Ecocore #5 by Alessandro Bava Edition

Issue V - The Issue of Narcissism. Narcissus is pretty. Narcissus doesn’t love you. ECOCORE exploits Narcissus as the symbol of the modern subject. Our imagination of the subject is made intricate by new perspectives on identity, the virtual, transcendence and how our aesthetic embodiment relates to capitalism. What are we as subjects and why is this question so often explored as a discourse of the body? What is our ‘nature’, and how do we get to it? How do we commune with the external as if it weren’t hostile? How do we cultivate an environment we want to participate in? Our psychic/social ecology meets with the environmental in haemorrhage of inner to outer. Narcissism is pathologised as a personality disorder/a phenomenon/a force that affects our precarious relation to the other. Our tech-driven, screen-gazing society enables a solipsistic narcissism, to the extent that we can identify it as typical of our cultural mood, our pixelated age. Narcissism is easily read as a destructive impulse towards extinguishing otherness, but is also identified as a traumatised and debilitated loving in which the only happy love can be the contained self-love by which all libidinal investment belongs to the ego. Your mouth is the only part of yourself that you can kiss in the mirror.

Contributions by: Gabriele Beveridge, Martin Soto Climent, Patrizio di Massimo, Buck Ellison, DeSe Escobar, Seth Fluker, Isa Genzken, Rochelle Goldberg, Ethan James Green, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Richard Hawkins, Lukas Hofmann, Lars TCF Holdhus / TCF Tea, Adrian Manuel Huber, Benjamin Ahmed Huseby, Emily Jones, Marie Karlberg, Veit Laurent Kurz, Paul Levack, Stefanos Mandrake, Marco Pio Mucci, Josip Novosel, Lisa Radon, Stefan Schwartzman, Ser Brandon Castro Serpas ,SSTMRT, Anthony Symonds, Frances Stark, Thomas Tait, Anna Uddenberg, Francesco Vezzoli, Tore Wallert, Phillip Zach, Jamie Sterns, Eli Pitegoff, Michele d’Aurizio, Fabrizio Ballabio, Boris Groys, Kristin Dombek