First movement. Action

Abstract

Movement is a space-time metaphor without which our visual and linguistic culture would barely be imaginable. Functionality, dynamism, change and relationality are just some of the facets that the notion of movement encodes in our material, symbolic and social existence. But think, also, of displacement, motility, emotionality; socio-political mobilisations and socio-cultural changes; creative and artistic manifestos; forms of architectural, plastic, musical, cinematographic, and geometric language; figures of semiotics, textuality and critical theory; chains, paths, trajectories, manoeuvres of signs, codes and representations. All these movements testify to the vitality of humankind’s experiential, communicative and creative processes. In the first of three issues devoted to this nexus of relationships, we deal with Generations, Stories, Transformations. From a socio-historical standpoint, we look at how experiential realities may take on a specific generational semantic form, thus transforming cohorts of people into communities of memory and meaning, materialising existence in terms of tension, antagonism, transmission and difference among individual stories, collective memories and cultural imaginations.