Issue 130, “On the Addressee,” considers a secret and urgent call that artists, poets and thinkers inscribe in their most intimate and demanding works: a call addressed to unknowable or posthumous addressees. It departed from an homonym essay written in 1913 by the poet Osip Mandelstam, in which he asked “To whom does the poet speak?,” while considering a call another Russian poet addressed in 1828 to a posthumous reader. Centuries later we are celebrating that precarious bond shared between friends, artists and/or writers from different generations or across centuries, to expose what is sharable today and bring to life the crucial aspects of such experience. We are also paying tribute to our 1990 edition, issue 75, guest edited by the Italian publisher Ginevra Bompiani, titled “The Mood of Our Time.” We are considering in that idea of “mood” whether it has a temporary or lasting effect on ourselves and on present time: what is partaken in the possibility of sharing such lasting effects. We are asking for what is left at the core of our intimacy, that is owned by no one, and can be transmitted in a “sharing” without presuppositions or sovereign figures. Listening to earlier calls left by thinkers like Giorgio Agamben or Jean-Luc Nancy, in her volume, we are seeking to read what a “call” and an “addressee” are in our experiences in art and within the planet Earth, today. This because, as a philosopher once said, “our coming was expected on Earth” – recalling the relations between parent and child, teacher and student, but also that with the unknowable or posthumous friend.

Pedro A.H. Paixao is an artist, scholar, filmmaker and editor from Lisbon living in Milan, Italy, He works mainly with theory and practice of drawing in relation to philosophy. He was born in Lobito (Angola) in 1971, lived between Lisbon, Chicago, Venice, Oporto, and Milan, and concluded his studies in Fine Arts (MFA) and Philosophy (PhD). His artwork is represented by Galeria 111, in Lisbon and Oporto, and he is a research member of the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Oporto. He directs a collection for the publisher Documenta, in Lisbon.

With special contributions by Giorgio Agamben, Matilde Campilho, Emanuele Coccia, Alexandre Conefrey, Bernardo Simões Correia, Emanuela De Cecco, Alessandro Di Pietro, Joana Escoval, Donna Ferrato, Toni Hildebrandt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alexandre Nodari, Yasmil Raymond, Isabella Rodriguez, Fabián Ludueña Romandini, Jorge Leandro Rosa and Veronica Stigger, and also with work by Bas Jan Ader, Paulo Brighenti, Berta Ehrlich, Nan Goldin, Jean-Luc Moulène, Rui Moreira, Bruce Nauman, António Poppe, Cindy Sherman and André Vallias