What is essential today, and what remains at the margins?
Over the years, L’Essenziale Studio has undergone several transformations, continuously reconsidering its position within an increasingly complex cultural landscape. Each new issue has offered an opportunity to question established perspectives, engage with emerging practices and reflect on the evolving relationships between contemporary art, design and visual culture.
Throughout these changes, one principle has remained central to our editorial approach: the desire to identify, document and critically examine what we consider essential. In a world shaped by the relentless circulation of images, information and cultural production, this commitment has become increasingly significant. To observe something closely, to interrupt the immediacy of consumption and create space for reflection is also to question the conditions through which contemporary culture is produced, circulated and understood.
With its tenth volume, L’Essenziale Studio reaches an important milestone. Yet rather than approaching this moment as a retrospective celebration, VOL.10 represents an opportunity to reconsider the foundations of the project itself.
What can truly be considered essential today? Which practices define our understanding of contemporary culture, and which remain outside its established categories? Where do the boundaries between disciplines begin to dissolve, and what possibilities emerge when we move beyond them?
These questions form the conceptual framework of FRINGE, an issue dedicated to exploring the shifting territories of contemporary artistic and cultural production.
The notion of the fringe has traditionally suggested a peripheral position, something existing beyond an established centre. Yet the margins are not necessarily places of exclusion or secondary importance. They can also become spaces of experimentation, where unconventional approaches challenge inherited structures and alternative perspectives begin to emerge.
Within this context, FRINGE approaches the contemporary as an interconnected landscape, shaped by practices that resist fixed definitions and move across disciplinary boundaries.
Art, design, photography and visual culture remain central to our investigation, but their relationships are increasingly informed by other forms of expression. For the first time, music enters the pages of L’Essenziale Studio, not as an independent category, but as part of a broader cultural dialogue.
This expansion reflects a growing awareness that contemporary practices cannot always be understood through the traditional distinctions separating artistic disciplines. Materials, technologies, images, bodies and sounds circulate across different contexts, producing new languages and challenging established modes of interpretation.
The unexpected, the transient and the unconventional no longer necessarily function as gestures of rupture. Increasingly, they reveal the conditions of a world in continuous transformation, where identities, forms and systems remain open to reinterpretation.
Across its pages, FRINGE brings together artists, designers, musicians and cultural practitioners whose work engages with these evolving territories. Through conversations, essays, portraits and original visual contributions, the issue considers how different approaches to artistic production can illuminate the contradictions and possibilities of the present.
Rather than offering a definitive interpretation of contemporary culture, VOL.10 proposes a constellation of perspectives, allowing connections to emerge between practices that might otherwise appear distant.
FRINGE is ultimately an invitation to observe from the edges. To question the position of the centre, reconsider established categories and recognise the potential of what remains undefined.
As familiar certainties begin to dissolve, new forms of expression and alternative ways of understanding the present become possible.
With:
Ahaad Alamoudi, Agata Ingarden, Aliaskar Abarkas, Atelier Craft, Ding Shilun, Dozie Kanu, Elli Antoniou, Elvis Wesley, Fernando Laposse, Forever Studio, Hong Hu, Kemil Bekteši, Kwangho Lee, Lara Dâmaso, Middernacht & Alexander, Mitzi Falcon, Natasha Tontey, Olga Treivas, Oliviero Fiorenzi, Rebecca Moccia, Sandra Mujinga, Sara Ravelli, Shygirl, Standard Equipment, Victor Verhelst, Xin Liu.
L’ES VOL.10 – FRINGE ISSUE is available now on our shop, shipping from November 2026.
See past issues of L’ES here
