Presentation
A laboratory of the imaginary: our twenty years
The electronic journal Elephant & Castle. Laboratorio dell’immaginario was founded in 2004 by Alberto Castoldi.
In June 2007 the online open access version of the journal retrieved in issue 0 the essays published during the previous triennium.
Since February 8th 2018 the journal has been indexed by Anvur in class A for the entire CUN 10 area. The journal is biannual and issues two trilingual and/or quadrilingual call for papers a year, but also welcomes special thematic issues.
From the 28th issue of December 2022 Elephant & Castle. Laboratorio dell’immaginario has migrated to the Open Journal System platform, which is more functional to the international dissemination of the (multilingual) contributions it hosts and the circulation in the scientific community of the ideas and reflections it promotes. The graphic design of the journal has been entirely renewed. Consultation of the issues is facilitated by interactive cross-references between the table of contents and the articles.
This is how the founder, Prof. Castoldi, described the project Elephant & Castle:
"Elephant & Castle, just like the well-known London Underground station, is a magazine conceived as a place of encounter, of crossroads and junctions of ideas, in which the experience of transit is more important than the point of arrival, the interweaving of dialogues more decisive than the conclusions. As Pavese wrote in The Business of Living: ‘The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one’s loneliness, how to communicate with others. This explains the persistence of marriage, fatherhood, friendships, since they might bring happiness! But why should it be better to be in communication with another than to be alone, is a mystery. Perhaps it is only an illusion, for one can be perfectly happy alone, most of the time. It is pleasant now and then to have a boon companion to drink with, provided that what we ask of others we already possess within ourselves. The mystery is why it is not enough to drink and fathom or own individuality alone. Why we should have to repossess ourselves through others’. I believe that Pavese’s fascinating question may be answered in different ways, and I hope that the issues hosted in this journal may exemplify them".
Alberto Castoldi
In its conciseness, Alberto Castoldi’s Presentation captured what would become the twenty-year work of the journal and the cultural project between word and image carried out by those who contributed to it: the members of the steering committee – Marco Belpoliti, Adriano D’Aloia, Jacques Dürrenmatt, Elena Mazzoleni, Francesca Pagani, Nunzia Palmieri, Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa –, the large national and international scientific and editorial committee and the Arts and Humanities Research Group of the Department of Letters, Philosophy, Communication of the University of Bergamo; and the Editor-in-Chief Coordinator Sara Volpi, who after years of intense and passionate work passes the baton, starting with this issue, to Giacomo Raccis.
Located at the junction of the Bakerloo and Northern lines, London Underground’s Elephant and Castle station was among the first to open in the late 1800s. The logo of the little elephant carrying the tower, a symbol of London’s Elephant and Castle district and of the tube station of the same name, was placed on the left side of the heading on the magazine’s old homepage. On the right side, small boxes with images were crossed by the graphic sign of a red spiral that, like an ideal road on which the elephant moves, intertwined its path with the figures. This junction of transportation and transit is at the same time a reference to a cultural and intellectual mobility in which ‘the experience of transit is more important than the point of arrival, the interweaving of dialogues more decisive than conclusions’. The lengthy quotation from Cesare Pavese included in the Presentation opens up, in particular, a series of questions, and Castoldi’s closing highlights the contradictory aspect of the juxtaposition between the chaotic and unpredictable dialogue of the metropolitan crossroads and the writer’s solipsistic ambition: ‘I believe that Pavese’s fascinating question may be answered in different ways, and I hope that the issues hosted in this journal may exemplify them’. Pavese’s words evoke the necessity of scientific communication as well as its illusory potential, the need to fathom ourselves and, at the same time, to repossess ourselves through others. It was this ambivalence of meaning and discourse that Alberto Castoldi wanted to provocatively set in motion with that original identity card of the journal. The romantic and uncanny image of the Demon of Travel flanked the heading on the right, completing a critical positioning that on the one hand affirms the sense of the operation, and on the other makes it cryptic. Reproduced in a small size, devoid of caption and explicit references in the discourse, it is the graphic threshold to the content which will follow it. The image recalls Castoldi’s passion for the nineteenth-century illustrations (A. Castoldi, Grandville & company: il perturbante nell’illustrazione romantica, Bergamo, Lubrina, 1987). The demon, which looks gigantic compared to the people who are walking on his seated body and entering his mouth – on foot, in a carriage or riding fantastic beasts – carries a reclining woman on his head. The flag in the maiden’s hands bears the inscription Fantaisie, while on the background of the black pit of its open jaws one can read Introduction. This cyclopean but not terrifying creature greets the flocking people with wide eyes and mouth, as it rests its open-clawed paws on the ground, and on whose palm people walk. The text to which the illustration alludes contains the sense of the visual insertion: Voyage où il vous plaira – Tony Johannot (illustrateur), Alfred De Musset (auteur), Pierre-Jules Stahl (auteur), Paris, Hetzel, 1843. The note to the reader announced the project of that volume “avec vignettes”: to write and illustrate it, with pen or pencil (“la plume ou le crayon”) so that it would best render the authors’ thoughts. Opening the series of fantastic narratives, the Demon of Travel welcomed readers by literally inserting them into his narrative world.
The effective synergy between word and image spills over from the lines and illustration of the Presentation to the practice of editorial work on the issues published over two decades. The compactness of the monographic choices makes each issue a choral and heterogeneous collection of articles and images dedicated to an author, a place, a thematic, theoretical, methodological, and historical cue. As a journal born from the project of establishing a “laboratory of the imaginary”, it has added to area repertoires a prestigious editorial home for studies on visuality and intermediality, as made evident by the latest issues published online.
If that is the past of the adventure of Elephant & Castle. Laboratorio dell’immaginario, the future certainly holds for us as much richness of stimuli and breath of horizons. The journal continues in that tradition while innovating and relaunching itself to meet the challenges of studying the texture, processes, and tensions of the imaginary: it is a laboratory constantly open to contribute to the international debate in science and culture.
Editors in Chief
Franca Franchi, Alessandra Violi
February 2024
