"THE GOOD IN THINGS", BY EMANUELE COCCIA
Conference to launch the book, "The Good in Things. Advertising as a Moral Discourse”, followed by a conversation between the author and Pedro, A.H. Paixão (editor), Jorge Leandro Rosa (editor and translator) and Bernardo Pinto de Almeida.
Seeing, letting the act of seeing serve as part of an animal life, which is much more than life as a passive subject, is an operation of restlessness. There is no reason not to bring vision closer to the act of thinking, until one can touch and generate a gesture of pure survival, that is common to both. Since "A Sensible Life” (2010), Emanuele Coccia has been re-establishing the empire of the sensible world over the intelligible world. He re-evaluates them and blends categories that we are accustomed to using in this context: "Our existence - sleeping or awake - is an uninterrupted plunge into the sensible world. It is sensible images - the images that we continue to nurture and which continue to feed our daytime or dream experiences - which define the reality and meaning of our entire movement."
It should therefore come as no surprise that this work, "The good of things”, which is now published in Portuguese, prolongs this daring attitude, dissolving the abstraction of the economic discourse and its inherent crisis. In our "things-obsessed” civilisation, objects - whether intended for common use or aesthetic use - have come to acquire an inescapable moral existence. In this book, Coccia identifies a radical displacement of our meaning-based operations - a process that prolongs and generalizes the journeys that the arts have made over the last hundred years. The moral life of commodities is, ultimately, a metamorphosis of ethics and aesthetics.
Serralves - a space dedicated to contemporary objects – is the ideal place to present this moral life of things, which is ultimately always, an aesthetic life that re-acquires forgotten prorogatives.
"The Good in Things. Advertising as a moral discourse”, by Emanuele Coccia is the fourth volume of the collection "Discipline without a name" edited by Pedro A.H. Passion for the publishing house, Documenta - an editorial project on thought and theory, overseen by the Carmona and Costa Foundation for the publishing house, Documenta.
Organization: Carmona and Costa Foundation and the publishing house, Documenta, with participation by the Serralves Foundation and the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto.
Access: free
A plastic artist, researcher and publisher. He is a member of the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto. His artwork is represented by Galeria 111 in Lisbon. He founded and coordinates the publishing project, "Disciplina Sem Nome” (Discipline without a name) for the publishing house Documenta, with the support of the Carmona and Costa Foundation, Lisbon.
Jorge Leandro Rosa is an essayist and translator. He regularly writes for Portuguese and foreign cultural magazines and is also co-editor of the Nada magazine. He is currently a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto. Having worked as a higher education professor, an activity that he still exercises irregularly, today he prefers to respect the diversity of the different wind regimes.
Bernardo Pinto de Almeida is a Professor of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. He has published works in the fields of essays, poetry and children's literature. He works primarily in the fields of History and Theory of Art, spanning a wide range of different aspects of cultural and literary activity. He recently coordinated assembly of the first exhibition of the Nadir Afonso Museum of Contemporary Art, in Chaves and also directed the film, "Nadir the Architect”.
