Editorial
by Michela Arfiero




It’s hot, hotter and hotter. As if the movement of energy worked only through sudden flows. But heat is not exactly the same as hot weather, and it should not be measured only according to its intensity. Heat is also told through words, sensations, sounds, and images. For me, heat can be found in certain atmospheres: a combination of things that move, touch one another, and mix childhood memories, echoes, mental landscapes, and everyday gestures, without forgetting the climate emergency.

Heat. The word that sustains this fourth issue of selvàtico is perhaps the one that, more than all those we have explored so far (thirst, margins, origins), presents multiple faces. Or, better yet, the one that contains the most contradictions: dark or nostalgic, romantic or threatening, depending on what is being nourished the most. It reminds me of an ambivalent deity, a mixture of Baba Yaga, who, if she gives you fire, can warm you and save you, or, if she doesn’t like you, destroy and kill you, and Xiuhtecuhtli (Aztec god of fire, sometimes depicted with a butterfly), who brings light against the darkness of night and is associated with the cycle of time and vital heat, but who can also unleash the incandescent fury of flames and destruction if neglected. Heat does not have the same temperature for everyone. Energy must spontaneously transfer from a body at a higher temperature to a body at a lower temperature. In an overheated world, perhaps it is felt more strongly in the wind that carries us far away; in a cold world, it is the warmth of a house or a lit fire that becomes the symbol of what has been lost. I cannot help but think of Joseph Beuys’s legendary felt blanket, used together with animal fat by a Tatar tribe to raise his body temperature after he was found following the crash of his plane during a snowstorm in Crimea. Whether true or legendary, this story provides a key to interpreting the artist’s iconography, for whom “everything is in a state of change” and the resulting “chaos can have a therapeutic character.”

Heat appears as hand-to-hand combat, an illness, a flame, and the objects that sustain it. An island, the island. Containers for melting ice cream, ceramics, disorder, and the energy, or heat, that we create in our attempt to bring order. The people we interviewed shared their idea of heat with us. Jonathan Bazzi associates it with intermediate temperatures, those that do not condition us; for Alberto Fortis, it is “the first spark” of bodily recognition; for Marco Assaggia, it resides in affection; Alberto Alessi finds it in conductive copper and a passion for metals; Christian Holstad describes ceramics as an alchemy that transforms even the person who practices it; Federico Tosi sees volcanoes as generators of life rather than destruction; Birthh turns it into a form of resistance and community, between sweat and Mediterranean heat. As happens throughout our pages, the theme manifests itself through different languages. Francesca Balena Arista tells the story of the duo Formafantasma and Mount Etna’s lava as a design material; Matteo Trevisani explores the ritual of cooking and sacrifice in the myth of Prometheus; Alessandra Carnaroli imagines bodily sensors in a poetic flow about life and death; Sabrina Ciofi portrays the creative eroticism of Nik Gallo; Lorenza Pignatti dismantles the “immaterial” cloud, revealing its real overheating; Marta Galli tells the story of the correspondence between Lloyd and Chatto about the climate of gardens. Elena Braghieri’s photographic reportage transports us into the fumaroles of the volcano, while Alessio Pellicoro’s photographs document the scorched lands of the South.

The editorials Candelabri and Dieci oggetti bring together design objects connected to fire and the domestic dimension. Showing heat as a physical and psychological trace on bodies, landscapes, and objects. The short story August Heat by William Fryer Harvey closes the narrative, in which suffocating heat becomes an almost supernatural omen.

It’s the hottest day of the summer. You can do nothing, you can do something, or you can do the right thing. (Spike Lee)

• Kathleen Shields, An Essential Solitude: Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field, Revisited, SNAP Editions, New York, 2020.
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2006.
• Elizabeth Warner, Heroes, Monsters and Other Worlds from Russian Mythology, Schocken Books, New York, 1985.
• “Xiuhtecuhtli,” in Myth Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of Religion (entry on Mesoamerican mythology).
• Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, Prentice Hall / Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1995.
• Joseph Beuys, Filzwinkel (Felt Corner), 1969.
• Spike Lee (director), Do the Right Thing, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks / Universal Pictures, 1989.
• William Fryer Harvey, “August Heat” in Midnight House and Other Tales, J. M. Dent, London, 1910.