«I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic». Thus Calvino writes in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), sensing – in a still dawning era for the studies on performativity – the essentially performative and agentive nature of the objects that appear within narratives.

Human culture has had a centuries-old relationship with the objects it has produced: if in Antiquity and the Middle Ages it perceived them as surrounded by an aura that made them, as well as unique, also capable of arousing wonder in their observers and of conveying a meaning, Modernity has gradually freed them – or torn them away – from the constraints imposed by tradition, removing them from the ancient symbolic dimension (personal, family, social). Finally, in the postmodern climate, objects, now virtually infinitely reproducible, are transformed into pure «performative material», into an «information network», they become «signs» in the purest Baudrillard’s acceptance.

Schechner’s approach favors a performative vision of objects: if it is true that, as the American scholar states, «performance isn’t “in” anything, but “between”» (Performance Studies. An Introduction, 2013), then objects can be studied both as vectors and as agents of performance. On the other hand, Cognitive Sciences, interested in investigating the entanglement between humans and the things that surround them, tend to consider objects not as simple passive products of material culture but as entities with their own agency that interacts and interferes with the human one: they become part, therefore, of a dynamic organic system and can even be understood as prostheses of mental processes extended beyond the brain and the body. We know that the performative vocation that animates the human being organizes space and time, in a scansion expertly orchestrated by objects that materialize an imaginary and define its further possibilities, in the given circumstances.

Literature, in its intrinsic capacity to create narrative worlds and to introject “fragments” of reality, removes objects from the dimension of mere usability and replays them in the form of more  or less explicit symbols. The same can be said of cinema, with famous borderline cases such as the McGuffin, a virtual engine, in itself empty of meaning, of action. Finally, the history of contemporary theatre revolves around the re-semanticization of objects that, even in absentia, measures the symbolic density of what an actor, or a performer, can and knows.

This issue of «Mantichora», therefore, intends to explore the ways in which the performing arts and the media arts have welcomed “things” into their codified imaginative activity to evaluate with which processes of “cutting” from the world objects become a form of the content of an action, of a text and an artistic or literary theme.