A heart monitoring system gives a straight line and a dull continuous beep. A green point in a radar disappears all of a sudden. A cry fills the void up. There’s an app abruptly unable to localize a phone or a GPS. A train is missing from the arrivals posters. A father is asking over and over to his daughter who she is. There is an article reporting the number of untraceable people after a shipwreck. A picture shows a theatre erased by bombing attacks. An excavation exhumes a statue’s head. A homeless is showing a sign with a request of help: he lost his job. These and other signals and narrations are each responding to a loss which unleash emotions.
Every society knows the experience of loss and is unceasingly looking for means and strategies to elaborate the sense of absence and loss. How is it possible to accept that people are not there anymore, that things have been destroyed, that a crisis ruined our wellbeing, that a native land, a home, a heritage can be gone forever? How is it possible not to lose, together with what we value, our hope and sense of future?
Loss is both an individual and collective event, which every time and context have been tackled with. But in modern society perhaps our difficulty to relate to loss has gone worse. A world and a culture having as a goal to always do better and progress, and constantly in need to demonstrate the gain in comfort and freedom, cannot admit to have lost something: it would mean admitting the present to be inferior to the past. But it is that very society which, despite condemning nostalgia, favours and intensifies every kind of loss, environmental, cultural, social. The planet earth is less and less fit for habitation due to climate crisis, culture is constantly losing historical memory also due to the degradation of the art and monumental heritage – or to its willing annihilation, society misses its ideological awareness and its identity values, and the post-human is more and more the loss of the human. In adjunction to the sense of loss of the great historic and social phenomena, there is the private and intimate experience of loss, in a society becoming more and more old, in which the memory loss becomes, as individual experience, more and more frequent.
We are interrogating ourselves: how do art, literature, cinema and philosophy relate to the experience of loss? How is it represented? Which emotions are thought to be bound to loss and get lost? Which is the configuration of the relation between loss and mourning? Which relation bounds getting lost and the time? How can one survive to what has gone lost? These and other questions have always been declared in literature, theatre, music and art, and develop the issue: how is it possible to represent what is not existent anymore, but is still existing in memories? How is it possible to evoke what is lost or gone?
The next AdE issue is focussing on loss and disappearing with contributions centring on emotions related to loss and disappearing, moving from literature to theatre, from theatre to music, from archaeology to art history, from philosophical thought to history of human knowledge.
Please submit a subject of proposal with a provisional title and a 500 words abstract within 30th September 2022 to soterafornaro@gmail.com. The accepted essay must be ready by the 30th November 2022. Publication is due in January 2023.