Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Connected food

    Connected food

    The first time we brought Spawn to Edinburgh to callously abandon her tearful little face in a soulless new-build apartment block, we were directed by a recommendation in our hotel to a nearby ‘Italian’ restaurant. We ate there, possibly twice, and we ate there again when we came to visit, when we came to collect Read more

  • Downtempo crepuscular negotiations

    Downtempo crepuscular negotiations

    I don’t know who the DJ Fontana is who remixed this album, but it’s presumably not Elvis Presley’s drummer, who died last year at the age of 87. There is some minor overlap in track names between this record and the first Black Gold 360 release, but I couldn’t tell you how much it sounds Read more

  • Time travelling curatorial aesthetics

    Time travelling curatorial aesthetics

    The visible surface of a museum, which is to say its collections as they are displayed, tells you what sort of institution it is. Its description of itself, on the other hand, and the way in which it verbally interprets its collections, tell you what sort of institution it thinks it is. The Galleria Regionale Read more

  • A fractured continuum

    A fractured continuum

    Photographs, particularly digital or polaroid photographs (remember those?), are both immediate and mediated, both portals and barriers. They are small physical reifications of memory, which both manifest and falsify the past, insisting that our recollections adopt precisely one physical position, and one instant, out of the infinitely many that we occupied during any given experience, Read more

  • Traversing epistemologies

    Traversing epistemologies

    The Cattedrale di Palermo is a chimaera of architectural styles and periods. If someone had drawn it from their imagination, the well-informed viewer might accuse them of anachronism, but this building is certainly not ‘without time’; it’s more ‘panchronic’, or ‘polychronic’. The current structure begins with a Norman foundation in 1185, although some elements are Read more

  • Between mnemonic quanta

    Between mnemonic quanta

    The principal characters in Jaime Hernandez’s long-running Locas series are, I guess, the same age as him, which is to say around ten years older than me, but when I first encountered them I was roughly the age they are at the beginning of the narrative, and I have grown up with them. They are Read more