Material Plasticity

On the cover. Liane Lang, We’re All in This Together, 2012–19. Installation at Kunsthalle Tübingen (Germany). Courtesy © Liane Lang

If I think back to the years during which this book came into being, I see them less as a chronological unfolding than as a scattered material trajectory. Over the course of its making, this project traveled through six countries, seven apartments, five academic institutions, and more disciplinary traditions than I had initially imagined. It has taken shape in several languages—which is not irrelevant, if one is convinced, as I am, that the materiality of the idiom impresses and expresses the content of thought. It has passed through libraries and museums, certainly, but also through artists’ studios, workshops, laboratories, private collections, as well as trains, airplanes, and countless other spaces of movement. If this book maintains that thought is always shaped by the material conditions through which it moves, it should acknowledge that it emerged in exactly this way. Ultimately, to me this book is a condensed testimony of the plural, contingent, embodied ‘contact zones’ that I was lucky enough to momentarily inhabit in the past years, when I was both leading my research and following it, almost chasing a line of inquiry that kept unfolding nonlinearly ahead of me.

I owe the seminal idea of investigating plasticity to Emmanuel Alloa. During a conversation in the summer of 2021 he commented, almost in passing: “Given your interests, you should look into the concept of plasticity.” I may have taken his suggestion a bit too seriously, as I ended up working on the concept for the next five years—and I would like to thank him for this.

The early stages of this research unfolded between Turin, Berlin, and Paris. My deepest thanks go to Gaetano Chiurazzi and Claudia Blümle, who supervised my doctoral research and welcomed me, respectively, at the University of Turin and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Their departments offered two remarkably different intellectual environments, each leaving a lasting imprint on the way I learned to think, write, and orient my gaze. During those years I was also fortunate to spend some months at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. I thank Barbara Carnevali for hosting me there, where I gained access to many of the materials and experiences that became foundational for this project. Those years were also shaped by friendships and conversations that continually tested, challenged, and refined the earliest versions of the ideas developed here. I am grateful to Andrea Osti for thinking together about statues and their destruction, to Cinzia Orlando for the adventures across plaster galleries and inflatable artworks, to Luca Fabbris for sharing his enthusiasm and exciting discoveries. Thanks to Lorenzo Gineprini, Leonardo Graciotti, Julia Modes, Pietro Pasquinucci, and Babette Werner for thinking alongside me in libraries and offices.

After completing my doctorate, this project continued to evolve in parallel with other research projects that gradually redirected it in ways I could not have anticipated. In Vilnius, where I joined the research center PAScapes for a few months, I encountered new questions that broadened the philosophical horizon of the book. I am grateful to Kristupas Sabolius, as well as to Vaiva Daraškevičiūtė, Mintautas Gutauskas, and Audronė Žukauskaitė for the stimulating exchanges on plastics and plasticity. My warmest thanks also go to Anda Pleniceanu, whose friendship, intellectual sensitivity, and shared curiosity have accompanied me from that first meeting in Vilnius through many conversations stretching between Valencia and Barcelona, Turin and Venice.

The final stages of the book took place in Switzerland, at the University of St. Gallen, where working within the Environmental Humanities profoundly transformed the questions I was asking and my perspective on them. I am deeply grateful to Federico Luisetti for his trust, guidance, and intellectual generosity. My thanks also go to my friends and colleagues in the Unruly Natures group—Rony Emmenegger, Flurina Gradin, Emiliano Guaraldo, and Christoph Miler. I also warmly thank Anna Bloom-Christen, Marco Menicacci, and Leire Urricelqui. Thank you for going after amphibious critters together, and for sharing so many insights and methods along the way. Special thanks to Emiliano for what became an almost daily conversation, full of ideas that rarely remained just ideas for long.

Academic conferences accompanied this project as places where ideas and intuitions were transformed through encounter. I presented parts of this research in many cities—such as Bochum, Amsterdam, and Trento—and I am grateful to everyone who invited me, listened attentively, and challenged my arguments with generous criticism. Two occasions, however, deserve particular mention. I warmly thank Patricia Ribault for inviting me to the Brain Roads symposium in Berlin, where conversations about neuroscience, philosophy, and art history unfolded alongside unforgettable experiences—including witnessing awake brain surgery (and almost fainting) and participating in an extraordinary nocturnal visit to the Bode Museum led by Horst Bredekamp. Just as important was the workshop Storied [Art] Matter gathered by Ursula Ströbele and Kaja Ninnis in Ingolstadt. In a period marked by constant geographical and disciplinary movement, that meeting gave me the rare feeling of encountering an intellectual community with whom many of the questions pursued in this book were already shared. I am grateful to the organizers and to all the other speakers and participants whose conversations accompanied that experience, and in particular to Buket Altinoba, Yorick Josua Berta, Marjolijn Bol, Olga Smith, Babette Werner.

Editing a journal issue on plasticity and aesthetics for Philosophy Kitchen became another decisive occasion for the encounters that shaped this book. I thank the director Giovanni Leghissa for embracing the project from the outset, and Alberto Giustiniano and Benoît Monginot for their invaluable collaboration over the years it took to bring it to completion. Editing the volume placed me in conversation with many scholars whose work has profoundly enriched my own understanding of plasticity. I am grateful to all the contributors, and especially to Horst Bredekamp, Stefania Caliandro, Pietro Conte, Ranjan Ghosh, Nidesh Lawtoo, Catherine Malabou, Kristupas Sabolius, Ursula Ströbele, and Salvatore Tedesco.

Many other scholars accompanied this project at different moments, often with insights that redirected an argument or opened an unexpected path of inquiry: my sincere thanks to Marcello Barison, Amanda Boetzkes, Andrija Filipović, James Martell.