Issue No.1 — The Long Goodbye

In 2023, when Alea miraculously reached the end of its first editorial cycle, with six volumes published in Italian, we began, in the editorial office, to discuss the future of the journal. The last issue, dedicated to the late David Graeber, had intercepted a series of questions about the state of things which, far from finding definitive or comforting answers (we would gladly have spared ourselves this new chapter!), seemed to gesture toward a possible trail, tracks still fresh in a sinister, elusive present. This is how we reached the Lands Between: a territory brushed by eternal twilight, dotted with distorted, inhuman architectures, inhabited by a humanity that seems to have lost all spatial or temporal horizons capable of lending meaning to the real. A kingdom where the imagination and vitality that pulse through life’s biology and sociality are constantly frayed by the stagnant, worn, and corrupted power of an Empire that has devoured its own limbs.

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This issue inaugurates a new cycle for the magazine, now published annually in a fully bilingual Italian–English edition. The Long Goodbye is a journey into the Lands Between in which we seem to be trapped—caught between the ruins of a past that continues to haunt the present and the glimpses of alternative futures emerging within our collective imaginaries.

Escape Velocity / Francesco Danesi della Sala / Editorial

Haunting / Carlo P. Banti / Compendium

The Radar and the Lighthouse / Lorenzo Alunni, Elisa Nocentini / Ethno-graphic Story

The Twilight Zones / Pasquale Menditto, Briana Procot / Atlas

Tunnel Terror: Maps and the Underworld Affect of Wartime Gaza / Kaitlan Bui / Essay

Adiós Doctoras. An Island of Doctors, No Wards / Federico Nastasi, Julio César García / Reportage

Failed Utopias / Silvia Pizzirani / Bullettin

Worlds Adrift, Troubled Seas, Possible Futures: A Conversation with Jatin Dua / Nives Ladina, Jatin Dua / Interview

Remnants of the Future: At the Edge of Time in the Argentine Pampas / Cush Rodríguez Moz / Reportage

The Space between Soothing: A Story of Absence and Intimacy / Luisa T. Schneider / Ethnography

Glen: Journey into the Sunken Valley / Francesco Danesi della Sala, Pasquale Menditto / The Italian Expedition

Fieldwords Research Dispatches / Mir Fatima Kanth, Iacopo Nassigh, Francesca Morra, Claudia Squarzon, Silvio Mottolese, Vera Lazzaretti, Uyen Dang, David Rypel / Fieldwords