Thomas Oberender: Philippe Parreno is the artist whose exhibition is currently on view in the atrium and the ground floor of the Gropius Bau. Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher and professor based in Paris and the author of The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2018). When Philippe approached me with Coccia’s books, I was particularly fascinated by Goods: Advertising, Urban Space and the Moral Law of the Image (2018). This short book offers an unusual perspective on capitalism, and specifically on how it creates a morality through advertising. Emanuele, before we discuss your new book about Philippe’s work, what are the ideas behind Goods?

Emanuele Coccia: The book starts with the location where advertising normally appears, that is on walls in public. For much of civilisation’s history, at least European civilisation, these were actually the places where the city gave expression to its own voice. In formal terms it is about systems of ethics, about gods and history, about the plague and the dead. The question that occupied me while I was writing it was what does it mean that we now only see images of commodities in the places where a city normally projects its own...