Where Mangrovia comes from

Behind the idea of Mangrovia is the encounter between some authors and journalists, and Sineglossa, a cultural organisation that promotes sustainable development models through the languages of contemporary art.

With this article, Mangrovia’s editorial staff inaugurates a series of in-depth “Backstage” articles, dedicated to explaining the behind-the-scenes workings of the magazine. From the choice of stories to the production of the covers, up to the opportunities and risks of the use of artificial intelligence in journalism, we will try to show how Mangrovia is born and grows.

In this first appointment, we leave the floor to Federico Bomba, art director of Sineglossa and researcher in Human Computer Interaction at the University of Bolzano, who is now also the editorial director of this publication.

How did Mangrovia come into being?

Mangrovia is a new publishing space in which Sineglossa gives space to those who use art to transform the present into another future. Before Mangrovia, to talk about how art innovates other fields of knowledge, Sineglossa organised a festival, art+b=love(?). From 2017 to 2022, between Ancona and Bologna, we brought hundreds of artists and computer scientists, humanists and scientists, to combine different methods, approaches and languages, and to show the public the social impact of this contamination.

The name of the festival, the formula art+b=love(?), condensed the elements necessary to make contamination: the sum of art and the variable b – each time a different discipline -, the resulting love, and finally the question mark because any experimental process must come to terms with the unknown and prepare for failure. That was the formula of the “New Renaissance”: a round table in which scientists, humanists and artists sat to design beautiful, sustainable and inclusive solutions. 

That approach that Europe chose two years ago when it launched the New European Bauhaus, a philosophical framework, operational manifesto, set of guidelines, networking space and opportunities for economic growth, which still represents the direction that all European public and private institutions should follow to work together to create a better Europe.

Starting from the festival was then born, in February 2022, Nuovo Rinascimento Mag, a digital container for experimenting with more up-to-date formats with which to recount the contamination of knowledge. A new formula, suitable for reaching a young audience through social media and podcasts, with a special focus on the dissemination of lesser-known cultural projects, far from the sector media agenda.

In a year and a half of activity, we have written and spoken about architecture and culture to revitalise the mountains, human rights in the work behind artificial intelligence, digital art for a new renaissance, and more. We met Giulia Tomasello, AWI Art Workers Italia, Valentina Rognoli, ENWE European Network for Women Excellence, Roberta Franceschinelli, Kin Lab, Luca Pozzi, Edoardo Montenegro, Fondazione Nuto Revelli, FerMenta, Carosello Lab, Pablo Aragon, Alessia Tripaldi, Michela Grasso, Milagros Miceli.

In addition to New Renaissance Mag, in January 2023 we opened a channel on Substack, a new independent writing platform that promises to revolutionise the model of journalism – succeeding, almost ¹ – where for a year we sent out 1,300 newsletters to a small group of 150 loyal readers.

That newsletter was called Mangrovia and, unbeknownst to us, was the embryo of what we present today.

Why Mangrovia and not the Nuovo Rinascimento mag?

With Josephine Condemi, Carlo Ferretti, and Riccardo Silvi, we discussed the role of a newspaper in dealing with culture, people and facts of the world today. Which facts, which people? How do we select the news? Which topics do we want to give attention to and why? And above all: what do we leave to those who read us? What is our promise?

We started with a common desire to investigate other boundaries, not only disciplinary but also geographical, biological and social. To build together a new look at those who try to transform the present and seek another future, a look capable of explaining the process and not just the result, telling the story before the fact, and finding collaboration where others see individuality. That is why you will find other stories of culture, technology and society here.

We asked ourselves whether it was right to keep the New Renaissance, whether that name – Renaissance – encompasses all the instances we wanted to embrace, and whether it can explain them. Is it really necessary to recover the cliché of the Renaissance court to communicate a publishing project that dreams of a posthuman, anti-human, intersectional and ecologist world? Is the Renaissance the right period to reclaim this way of knowing the world? Perhaps so, as explained by a recent international conference on the subject ², in which the concept of the Renaissance is disentangled from the rationalist interpretation that the moderns made of it (as Telmo Pievani reminds us in “Latour and the Plurality of Worlds”, introduction to Disinventing Modernity), and returns associated with the image of a plural, magical, inclusive, human and non-human age, despite all the revisionist and deconstructionist current that, instead, paints it as hegemonic, Eurocentric, patriarchal, white. One of the latest examples is Cecilia Alemani’s curatorship of the 2022 Venice Biennale. ³

But in the meantime, everyone is talking about the Renaissance, as we noted three years ago ⁴, and they continue to talk about it, allowing capitalism to engulf everything, even history, and turn it into a brand.  

So why not change course, reaffirm the equality of all living things and learn from a plant how to connect the knowledge of sea and land? Hence our name, Mangrovia.

What do we promise? We want to help to look at the world from other latitudes, anticipate changes and be inspired by glimpses of a society that could be. With the knowledge that «the gift of science is to introduce new beings into the world – be they elementary particles, microbes, machines, algorithms, climate models, patents, nuclear accidents, the hole in the ozone layer, withering Apulian olive trees, PFAS in the water, genetically edited organisms – that hybridise with other beings (from the market, craftsmen, artists, the horrors of time, ecosystems), network, contaminate, enrich our societies and change them. The sciences bring new beings closer and make them perceptible. It is up to us to find, from time to time, new ways to coexist coherently with these new hybrid presences, even dreaming of ‘a harmonious cosmos’⁵».

For those who want to follow us on this adventure, all they have to do is read us and talk about Mangrove to those looking for a different future.  

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Mangrovia is a project by SCG, curated by Sineglossa, funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU within the framework of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan Mission 1 – Digitisation, Innovation, Competitiveness and Culture, Component 3 – Tourism and Culture 4.0 (M1C3), Measure 3 ‘Cultural and Creative Industry 4.0’ promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

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1. Cf. “Il successo di Substack”, Il Post ↩︎
2.  Cf. “Il concetto di Rinascimento, tra la storia e il mito. Origini, cambiamenti, riletture”, conference organised by VIVE – Vittoriano and Palazzo Venezia, in collaboration with the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, edited by Edith Gabrielli (VIVE – Vittoriano and Palazzo Venezia), Massimiliano Rossi (University of Salento) and Tristan Weddigen (Bibliotheca Hertziana). ↩︎
3. Curator Laura Lombardi of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, in her talk entitled Riletture del Rinascimento nel postumano (Reinterpretations of the Renaissance in the Posthuman), within the aforementioned conference.  ↩︎
4. “Non basta invocare un “Nuovo Rinascimento” per farlo accadere realmente“, TPI ↩︎
5.  By Telmo Pievani ~ Latour e la pluralità dei mondi ~ CC 4.0 (BY-NC-SA) ↩︎