It’s not new: Alessandro Baricco (where our feature on his books appears) appreciates experiments, and this is confirmed by the launch of Waterloo, “an artwork that takes the form of a newsletter,” available on Substack for those who choose to subscribe (through the site, the monthly subscription costs 30 euros, while the annual is 26 euros in 2026 and 27 euros in 2027; yes, the annual plan costs, “by choice,” less than a single month).
Space for Texts, Audio, Video, and Some Live Events
Waterloo is published by tipiace, the editorial imprint of the creative agency dieci04, and the zero issue, W1, has just been released (W2 is coming on Thursday, November 5).
The project comprises texts, audio, video and some live events, the first of which is scheduled for Wednesday, December 30 at the Theatre Galli in Rimini, as part of the “Penultimate Night” of the “Longest New Year’s Eve in the world”: these are the forms through which Baricco “will carry forward, number after number, a search into what is changing in the way human beings inhabit their own time“.
It is Baricco himself who explains, in W1, the choice of the title: “I named it Waterloo. In any case we are all on a slope, I don’t think it’s a mistake to think that something big is ending, something big is being born. Like on the hills of Waterloo. The mistake, if any, is to wonder whether for humanity it will be a matter or a tragedy. We must learn to accept that there are always defeats, there are always victories, it then depends on how you pronounce their name.”
The attempt? To understand “the alterations of the human feeling”
At the heart of Waterloo lies “the attempt to understand how the posture with which Western humans read the winds of their times is changing“: those that Baricco calls “the alterations of human feeling.”
Three strands will anchor the inquiry: “the unstoppable advance of quantum mechanics into the territories of the imaginary, the dissolving of the category of goodness and the sunset of the concept of boundary, not so much in geographical maps as in those that draw Knowledge. Other themes will be added along the way…”.
The world is changing its skin
The author continues: “I think I’ll start by sketching a certain idea I’ve been pursuing for a while. It concerns what is really happening, very under the skin of the news, much before Trump’s bombast, much further upstream than Musk’s money. There, beneath it all, the world is changing its skin: and it’s the only thing that will remain from all this, I think“.
The promise is simple: “to closely observe a person who is watching the world, at the very moment they are watching it. Without a predetermined endpoint from the outset”: Waterloo “will roll on Substack for a while”, adds Baricco, “and then we’ll see”.
The newsletter is also available in Spanish (translated by the AI Lara)
Waterloo is written in Italian and is available also in Spanish, to engage with Baricco’s numerous Spanish-speaking readers. The translation is made possible with the support of Lara, described as “the best AI in the world for professional translation,” and chosen also “to experiment with new tools and understand them better”; at the same time, “editing and revision remain entrusted to the tipiace editorial team.”
On Substack Waterloo lives in its canonical form as a newsletter. In time it will also become a site, “which will try to widen the research starting from the published texts, through other perspectives and non-chronological modes of consumption.”
