Concreta

Concreta emerges both from shared desire and from loss: the desire to build a platform from which to contribute to contemporary reflection on the image, through the publication of a biannual magazine and a series of artists’ books; and to do so from a specific place, a community marked over the last fifteen years by the systematic disappearance of the cultural infrastructure dedicated to the plastic and visual arts. This local situation of cultural crisis is added to the current state of global collapse of financial capitalism, which points towards a change of paradigm in many aspects, not only at a macroeconomic level but also, and above all, at a micro-political level, foretelling a bleak future for culture and the arts. No longer considered forms of critical knowledge of the world, instruments of thought and action, culture and the arts are reduced to mere entertainment. For all these reasons, Concreta has positioned itself from the beginning as a platform of resistance to the cultural impoverishment of our present and has chosen to work with paper publications as well as and online in order to elaborate a proposal that arises from a specific place but is not limited to its geography.
The central aim of this publication is to contribute to the elaboration of a theoretical framework for research, inside and outside the academy, on the image, with special interest in the photographic image and in the history of art, but crossing over all the disciplines of knowledge that conceive of the image as a point of friction and unrest, as a structure of meaning and as a dialectic field of forces.