Camilla Balbi

Historians have now commonly acknowledged how the photographic atlas, in its many forms – perhaps the most celebrated being Aby Warbug’s Atlas Mnemosyne – had been employed in Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic as an extraordinary epistemological device to conduct historical, political, psychological and more broadly culturological investigations.
And yet, some declinations of the device-atlas still remain singularly unstudied. This is the case with Das Frauengesicht der Gegenwart (The Face of the Women of the Present), the subject of the proposed contribution. Published in 1930 by the art historian Lothar Brieger, shortly before racial laws forced him to leave Germany, this photographic book (71 pages out of 135 are photographic plates) was realized with the aim of celebrating female self-affirmation against the conservative tendencies that were beginning to spread in the ascendant National Socialist society, constituting perhaps the most intense, and the last, representation of the Neue Frau in the German context. In the article, a dual perspective will be adopted. On the one hand, Brieger’s thought will be analyzed in dialogue with the main theories of photography of his time (above all, that of his
friend Walter Benjamin, whose wife, Dora Kellner, is included in the portraits). On the other hand, the photographs in the book themselves will also be considered separately from their theoretical framework, investigating the view of the “modern woman” proposed by their material authors, the – long forgotten – female photographers Nini and Carry Hess.

Between 1929 and 1930 the Der Kreis journal hosted a debate among art historians and museum directors on how art copies were changing the museum landscape. The so-called Hamburger Faksimile-Streit constitutes a crucial moment in the Weimarian theoretical debate on the categories of copy and original, culminating a few years later in Benjamin’s well-known essay on the work of art. After examining the theses of the main participants in the debate, this article focus on the position of curator and museum director Alexander Dorner – the only one advocating for the non-superiority of originals over copies in art museums – and on his relationship with Walter Benjamin’s later theories.

This paper addresses geographical displacement, elsewhereness, as a fundamental experience in early twentieth-century culture. It examines its aesthetic and epistemological consequences within the specifi c context of German-Jewish women's photography in pre-state Israel during the 1930s. The article focuses on photographs taken during the Palestine sojourns of two prominent photographers from the Weimar Republic: Marianne Breslauer and Ellen Auerbach. The two moved not only through geographical places, but also across intersecting imaginaries, ethno-religious and gender identities, on the margins of discourses and political systems: as women, as Jews, and as photographers. The article explores these balances at a delicate historical juncture: when a distant spiritual homeland slowly becomes a complex territory for a very complicated immigration, and travel photography turns into exile photography. The resulting photographs exist within a dynamic interplay between ancient collective memories of the "Land of the Bible", and the modernist iconographies associated with Zionist nation-building; the enchanted gaze towards the Arab East; and a German training altered by displacement. Lastly, from a theoretical perspective, the study considers how the displacement of the two photographers partially decentered their modernist background, expanding the dimensions of the modernist canon to include nomadism, memory, and longing.

Contemporary computer vision software represents an incredible opportunity for both art history researchers and museum practitioners: it is a tool through which images can be described, organized, studied and shared. In this process—the one in which a computer vision software operates over a database of art history images—there are however a variety of dynamics at play. They have to do with theoretical assumptions, historical categories, technological constraints and ideological stances: a set of premises which calls for a closer methodological survey of the process. We propose an account which uses art theory and visual culture studies to scrutinize the different steps and activities which constitute the computer vision analysis: after all, the study of images has historically been a prerogative of art historians. Our intuition is that art images databases somehow provide a “protected environment” in which to observe how old problems, inherent to the discipline, interact with new problems created by the way we consume and design software. The three levels at which we will try to detect biased stances answer three different questions. Which images are we talking about? Which research questions are we asking? Which linguistic and political logics are at play? In order to do so, we will begin the discussion by debunking the myth of a simple parallelism between these new forms of conceptualizing the real and traditional ones, challenging Manovich’s (1999) use of Panofsky’s symbolic form (1927) as a hermeneutic of the database. We will show instead how the art-database logic somehow sticks to the traditional art historical narrative, while at the same time producing new kinds of biases. Then, we will focus on how this technology actually works, and which kind of art historical thought lays behind the algorithm. Our guess is that the praxis of this software is closer to the connoisseurship than to the art historical research. Thirdly, we will analyze the labeling process through which computer vision software creates descriptive metadata of the images in question, using Mitchell’s critical iconology (1994) account to problematize the strong ideological and political stance behind the image-text relationship. Throughout the discourse, and especially in the final paragraph, we will address the transparency and evaluation standards which need to be defined in order to allow a strict methodological approach to guard and guide the process, at times lacking both in the cultural sector and in the wider visual field. What will emerge is an account of computer vision software and processes which appear to be far from ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ in their extremely layered functioning, built in the midst of diverse stakeholders’ interests and procedural false steps. Granted that these technologies are however contributing to build the visual culture of our time, we detect a series of overlooked assumptions along the way through the lenses of art theory, hoping to contribute to the design of a clearer view.

