Carlo Campailla, Gianfranco Marrone, Ilaria Ventura Bordenca, a cura, Semiotica elementale. Materia e materiali, Palermo, Museo Pasqualino, 2023 (pp. 220)

What do chairs, boats, cupboards, doors, lecterns, pencils, kitchen utensils and surfboards have in common? Nothing, except for what they are made of: wood. A versatile material, each of these objects exploits a specific quality of wood: it is strong and durable, good for cupboards and chairs in the home; it is light and buoyant, which is why we often find it at the feet of surfers; it is insulating, perfect for fixtures or the utensils we use at the cooker to prevent unwanted burns. But what comes first, the wood or the chair? The material or the materials? The common sense would have no doubt. There are materials - somehow raw, primordial, virtual - from which man is able to think, design and produce a wide range of objects and artefacts. Indeed, to speak of elemental semiotics is to rethink purport - an element of Hjelmslev's triad, along with form and substance - beyond its apparent opposition between inescapable concreteness and constitutive unknowability. If, as we know, it has remained outside semiotic analysis, it is because it has long been understood as an undifferentiated continuum prior to semiotic organisations and formal configurations. Hence the aim of recent semiotic studies on materiality is to return to the discipline's Hjelmslevian theoretical assumptions in order to think of materiality and materials as languages and as objects of social discourses.