Discover the IFCC

The Istituto Fiorentino di Critica Culturale (IFCC) is a research institute devoted to examining how systems of power shape perception, experience, and the imagination of the future.
Through philosophy, art, and ethics, IFCC critiques the mechanisms of control — technological, ideological, and aesthetic — that define the limits of thought and action in contemporary society.
Its mission is to reopen the political imaginary: to recover the capacity for resistance and renewal within the lived realities of a world too often justified by myth.

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Our Story

The task of critical culture is to make the future thinkable again —to recover the space between what is and what could be.

How can we think the future again?
IFCC examines the invisible architectures of power that structure contemporary life — from the algorithmic governance of data, the use of imagination to control - to the aestheticisation of power and violence in media and culture.

The IFCC was founded in Florence not by coincidence, but by design.
Florence — the birthplace of the Renaissance — is a city where art once redefined the possible, where perspective itself was invented to expand the field of vision.
To establish an institute for critical thought in such a place is to reclaim that legacy — to reopen perspective in another sense: the political and ethical capacity to see beyond the world as it is.
The institute’s founding question is therefore as simple as it is radical:

How can we think the future again?

It asks how subjects are shaped, disciplined, and seduced by systems of control, and how the arts and critical thought might reopen the horizon of human agency.
In this sense, the IFCC is not merely an academic institution — it is a project of renewal.
It believes that critique is not the enemy of creation, but its precondition; that theory, when spoken in the right language, can transform not just understanding but perception itself.

Research

IFCC’s research addresses how contemporary mechanisms of power — from algorithmic governance to cultural myth — shape subjectivity and foreclose the future.
Grounded in critical theory, phenomenology, and aesthetics, the institute studies how violence operates not only materially but ontologically: in the reduction of being to function, of imagination to consumption.

Research Axes

Ontological Violence and Control

Investigating how rational and technological systems transform the human from agent into instrument, and how this violence becomes naturalised through discourse and design.

Aesthetics of Resistance

Exploring how art and perception interrupt systems of domination — from abstraction in painting to the politics of the image in digital culture.

Phenomenology of Hope

Re-examining time, anticipation, and the unfinished as conditions for political and ethical renewal.

Critical Technologies

Analysing the ethical and epistemic implications of data infrastructures and artificial intelligence for the formation of modern subjectivity.

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Critical Technologies

Publications

IFCC develops and supports interdisciplinary publications that extend the reach of critical inquiry.
Its editorial projects bring together philosophers, theorists, and artists to address key questions concerning representation, aesthetics, and digital culture.
Through essays, reviews, and collaborative volumes, IFCC advances a renewed vocabulary for confronting the ethical and aesthetic crises of the present.

Events

The IFCC’s events and programmes are built on a commitment to interdisciplinary engagement.
They convene philosophers, scientists, social theorists, and cultural practitioners to address the central challenges of our time — from technological transformation and ecological crisis to the erosion of democratic life and the redefinition of human agency.
Each event is conceived as a forum for critical inquiry, designed to bridge disciplinary boundaries and reconnect thought to the world it seeks to understand.
Through lectures, dialogues, and seminars, the institute fosters collaboration between fields too often kept apart, demonstrating that confronting complex problems requires a plurality of perspectives and methods.