Sudario is a visual arts magazine dedicated to amplifying voices from and about the Mediterranean. Its mission is to look beyond the seductive surface of the region—to probe its miracles and its curses, its beauty and its unrest. Sudario embraces a radical, often uncomfortable realism. It is experimental, sometimes psychedelic, and always engaged in confronting contemporary crises. The aim is to open new paths of thought and action through a blend of critical inquiry and artistic experimentation. The magazine brings together both existing works and newly commissioned pieces that address themes we consider urgent and underrepresented. Conceived as a platform for reflection and storytelling, Sudario fosters alternative narratives of the Mediterranean through our printed publication as well as through exhibitions, workshops, and concerts. The magazine is committed to a clear aesthetic and ethical stance. Sudario collaborates with artists and thinkers who challenge romanticized portrayals of the region, offering instead incisive, grounded perspectives.

Sudario #1 gathers the voices of 17 artists in a choral essay edited by the founder and curator of the magazine Stefano Tripodi and curator Magali Avezou.

The magazine reflects on the notion of magic — not as escapism, but as a way of thinking about the world and relationships, an imaginary that philosopher Federico Campagna describes in Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History. As the project took form it became clear that focusing solely on magic felt naïve — disconnected from a world marked by conflict, collapse, and loss, and the theme of disaster emerged, articulating the contradiction at the heart of both the region and our contemporary condition. To define Sudario’s curatorial position, that is based on the willingness to see more, name more, and refuse the narrowing of perception in times of crisis, Tripodi and Avezou also echoed philosopher Gabriel Catren’s concept of the phenomenodelic: a state of expanded perception, rigorous andForward thinking at once. 

Given this background, this first issue takes its title from the ancient figure of the Ouroboros, the serpent that devours and regenerates itself. It is a symbol of cycles without end, of collapse that feeds new growth, of opposites that refuse to separate. This image gives form to the way we look at the Mediterranean today: as a space where catastrophe and survival are inseparable, where faith and cynicism, myth and infrastructure, ritual and violence, coexist in one continuous loop. The Ouroboros embodies this logic of resistance: destruction that is also creation, a circle that holds contradiction without closure. 

The design—conceived by Atto—follows a stream-of consciousness structure, evoking a sense of fluidity and focuses on building a coral narrative structure through images. The concept is a continuous flow of photographs, where the boundaries between artists blur— merging into a single voice that speaks of the Mediterranean. Like an aedo (the ancient Greek bard) recounting tales of the lands he has visited around the fire, Sudario seeks to gather diverse voices from across the Mediterranean to tell its own story and vision of the region. The structure resembles that of a film. The magazine presents a sequence of selected projects by the artists invited, interspersed with the commissioned project by Mary Queau.

In the text that accompanies the first issue, Magali Avezou guides us through the flux of images presented in Sudario: “We invited Marie Quéau to create a series of images for Sudario #1. Quéau is a French artist whose photographic practice questions the descriptive nature of images by drawing on collective imagination and science fiction. In autumn 2025, her series Fury will be exhibited at Le BAL in Paris, coinciding with the release of a new monograph published by Roma Publications. In her commission for Sudario she presents eighteen plates, conceived as palimpsests, cover the volume of “The Universe of Parapsychology and Esotericism”, a book she found in a second-hand bookstore. Her images — the “Barges wildfire of summer” 2025, airplane dismantling platforms, scrapyards, caves — dialogue with the 1975 entries on unexplained phenomena, mystical beliefs, and occult practices. All of it is bathed in an unsettling blue light where fire simmers beneath the surface. Her plates are scattered throughout this first issue, a sort of fade-to-black that both separates and connects the projects of 16 artists. 

Myth and contemporary legends speak to us of the first rhinoceros seen in Europe (Federico Clavarino), the Camino de Santiago (Bandia Ribeira), the Tarantella festivals (Jacques Sorrentini Zibjan), the Moroccan Fantasia (Karim El Maktafi); while in Palestine, the population is being mercilessly annihilated by a neighboring state (Taysir Batniji) — a massacre that technologies, by adopting a colonial and racist bias, contributed to justify (Yazan Khalili). Palestinian youth continue to resist, nonetheless, through the joyful practice of skateboarding (Maen Hammad); in Beirut, they immerse themselves in video games (Rä di Martino); in the French suburbs, young people grapple with class issues and the definition of masculinity (Sara Sadik); and young Italian caregivers find on social media a community with whom to share their hardship (Federica Sasso). As an act of defiance against the grip of technology on our lives, Irene Fenara turns surveillance cameras against themselves to depict her presence in improbable locations across the Italian peninsula — a female and unsettling figure confronting the machine. Other contemporary matters, like the ambivalence of technologies, the climate crisis (Katerina Angelopoulou), the impact of migration on individual (Olgaç Bozalp), overtourism / super rich (Bojan Mrđenović) are not exclusive to the Mediterranean, although they impact it profoundly and define its present condition. 

The project that closes this first issue of Sudario, Volgar Eloquio by Jacques Sorrentini Zibjan, focuses on the festivals in southern Italy that once a year gather communities — young and old, rich and poor — around the Tarantella, a traditional dance originally meant to save those bitten by a spider from a deadly lethargy. In this film, Sorrentini invokes the figure of Pasolini, and his defense of particularities — linguistic, geographical, human. A form of resistance through dance and music, rooted in the specific and the collective”.

A limited edition has been conceived in collaboration with Marie Quéau and printer Paolo Nava (Milan). An offset  print of one of the plates imagined for Sudario is enclosed in an Shiro Echo Raw envelope that wraps the magazine, making  the set a collectible piece available in 75 copies. 

Sudario’s debut issue has been made possible by the support of architect Giacomo Garziano, founder of GG-loop, with studios in Amsterdam, Milan e Ibiza. His practice advances a biophilic, narrative approach to design and treats architecture as an iterative inquiry, a loop of questions and answers that shapes both thought and form. Building on projects such as Freebooter and the research trajectory Mitosis, GG-loop frames design as a regenerative ecosystem, employing bio-based materials alongside parametric and BIM tools to align environmental performance with lived experience. This ethos resonates with our guiding idea for the issue, Ouroboros, and with the magazine’s own method of reading, sequencing, and renewing images in cycles. We are grateful to Giacomo for believing in this first step and for exemplifying how circular thinking can be precise, material, and human at once.