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Peter Kolosimo: Ruin lust, fantastic archaeologies, past futures

cover of Peter Kolosimo, Non è terrestre, Milano, Sugar, series Universo sconosciuto, 3, 1968
Peter Kolosimo, Non è terrestre, Milano, Sugar, series Universo sconosciuto, 3, 1968, private collection.

Here’s to advertise some recent publications stemming from the study of Peter Kolosimo’s fantastic archaeologies, their early modern and modern literary genealogies, and their editorial success in the twentieth-century Italian and international markets.



Giulia Iannuzzi, Editoria dei misteri, archeologie fantastiche, futuri passati: Il successo di Peter Kolosimo e l’editore Sugar, Line@editoriale, 14, 2022, pp. 14-46, open access at https://interfas.univ-tlse2.fr/lineaeditoriale/1599

This article is a written version of the talk Kolosimo and Sugar. Publishing, fantastic archaeologies, past futures given at the conference PK. 100 years of Peter Kolosimo. The rediscovery of a successful author. Inventor of a new publishing genre, Bolzano, 15 December 2022 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI2S20qcSng). An updated version is now being featured in the conference proceedings: http://www.cisu.org/un-nuovo-libro-su-kolosimo-presentato-al-senato/

I would like to thank the conference organisers for the invitation to attend and for the fruitful exchanges initiated on that occasion.

This essay offers a survey of Peter Kolosimo’s books published by Sugar (later SugarCo) between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s in Italy, and of their remarkable commercial success. Kolosimo’s works discussed fantastic theories such as the possibility that the earth had been visited by hyper-evolved aliens in the distant past, or that mythical advanced civilisations had existed in ancient times. His popularity ushered in the spread, in Italy, of a wider constellation of books and periodicals dealing with mysterious topics, from ufology to pseudoarchaeology and occult sciences. This article focuses on the collaboration between Kolosimo and his publisher based in Milan.

 

Giulia Iannuzzi, La vertigine temporale della rovina, in Almanacco della fantarcheologia: Antichi astronauti, continenti scomparsi e futuri passati, ed. Fabio Camilletti, Bologna: Odoya, 2022, pp. 19-42, ISBN 9788862887748, link on publisher website

I presented part of this research in the paper Ruin lust, fantastic archaeologies, past futures at Between fiction and society: Imagination and world building in the aftermath of a global pandemic (IULM, 13 October 2022).

This paper examines the ruin as a device of cognitive estrangement used in speculative fiction to thematise and problematise given conceptualisations of historical time and temporal linearity.

Since the modern age, the ruin as a fragment of the past has engender new imaginary colonisations of a secularised future. Drawing on the hypothesis that the fantastic ruin and archaeological methods applied to past futures matured in the European imagination during the late modern age, this research connects twentieth-century archaeological and clipeological science fiction to the long-standing history of the ruin within a fantastic imagination.

Materialising heliotropic conceptions of civilisation, especially since the 18th century the ruin has aroused the interest of writers, historians and painters in connection to notions such as those of development and decadence, modernity and crisis applied to human societies as well as to imaginary alien civilisations. The idea of a history magistra vitae and of a cyclical course of civilisations became premises for the application to the future of history as a method and for the aesthetic appreciation and poetics of ruin, discussed by Denis Diderot and Edmund Burke, and epitomised in the ruined Louvre painted by Hubert Robert and in Joseph Michael Gandy’s pictorial work portraying the Bank of England in ruins.

The temporal estrangement of the ruin took on futuristic connotations inspiring some of the earliest speculations about the time to come. The contemplation of the remains of the past synecdochically fostered the idea of a future observer contemplating the ruins of the present in writers such as Thomas Lyttelton and Volney. Towards the end of the 18th and throughout the 19th century, the idea of radical changes foreseen in the future increasingly incorporated the possibility of disasters, catastrophes and extinctions (e.g., the Earth in ruin and the last men imagined by Bodin, Grainville, Shelley).

This paper outlines the connection between these precedents and twentieth-century archaeological science fiction that hypothesised the existence of hyper-evolved terrestrial or alien civilisations located in a distant past.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Giulia Iannuzzi (October 2, 2024). Peter Kolosimo: Ruin lust, fantastic archaeologies, past futures. Geographies of Time. Retrieved May 14, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12eld