In 1955, Ellen Auerbach, a Weimarian advertising photographer of the Bauhaus circles, chose to document her trip to Mexico with her colleague Eliot Porter, using color photography for the first time in her career. This article seeks to contextualize, for the first time, Auerbach's decision to use color in her workand within the history of modernism in general. In a discourse where exile studies interweave closely with art theory, I intend to trace the paths of a modernism that might have been, but that was erased by history and migration, demonstrating how the use of color in a non-Western exile context became a starting point for rethinking the aims and epistemic possibilities of the photographic medium within and beyond the modernist perspective.

Through a perusal of archival material and guides of the time, this paper aims to reconstruct the theoretical and curatorial project behind the reorganization of the Landesmuseum of Hanover undertaken by Alexander Dorner between 1923 and 1936.
The approach adopted, which analyzes the museum as a theoretical text, has two main results. On the one hand, it broadens the critical discourse on the art theory produced in Weimar to include museum institutions, and, on the other, it helps in reconstructing Dorner’s thought, whose theoretical relevance has often been obscured by a “reductionist”, bureaucratic interpretation of his work as a museum director. This study highlights how the eccentric nature of his position – suspended between art history and militant criticism – leads to an extraordinarily innovative thought, which hybridizes classical art theory (Dorner dialogues fruitfully with Alois Riegl and Erwin
Panofsky) with a deep understanding of the most radical avant-garde experiences of the time. The first part of the work reconstructs Dorner’s positions on the historicity of vision, and how they found expression in the environments of the Landesmuseum. The second part dwells on the problems of exhibition design, and on the pragmatic framework for the realization of Dorner’s display philosophy

Between 1929 and 1930 the Der Kreis journal hosted a debate among art historians and museum directors on how art copies were changing the museum landscape. The so-called Hamburger Faksimile-Streit constitutes a crucial moment in the Weimarian theoretical debate on the categories of copy and original, culminating a few years later in Benjamin’s well-known essay on the work of art. After examining the theses of the main participants in the debate, this article focus on the position of curator and museum director Alexander Dorner – the only one advocating for the non-superiority of originals over copies in art museums – and on his relationship with Walter Benjamin’s later theories.

The main objective of this paper is the study of Jenny Holzer’s latest works, specifically the Expose (2020) and Protect (2020) projects, from a comparative and historical perspective.
The study opens by tracing the echoes – present in the works produced during the pandemic and the darkest time of the Trump administration – of a younger Jenny Holzer, who was struggling to emerge in the late 80s and early 90s as she wanted to give voice to the desperation of New York, a city that had been brought to its knees both by the explosion of the AIDS virus, and the silence and indifference of Reagan’s policy on the issue. Secondly, I will offer some observations about the hitherto unseen interaction of Holzer’s well-established artistic hallmarks – the trucks and the signboard, which she had been using since the 80s – with the use of social media, particularly Instagram, showing how venturing onto social media during the pandemic was a great occasion for Holzer to overcome the postmodern positions of her youth and to rediscover the more strictly political vein of her artistic practice.

Cosa significa dire che un'opera d'arte è "ebraica"? E qual è stato l'apporto della teoria dell'arte propria dell'ebraismo alle innovazioni linguistiche introdotte dagli autori ebrei nel sistema dell'arte del XX Secolo? Partendo da queste e altre domande, l'articolo intende sviluppare un percorso esegetico volto a mostrare come l'identità ebraica si sia declinata, nelle sperimentazioni artistiche del secolo scorso, in forme e soluzioni linguistiche molto diverse tra loro. In particolare, la mia analisi si concentrerà sulle relazioni tra l'anicosnimo proprio della tradizione veterotestametaria e le tendenze astratte emerse nella pittura americana del secondo dopoguerra. Dopo aver discusso le peculiarità del concetto ebraico di astrazione, il mio focus sarà sulla loro declinazione - antitetica e complementare - nella produzione artistica di Barnett Newman e Mark Rothko.

The interplay between the discoveries of physics and the popular press underwent a decisive moment in 1895, with the announcement of Rontgen’s X-rays in the Vienna Presse, marking a significant shift in how scientific breakthroughs were communicated to the public. This is the beginning of the ambiguous status of these technical images, which have recently stepped out of the circles of medical and scientific history to become an important chapter in media culture. Rather than treating X-ray images as media, this paper explores them as photomechanically mediated objects. Examining their journey through periodical culture as photomechanical reproductions reveals their role as agents of artistic and cultural transformation of fundamental importance to the history of
modernism and the avant-garde. This presentation looks at the intersections between medical and photographic images in the 1920s and 30s, tracing the path of a single X-ray photograph. Originally taken in a Berlin laboratory for the training of female scientists, this image found its way into medical publications in Vienna and art journals in Berlin before appearing in the Prague avant-garde magazine ReD in 1928. In the early 1930s, it was finally mistakenly attributed to Moholy Nagy’s artistic corpus. This unpublished case study aims to show how approaching these images from the material perspective of periodical studies can enrich our understanding of the relationship between scientific images and art history. By reconstructing their transnational migration, this approach leads to new insights and attributions, shedding light on marginalized subjectivities and authorships, especially those of women, traditionally overlooked by the canon.

