Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Figure

Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Figure

Nadal-Melsió, Sara

Hardcover

PhilosophyArt HistoryPerformance Art

Publisher Price: $32.00

ISBN10: 1890951854
ISBN13: 9781890951856
Publisher: Zone Books
Published: Apr 15 2025
Pages: 328
Weight: 1.45
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

How the work of several contemporary artists illuminates and challenges the policing of European borders and identity

In this stunningly original book, Sara Nadal-Melsió explores how the work of several contemporary artists illuminates the current crisis of European universalist values amid the brutal realities of exclusion and policing of borders. The wolf is the name Baroque musicians gave to the dissonant sound produced in any attempt to temper and harmonize an instrument. Europe and the Wolf brings this musical figure to bear on contemporary aesthetic practices that respond to Europe's ongoing social and political contradictions. Throughout, Nadal-Melsió understands Europe as a conceptual problem that often relies on harmonization as an organizing category. The wolf as an emblem of disharmony, incarnated in the stranger, the immigrant, or the refugee, originates in the Latin proverb man is a wolf to man. This longstanding phrase evokes the pervasive fear, and even hatred, of what is foreign, unknown, or beyond the borders of a community. The book follows the wolf in a series of relays between the musical, the visual, and the political, and through innovative readings of artworks--by, among others, Carles Santos, Pere Portabella, Allora&Calzadilla, and Anri Sala. Traversed by the musical, these artworks, as well as Nadal-Melsió's writing, present unstable symbolic and material ensembles in an array of variations of political possibilities and impossibilities that evade institutions intolerant of uncertainty and wary of diversity.

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