Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • A memory of speech

    A memory of speech

    We speak, and sometimes we are heard. An impression remains in the memory of our auditors, and although it is not our speech, we and they treat it as such. Eventually, that recollection is occulted or extinguished, in both speaker and auditor, and for the most part, no trace remains of the utterance. This is… Read more

  • The truths between instants

    The truths between instants

    ‘The camera cannot lie’ is a phrase that has had currency since the last years of the nineteenth century, although it may well struggle to retain any utility in our present era of  the digitally constructed image. It was always founded on a stark misunderstanding of visual experience. The camera, rather, can never speak truthfully,… Read more

  • The city’s invisible family photographs

    The city’s invisible family photographs

    The Galleria d’Arte Moderna Sant’Anna is housed in what was once a Franciscan friary. I can’t remember entering it, or how it presents itself to the street; I can simply recall being in it, and how it looks inwards, from all sides, onto its cloistered central courtyard. Where once a lush and intensively cultivated garden… Read more

  • The book closed, the world continues

    The book closed, the world continues

    The best speculative fiction, particularly of the secondary-world variety, immerses its readers in its setting, often in initially quite baffling ways, and lets them work out the details of its imagined cultural and social milieu as they go. Sadly Flamesong doesn’t do this, but takes very slim pretexts from the earliest pages to indulge in… Read more

  • The building which commemorates itself

    The building which commemorates itself

    We were advised by our Airbnb host that the Chiesa del Gesù is one of Palermo’s most beautiful baroque churches from the outside, but he warned us against the interior. In a city where so much has been destroyed and rebuilt, I imagined that we might see something unsympathetically or ineptly restored, but I think… Read more

  • Moments of erasure

    Moments of erasure

    Facing across a busy Palermo street narrow enough to deny its facade any commanding sightlines, the Palazzo Riso-Belmonte is also situated in a city endowed with an embarrassment of Baroque riches. Despite the twin catastrophes of the WWII Allied bombing campaign, and the mafia construction scams of the ‘Sack of Palermo’ from the 1950s to… Read more