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Alexander Carnera

Carnera is a freelance writer living in Copenhagen.

Why there is something and not just nothing

Venice: This year's Art Biennale in Venice feels like the end of a human-centered era, a time where man with his invulnerability, self-sufficiency, the white man as the center of the world is under attack. Now it is the woman's turn to ask the big questions, about the sanctity of life, about connectedness, about man and technology, about what comes after "man".

Decomposition process

Anselm Kiefer: Salla dello Scrutinio in Venice's Doge's Palace – here about how the past and the present historical moments converge.

Ecology is playfully serious

ECOLOGY: Penguins' newly launched green series presents old and new books that change the way we think and talk about the living earth. You are in the age of mass extinction, but the philosopher Martin Heidegger brings us here on the trail of what we need.

An excommunication of the dead and death?

DEATH: Via the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, can we, with today's pandemic, expose the symbolic meaning of death, the one that is otherwise difficult to spot?

To imitate nature in order to master it

THE MIMETIC POWER: Imitating another is also a way to gain power over the person portrayed. And how often do we see an imitation of the cosmos at a bar in a dark side street?

A world that is subtle, beautiful, ugly and strange

ART: Does the artist today work constantly burdened by network care, communication and visibility, without producing anything truly created? Chris Kraus gives his take on what an artistic work should be.

The healing power of the community

RITUALS: The compulsion of neoliberalism to be on, to communicate, to make visible, to be busy, creates, according to Byung-Chui Han, reflex, narcissism, depression and an aggressive psychological emptiness.

To love is to be seized by the incomprehensibility and generosity of the world

DOCUMENTS: Ancient Egyptian art and the later Sufi tradition have access to insights that modern man has gradually forgotten.

Too much is governed by the recognizable, the reproducible, the interchangeable

KNOWLEDGE: Where is it that, according to author Alexander Hooke, "does not fit into a familiar cultural epic pattern, opera, tragedy, romance, ballet, comedy, vaudeville, sitcom, or farce"?