When Words Fail

Orientations towards and tools for visual and textual meaning–through art and design–in the contemporary blur.

The visual and textual contributions in this volume take shape from a series of questions that place at the center of reflection the role of artistic and design practices in the production of knowledge. What tools can we adopt when words are no longer sufficient to describe what surrounds us? How can we construct new languages and new imaginaries capable of giving form to experience, uncertainty, and the complexity of our present? What does it mean today to produce knowledge through practice, at a historical moment when the boundaries between discipline and action, between theory and project, between art and life are becoming increasingly blurred? How do artists and designers use the tools of their practices to question reality, deconstruct dominant narratives, and propose alternative perspectives?

The volume gathers and weaves together the works and writings of more than one hundred artists, designers, scholars, and thinkers who, through different approaches, languages, and sensibilities, explore the possibility of generating knowledge through image, gesture, form, and action. The aim is to shed light on how visual practices can not only represent the world but also have an impact on it, activating processes of situated, critical, and transformative knowledge.

Introduced and edited by Giulia Cordin, with contributions by Nida Abdullah, Matteo Antoniazzi, Noemi Biasetton, Nitzan Cohen, Silvio Lorusso, Simone C Niquille, Kseniia Obukhova and Francesca Verga.