Who writes here

Not everyone who has worked outside Italy has something to contribute to a publication like this. Experience, on its own, is not a sufficient condition. What matters is not having left, but having operated long enough in a different system to recognise that the initial assumptions you carried with you were only partially valid, and that adjusting them required more than a superficial adaptation.

The people who write for ITALIC tend to have gone through that process, often without framing it explicitly. They have had to make decisions in environments where familiar signals were absent or unreliable, and where the consequences of misalignment were not theoretical. They have seen what happens when a way of working that is effective in one context fails to translate into another, and they have had to reconfigure it in practice.

This does not necessarily correspond to seniority in the conventional sense. It is possible to have a long career without ever stepping outside a stable framework, just as it is possible to develop a precise understanding of these dynamics relatively early, provided that exposure is real and sustained. What distinguishes a potential contributor is not the title they hold, but the clarity with which they can describe what has changed in the way they operate, and why.

There is also a specific kind of distance involved. Writing for ITALIC requires the ability to step back from one’s own trajectory and treat it as material rather than as a narrative to be defended. This implies a certain discipline in what is emphasised and what is omitted. The objective is not to present a personal path as exemplary, but to extract from it elements that remain valid regardless of who is reading.

For this reason, we are not looking for visibility, nor for alignment with a predefined voice. We are looking for people who are able to observe their own practice with a degree of precision, and to articulate that observation without relying on familiar categories that tend to simplify more than they explain. The text is the only thing that matters, and it has to stand on its own.

In practical terms, this means that contributions are not expected to be frequent. They are expected to be considered. A piece should exist because there is something that cannot be easily reduced to a shorter format, something that benefits from being developed in full. The publication does not operate on volume, and it does not require constant output. It requires relevance.

What this creates, over time, is not a collection of opinions, but a set of reference points. And contributing to that set is a responsibility that goes beyond the act of writing itself.