Sara Nadal-Melsió, Europe and the Wolf

Join us on Tuesday, June 3 at 7pm for a conversation between Sara Nadal-Melsió and Diana SeoHyung, for the launch of Nadal-Melsió’s book Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on the Musical Figure (Zone Books, 2025).

In Europe and the Wolf, 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.

Bios

Sara Nadal-Melsió is a Queens-based Catalan writer, curator, and educator. Her essays have appeared in various academic journals, edited volumes, and museum catalogues. In October 2024, she contributed to The Irving Sandler Essay Series at The Brooklyn Rail with her “Tombarolian Crossings.” She is the Associate Director of the Whitney Independent Study Program and the co-author of Politically Red (MIT, 2023).

Diana SeoHyung is a writer and translator, whose writing has appeared in Art in America, ArtAsiaPacific, The Brooklyn Rail, Momus, The AMP and is the recipient of the 2024 Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing. She is an immigrant, born in Seoul, South Korea, raised in Queens, New York, and is a mother of a six-year-old called Mark.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program [​at​] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

Also check out other Arts events in Brooklyn, Literary Art events in Brooklyn.