The River Does Not Have Preferences - An Analogy on the Logic of Capital

Essay  /  michelerovatti.com  /  2026

The River Does Not Have Preferences

In December 2025, Xi Jinping brought Emmanuel Macron to a two-thousand-three-hundred-year-old irrigation system in Sichuan province. He was not offering a lesson in hydraulic engineering.

Michele Rovatti  ·  May 2026

The Dujiangyan irrigation system was built around 256 BC by Li Bing, governor of Shu under the Qin dynasty. It is the oldest functioning irrigation infrastructure in the world — continuously operational for over two thousand three hundred years. It works by cutting a channel through a mountain to divide the Min River into an inner channel for irrigation and an outer channel for flood control. No dam. Not blockage but division. Not opposition but redirection. The river's own force is the instrument of its management. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It still irrigates the Chengdu Plain today.

The Fear of Ideas - Democracy, Cultural Hegemony, and the Politics of Thought

The Fear of Ideas

The controversy surrounding the Italian government’s proposed revision of secondary school philosophy guidelines is not merely academic. It reveals a deeper anxiety about culture, ideology, and the fragility of democratic legitimacy in an age of political exhaustion.

The Dream of Never (Book)

 

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Culture, Capital and the Refusal of limits

The Proportions Are Perfect for the Space — On Banksy, Westminster Council, and the End of Transgression

Addendum  /  The Bud That Never Blossomed  /  May 2026

The Proportions Are Perfect for the Space

On Banksy's Waterloo Place statue, Westminster City Council's warm welcome, and what it means when the institution congratulates the gesture that was supposed to unsettle it.

Michele Rovatti  ·  May 2026

This is an addendum to The Bud That Never Blossomed, which argued that the system no longer represses cultural threat — it absorbs it before it can mature. What follows is a case study, delivered by events ten days ago.

On the morning of 29 April 2026, Londoners walking through Waterloo Place found a new statue among the monuments to King Edward VII and the Crimean War dead. A suited man, holding a large flag. The flag blows back into his face, covering his eyes. He steps forward confidently off the edge of the plinth. He cannot see where he is going because the thing he is carrying for pride has blinded him. The base of the plinth bears a signature. Banksy had installed it overnight.

By the following morning the BBC had confirmed the attribution. Galleries went live. Commentators gathered. The piece was identified as a critique of blind patriotism — timed, the press noted, to coincide with King Charles III's state visit to Washington, where he addressed Congress in defence of NATO. The placement was observed to be pointed: Banksy's anti-establishment gesture installed among the monuments of British imperial and military history, the subversive work taking its place in the civic landscape of St James's.

The Ibiza Case - Politics, Spectacle, and the Management of Narrative

 

Essay  /  michelerovatti.com  /  2026

The Ibiza Case

On how a dictatorship accidentally created the conditions for one of the twentieth century's most fertile cultural experiments, and what the growth imperative did to it next.

Michele Rovatti  ·  May 2026

Pliny the Elder recorded the name in the first century AD. The Greeks had called them the Pityussae — islands of pines — for the forests that covered them. The pine trees and the gnarled juniper, the sabina, introduced by the Phoenicians and cultivated for its extraordinarily hard wood, were the first thing anyone noticed about the place. They are still there. Some of the junipers at Cala Bassa, on the island's west coast, are a hundred years old. They are classified as cultural heritage under Spanish law and cannot be touched. The beach club sets its Balinese beds in their shade.

The trees are the right place to start, because what happened to Ibiza is the story of a place whose aura — whose specific cultural gravity — was produced by conditions that had nothing to do with commerce, and then consumed by a commerce that could not have existed without them. The aura is now eroding. The trees are still there. The question is how long the trees can outlast what is being sold in their shade.