Sociologist Federico Rahola will lead a discussion with artist Martina Melilli on Ghostly Matters, a book by British author Avery Gordon. Rahola, together with Stefania Consigliere, edited the Italian edition of the book, published in 2022, which served as inspiration for Melilli’s installation, currently on view as part of the exhibition “Chì ghe pu Nissun!”.

Ghostly Matters, published in 1997, was one of the most influential works in contemporary American sociology. Weaving together sociology, critical thought, and literature, Avery Gordon offers us a glimpse of the phantasmal matter that inhabits everyday reality: unease, a sudden anxiety while crossing a square, the fright at the sight of a passerby’s face, the whispering of polluted rivers. The ghost points to the traces of history’s violence, narrates the unjust organization of the world; but it also carries the omen of something beautiful and still possible: the certainty that around the corner of a street, happiness awaits. The ghost is the crack that, amidst the violence of history and the most mundane ordinariness, lets the utopian flash through.

Federico Rahola (Genoa, 1966) is an associate professor of Sociology of Cultural Processes in the Department of Education at the University of Genoa. He is a member of the editorial board and served as editor-in-chief of the Italian journal “Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa” (2016–2020), published by il Mulino. He is the author of, among other works, Underground Europe. Along Migrant Routes (Milan 20202—with Luca Queirolo Palmas), Forms of the City. Sociology of Urbanization (Milan 2015), Who Decides? A Critique of Exceptionalist Reason (Versona 2011—both with Massimiliano Guareschi), and Definitively Temporary Zones. Places of Humanity in Excess (Verona 2003).