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Mission and Research Orientation
The Institute’s mission is to renew the political and ethical imagination of the present.
Through philosophical inquiry, artistic practice, and cross-disciplinary collaboration, IFCC investigates how contemporary mechanisms of control — from technological surveillance to ontological reduction — affect subjectivity and social agency.
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Grounded in critical theory, phenomenology, and aesthetics, its research explores how systems of representation — from ideology to algorithm — determine what may be seen, said, and understood.
In response, the Institute promotes a practice of critical imagination that integrates theoretical analysis with creative experimentation to inform ethical, cultural, and institutional renewal.
Institutional Overview
The Istituto Fiorentino di Critica Culturale (IFCC) is an independent, non-profit research institute based in Florence, Italy.
Founded in 2025 as an Associazione Culturale, the Institute advances interdisciplinary research and public dialogue across philosophy, the arts, and the social sciences.
Its central aim is to examine how aesthetic, technological, and epistemic forms of power shape human perception, experience, and imagination.
IFCC approaches culture as a field in which domination and resistance are continuously negotiated — where images, ideas, and technologies organise collective life and condition the possibilities of thought.
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?
The IFCC investigates the invisible architectures of power that shape contemporary life — from the algorithmic governance of data and the instrumentalisation of imagination, to the aestheticisation of power and the representation of violence in media and culture.
Its research explores how these forces condition perception and possibility, and how critical thought and artistic practice can reopen the horizon of human agency.
The Istituto Fiorentino di Critica Culturale (IFCC) was founded in Florence by design.
Florence—the birthplace of the Renaissance—has long been a city where art and thought redefined what it meant to see and to imagine. To establish a centre for critical inquiry here is to renew that legacy: to expand perspective once more, not only in the visual sense, but in the political and ethical capacity to look beyond the world as it is.
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The Institute’s founding question is both simple and far-reaching:
How can we think the future again?
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IFCC examines how subjects are shaped, disciplined, and enticed by systems of power, and how the arts and critical thought can reopen the horizon of human agency. In this way, the Institute stands not only as an academic organisation but as a space for intellectual and cultural renewal—affirming that critique is the condition of creation, and that theory can transform perception itself.
Governance and Structure
IFCC operates as a non-profit Associazione Culturale under Italian law (art. 36 Codice Civile - ATECO 94.99.20).
A Board of Founding Members, together with affiliated scholars and institutional partners, provides strategic oversight and ensures the integrity and independence of the Institute’s research and public programmes.
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The Institute collaborates with universities, research centres, and cultural organisations in Italy and abroad to develop joint projects, publications, and events that connect philosophical inquiry with artistic and civic life.
Information about the IFCC’s governance and affiliates can be found on LinkedIn.
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