How to Stop Worrying and Love the Post-Medium, Notes for a Genealogy of Italian Art Practices of Medial Resistance

Under late capitalism, the artistic medium no longer functions as a neutral technical support but as an inescapable structural condition. The transition from modernist medium-specificity to the post-medium condition does not eliminate mediation, it intensifies it. Mediation becomes inseparable from regimes of visibility, exchange, and simulation. Even practices grounded in dematerialization or relationality remain embedded within circuits that render them legible, circulable, and potentially commodifiable. The medium thus operates as an infrastructural field through which art is captured and translated into value. A genealogy of artistic practices, movements, and collectives active in Italy from the second half of the twentieth century to the present reveals sustained attempts to confront this condition from within. Rather than abandoning mediation, these practices inhabit its limits, staging situations, temporary communities, pedagogical experiments, and shared processes that displace the primacy of the object. They generate zones of friction in which use, duration, and collective activation interrupt systems governed by equivalence and reversibility. In the post-medium condition, the medium shifts from material support to relational milieu: an environment of exposure and control. Art cannot exit commodification, yet it can intensify its thresholds, producing opacity, remainder, and symbolic excess, even within hyper-technologized capitalism.