A neue Shehen? Germaine Krull and Trude Fleischmann Aktfotografie

The paper delves into the pioneering work of Germaine Krull (1908) and Trude Fleischmann (1895), two Mitteleuropean women who defied societal norms as secular, middle-class, emancipated, and openly queer women working in photography. Their contribution to European photographic Modernism have often been overlooked, marginalized by a historiography that has long neglected female experiences scarred by history and exile. The focus of this study is a reexamination of the early nude photographic portraits they both realized between 1924 and 1925. Through the recent lenses of queer and visual studies, I aim to situate the gaze of these young photographers within the broader cultural contexts of the era. This entails placing their work in dialogue with influential currents such as the neue Sehen and the freikörperkultur, while also scrutinizing its reception within the official medical and media spheres of the time. Ultimately, this article uncovers how the queer gaze both decentered and redefined representations of the female nude during the dynamic – and dramatically ephemeral – cultural landscape of the 1920s.

My presentation aims to comprehensively examine the emergence and development of a female and Jewish photographic culture during the Weimar Republic, and its subsequent diasporic trajectory post- 1933, both historically and theoretically. Rather than focusing on specific case studies, I intend to offer a broader narrative that critically illuminates the historical landscape of the decade. Central to this inquiry is a nuanced understanding of the cultural milieu in which figures like Lucia Moholy operated — a milieu characterized by complicated intersections of ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and gender.
Through this lens, I will examine the material, institutional and socio-historical factors that shaped photography in the Weimar years as a distinctly "gendered" practice, and the resulting esthetic manifestations. Furthermore, I will discuss the post-history of this cultural phenomenon, which was characterized by forced migration, loss and oblivion under the National Socialist regime. The experience of exile, which subjected this coherent corpus to processes of hybridization and transnationality, especially towards non-Western directions, will be considered as a new "formal category" that generates new paradigms, worthy of being addressed systematically.
This story, in fact, is the story of a physical exile, but also of a historiographical one. These women were not only pushed to the margins of geographic and historical discourse due to the politics of their time, but also because of their racial and gender identities. Bringing these gazes, their networks, their aesthetics and their movements to the fore forces us as scholars to explore new hermeneutical paths within the history of photography in Weimar. Which on their way encounter material history, exile studies and decolonial studies. An operation that does not merely expand the boundaries of the canon, but also profoundly alters its very essence.

This talk by Dr. Camilla Balbi delves into the persona of Erwin Panofsky, one of the most important art historians of the last century, from a new, mediological perspective. Drawing from Balbi’s forthcoming book, “Erwin Panofsky and Modernity: Painting, Photography and Film”, the discussion will focus on Panofsky’s exploration of the photographic medium.
A remarkable aspect of this analysis lies in Panofsky’s efforts to understand the medium beyond its artistic realm. The pages devoted to the interplay between painting and photography extend to medial considerations of their social applications, be they scientific or museological. This exploration navigated the urgent theoretical debates of the time, engaging in dialogue with renowned personalities such as Max Sauerlandt, Siegfried Kracauer, and Heinrich Schwarz.
The lecture unfolds the historical and theoretical layers in Panofsky’s writings on photography. It deals with the interplay between originality and reproduction and the nexus between knowledge and visualization. Finally, the lecture explores
the impact of Panofsky’s exploration of photographic technique on the birth of iconology, revealing a surprising connection between his reflections and the ethos of contemporary Bildwissenschaft.

With the development of photomechanical printing techniques around 1900, the dissemination of visual information about art objects expanded on an unprecedented scale. For the first time, editors, publishers, gallerists, auctioneers, artists, art historians, and associations had access to a seemingly unlimited supply of images. Together with photographers, studios, and photo agencies, these figures became key actors in a distribution model in which photomechanically reproduced artworks played a central role. As a consequence, those who worked in the fields of art and art history now had to deal with entirely new visual objects: from illustrated books and periodicals to facsimiles, postcards, calendar pages, and clipping collections. All these items were kept on shelves and in boxes, included in scrapbooks, or pinned to walls, as part of personal or institutional archives. They served both as research documents and as evidence of personal visual obsessions or new collective ideas.

