It sets a new tone - but this tone is immediately recognizable as belonging to our time. * Boris Groys, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University, USA *
A brilliant meditation on the planetary debacle of Westernized Modernity and a radical evocation of the spiritual and imaginative realities that may just possibly lie beyond the ruins of our future. A lucid and urgent work. * Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University, USA *
It’s not enough to realize that the world is ending; we need to learn how to dream up new ones. Federico Campagna’s Prophetic Culture— a worthy successor to his Technic and Magic— offers an eloquent, evocative and visionary map for drafting the cosmos to come. * John Tresch, Mellon Professor in History of Art, Science, and Folk Practice, The Warburg Institute, UK *
A world does not simply exist from a human point of view. It needs to be maintained and even entertained by means of song and story. But how to perform this maintenance, or housekeeping if time and space break down, if the present becomes unpredictable, the past keeps changing, the future is past and the “house” as such becomes precarious, unstable and unavailable? Despite its wealth of historical references to prophetism and gnostic traditions Federico Campagna's book is in my view an intriguing experiment of how to turn something as mundane and pedestrian as housekeeping into a necessary tool of remaking the world, to turn housekeeping into world making so to speak. * Hito Steyerl, Filmmaker and writer *
This is a visionary book, highly original in conception. It offers an eloquent series of meditations on the forms of cultural and political possibility embedded within Judaeo-Christian mysticism, and addresses the prevailing sense of cultural crisis with confidence. Like Giorgio Agamben, Federico Campagna is an eclectic thinker with an internally coherent and urgent message for our time. * Malcolm Bull, Professor of Art and the History of Ideas, Christ Church College, Oxford *
Campagna has written the score for a piece that allows its own end. It dies within and in its death gives us life in form of a humble prayer. A prayer whose words we have forgotten long ago but whose rhythm we still sing to ourselves. * Nicolas Jaar, Composer *
Something has ended. What comes next is still unclear. At a time when extrapolative futures designed for navigating more stable realities are proving inadequate, Prophetic Culture offers a possible angle of approach, through a new kind of worlding, for the hazy, futureless reality fast approaching from over the imaginative horizon. * Anthony Dunne, Professor of Design and Social Inquiry, The New School, USA *
We are on the bridge between worlds: Federico Campagna shows us how we might remake the cartographies of the next. The ‘end of the world’, as seen through the prophetic attitude, becomes not apocalypse, but apocatastasis: a joyful restoration. Campagna offers the cosmic trip for our collective transformation, inadvertently becoming a prophet for our time. Prophetic Culture is the foundational book for the day after tomorrow. * Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers, Ignota Books *
