Editorial. Epochal Signs

Abstract

In the editorial, Giovanna A. Massari introduces issue 14 of “XY”, devoted to the ‘suspended places’ and the representation of marginality. The text revisits a research direction already explored by the historical series of “XY dimensioni del disegno” in the 1990s, when the ‘suburban issue’ was considered not only as an urban problem, but as a field of formal, structural, and figurative inventions capable of generating new qualities. Today, the concept of suburb expands into the broader idea of marginality: a condition involving outskirts, urban voids, abandoned villages, residual fragments, disused areas and suspended landscapes. “XY” therefore opens a critical reflection on the value of images and drawing in interpreting these unstable, precarious and resilient spaces. Representation becomes a tool for recording the contemporary world, reading its transformations and imagining new design, aesthetic and political-cultural possibilities.