In this stunningly original book, Sara Nadal-Melsió explores how the work of several contemporary artists illuminates the current crisis of European universalist values amid the brutal realities of exclusion and policing of borders. The “wolf” is the name Baroque musicians gave to the dissonant sound produced in any attempt to temper and harmonize an instrument. Europe and the Wolf brings this musical figure to bear on contemporary aesthetic practices that respond to Europe’s ongoing social and political contradictions. Throughout, Nadal-Melsió understands Europe as a conceptual problem that often relies on harmonization as an organizing category. The “wolf” as an emblem of disharmony, incarnated in the stranger, the immigrant, or the refugee, originates in the Latin proverb “man is a wolf to man.” This longstanding phrase evokes the pervasive fear, and even hatred, of what is foreign, unknown, or beyond the borders of a community. The book follows the “wolf” in a series of relays between the musical, the visual, and the political, and through innovative readings of artworks—by, among others, Carles Santos, Pere Portabella, Allora&Calzadilla, and Anri Sala. Traversed by the musical, these artworks, as well as Nadal-Melsió’s writing, present unstable symbolic and material ensembles in an array of variations of political possibilities and impossibilities that evade institutions intolerant of uncertainty and wary of diversity.
Sara Nadal-Melsió is the Associate Director of the Whitney Independent Study Program. She is the coauthor of Politically Red.
“A poignant and courageous embrace of dissonance, Europe and the Wolf invites us to listen to the ontological fugitives and refugees of political or cultural hegemony. Through an intricate web of interludes, variations, and codas, Sara Nadal-Melsió assembles a rich sound assemblage of contemporary performance artists, filmmakers, musicians, and writers who excavate colonial violence as the ruinous hidden foundation of a unified Europe. The result is a surprisingly poetic and hospitable archive of dissonance, one that resists figurative traces and representation and instead captures the flash appearance of what is deemed uncertain and unsafe.” – Nicola Behrmann, Rutgers University
"You need to follow in the paces of this wondrous book, a wolf’s harried tracks, to feel what’s driving it. Nadal-Melsió theorizes the oddest effect: music that pleases through disharmony. Faculties in harmonious free play produce aesthetic pleasure, according to Kant. For Nadal-Melsió, music that throws the faculties out of tune produce another kind of pleasure and another mode of freedom. Pleasure at discovering the displaced beings, the wolves, whose free night prowls disturb Europe’s sleep.” – Paul North, Yale University
"Nadal-Melsió executes a breathtaking analysis of Europe’s fables of freedom and progress and in so doing models the most significant intervention thinking can make today: interrogating the ideal of humanity that the Enlightenment has tantalizingly offered us yet which never arrives. The book that the reader holds in their hands constitutes a meticulous undoing of the very notion of Europe even as it valiantly upholds art as the light that can lead us to the end of the tunnel." –Jorge Coronado, Northwestern University
“Nadal-Melsió writes about art that makes philosophical interventions, and therefore acts politically. These are durational works that stage music inside of art and critique inside of film, pieces that cannot be replayed in a book. We gain access to them here through Nadal-Melsió's writing, a writing that has been transformed by the works into a sort of performance. Rather than a series of critical and philosophical pronouncements ‘on’ the art, these interlinked essays are a form of orchestration, inducing us to hear the wolf tone in Bach and to explore intervals rather than live in a world of territories and borders. Page after page, we learn to find the secret dissonance inside of order and to internalize dissidence as a form of listening otherwise.” – Alexander Nagel, New York University
