. The appearance of infinities brings with it uncertainties: some theoretical models suggest that our universe is the result of preceding processes. We simply do not yet have the conceptual tools, within our notions of space and time, to understand them.

In Gabriel Orozco’s Mis manos son mi corazón, I find an image that approaches my chaotic idea of origins: two closed hands that, once opened, give shape to a heart. Hands that create, but that are also a vessel, a container positioned toward the other.

Matteo Trevisani writes about origins and genealogy, and in one of the novels of his trilogy he cites the mitochondrial mother, the mother of all mothers—the “mitochondrial Eve,” a woman who lived between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago, from whom all bloodlines descend. For Simon J. Ortiz, a poet of the Acoma Pueblo Nation, telling the stories of one’s origins is an act of survival. I take a walk as if it were a ceremony to connect myself with the origins of a place, of a landscape. To remind myself that I, the maple tree, and the stars share, in the end, the same origin.


• Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life. Film, 2011.
• Alain Schnapp, The Conquest of the Past: At the Origins of Archaeology. Johan & Levi, Milan 2025.
• Johann Wolfgang Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants and Other Writings on the Natural Sciences. Guanda, Milan 1999.
• “The Universe Before the Big Bang?” Scientific American (Italian edition: Le Scienze), no. 622, February 2020. Article by Martin Bojowald and Abhay Ashtekar on loop quantum gravity: introduces the idea that the Big Bang is not a singularity but a transition from a preceding universe.
• Gabriel Orozco, Mis manos son mi corazón, 1991.
• Matteo Trevisani, Libro dei fulmini. Edizioni di Atlantide, Rome 2017. Libro del Sole. Edizioni di Atlantide, Rome 2019. Libro del sangue. Edizioni di Atlantide, Rome 2021.
• Simon J. Ortiz, The People Shall Continue. Illustrations by Sharol Graves. Children’s Book Press, San Francisco, CA 1977.
• Alan Sorrenti, “Figli delle stelle,” 1977.