Experiences on the edge

Notes on Life and Art

In Experiences on the edge, Alexander Carnera raises a number of ethical, aesthetic and existential questions about our time. Do art and literature still have a meaning for our lives? What happens to our experiences in a life without duration - a life in the flow?
Everyone is left to themselves, with their own story and their own body. Perhaps art reminds us that it is not enough to be alive, you have to experiment - go on a discovery without knowing what you are looking for. See and work with things as they are, in their changing, degrading and strange forms. Stop linear progress, see life from the side of death.

Through the book's 22 essays, a special meeting is established with art and life as it unfolds in, among others, Knausgård, Tarkovskij, Musil, Sloterdijk, Rilke, Gombrowicz, Thykier, Sontag, Blanchot, Agamben and Kiefer.
Experiences on the edge are also an attempt to refresh the ability to appreciate the mysterious life of art and creation. Not to celebrate art and turn one's back on life, but on the contrary to reach life through art. To be at home in life thanks to art.'


Carnera's writing is "far from anecdotal, but rather thinking in real time, where something is at stake and where the twists and turns of the brain are articulated through the writing's "digestive process". Carnera is an excellent writer, but it is the closeness between life and art, pen and head, that really sets him apart... the circulation between... the artists... and Carnera himself on the road, opens up interesting avenues, which have been essayed, and these are we must walk to get where we are going: to thought experience. Yes, because "an increase in our attentiveness requires the activation of a selfless imagination which in turn makes it possible to see one's fellow human beings, the world, things." Kjetil Røed, Ny Tid.