Horizontal and vertical. The aspects of power

A fascinating journey in the political symbology of power.

For centuries now, "horizontal" and "vertical" have ceased to be simple geometric concepts and have become the load-bearing axes around which our social imagination is constructed, the spatial layout that organises and makes power relations explicit, shaping the human geometries that establish everyone's place within a collective. Space is an inescapable cognitive dimension. It's therefore no coincidence that spatial representations are those that can immediately make the underlying power structure legible. As a vast iconography shows, the disposition of bodies in space – in the centre or at the margins, at the top or the bottom, up-scaled or downscaled – can in fact allow to grasp the evidence of the social relations typical of a given context. Boni, thanks to his anthropologist view, was able to assemble this original visual itinerary, which identifies, in time and space, the multiform shapes taken on by power, both in its hierarchical vocation and in an egalitarian principle which instead favours circularity. In this way, through an analysis of body postures, of ritual choreographies, of architectural structures and of the many devices associated to apical positions, an original history of the counterpoint between high and low begins to take form. Such a history cuts across modernity and classical ethnography, only to reappear today in its original form, in the unexhausted tension between the horizontal line – experimented by social movements – and the hyper-verticality that characterises global and – most of all – financial powers.

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