The diversity of these novel photomechanical sources, the system that produced and surrounded them, and their distribution and cultural impact are still an open field for investigation, one that seems all the more important to address as this visual information – made widely accessible by the digitization campaigns of recent years – can form the basis for material and medial counter-history of twentieth-century art. In order to reflect on the specific nature of photomechanical reproductions of art (with regard to their materiality, distribution, and uses), the conference navigates between the fields of the history of art and photography, periodical studies, visual and media studies, and the digital humanities.

Which actors and techniques were involved in making photomechanical reproductions of works of art? What were the socio-economic and aesthetic drivers of the activities of photo agencies and publishers? Which subjects whose identity has so far remained in the background – such as women or minorities – can be reclaimed by analyzing reproductions from a material and systemic perspective? What role did pictures of works of art play in the editorial and cultural policies of their time? What do we know about their reception? How did the photomechanical reproduction of artworks affect art historiography, teaching, criticism, and the canon? Which narratives that have fallen out of the canon can be restored through digital methods?

These questions take on a new urgency with the increasing importance of the digital processing of image data, as it has opened new horizons for studying reproductions on a large scale, removed some of the limitations of accessibility, and paved the way for larger comparative studies. At the same time, these new tools raise critical questions that have not been fully explored, and require greater awareness of the objects, techniques, processes, and contexts under consideration. We invited speakers from across the methodology spectrum: from close to distant reading, from traditional to digital-based approaches. The goal is to open a discussion between scholars conducting qualitative research and the growing number of digital experts working in interdisciplinary teams.

This paper investigates self-representation and identity renegotiation within the complex generational movement that saw German Jewish intellectuals and artists – educated in secular, progressive, and European circles – confronting the Middle Eastern imaginary and landscape for the first time in the early 1930s. In the proposed contribution, I will address the photographic depictions of this experience, analyzing the photographs taken during the stays in Palestine by two prominent female photographers of the Weimar Republic in the 1930s: Ellen Auerbach (1933) and Marianne Breslauer (1931). These “neue Frauen” are authors long forgotten by historiography, which has largely favored a male modernist canon, while also overlooking the experiences that emerged from migration to the geographical margins of cultural and artistic discourse. Shedding light on their work contributes, in this sense, to offering a gendered perspective on Orientalism, but also a properly female voice on the imagery and private mythologies of mid-century female German Jewry.
Realized in Auerbach’s case as a consequence of emigration prompted by the rise of National Socialism, or in Breslauer’s case as reportage from those “grand tours” common among the German-Jewish bourgeoisie at the turn of the century, these photos present themselves as intricate palimpsests, layering family biblical imaginaries nurtured in central Europe, Orientalism, the modern Zionist sense of a transnational community, and the pronounced otherness of the new context. The article will therefore take into account the multiple lines of influence that animate these photographs, examining the interplay between the ancient collective memories of the “land of the bible” and the modernist iconographies (collective memories in another sense) of the Zionist nation- building process, the enchanted gaze toward the Arab East, the feminist secular identity of the artist, and the formal techniques employed by studio photographers who, for the first time, were exploring the open landscapes of the Middle East. Lastly, from a theo- retical perspective, the study considers how the displacement of these two photographers partially decentralized their modernist background, expanding the dimensions of the modernist canon to encompass nomadism, memory, and yearning.

The idea of Renaissance, foreshadowed by the Italian humanists and implied in Giorgio Vasari's historiographical sketch (1550 and 1568), was reinterpreted in the 18th century and even more so in the 19th century. Since then, this idea has undergone a whole series of reinterpretations, critiques and revisions. Yet, five centuries later, this idea still has a seemingly inexhaustible vitality and, at least in the context of art history, even a considerable amount of credibility.

In the final, highly critical years of the Weimar Republic, as the politically debated bicentenary of Lessing’s birth (1929) approached, German art theory and aesthetics returned to reflect critically on the legacy of Laocoon (1767). In particular, on the sharp distinction it imposed between spatial and temporal arts. The analysis of Lessing’s reinterpretations that took place in the Warburg Kreis during this period will reveal an important aspect of the neo-Kantian and typically Hamburgian approach to the media. A radically different concept from that of modernist medium specificity emerges here, in which time becomes something that also belongs to the figurative arts.
After discussing Ernst Cassirer’s theoretical formulation of the problem, I will look at its art historical consequences in the thinking of Erwin Panofsky, paying particular attention to his essay Albrecht Du ̈rers rhythmishe Kunst (1926). The study of rhythm in Du ̈rer’s art presents itself, on the one hand, as an explicitly anti-Lessing problem, that forces the theorist to deal, for the first time, with the dynamism and the temporality of the pictorial image. On the other hand, it opens up art history to disciplines that in the same years were devoted to exploring the “mythopoetische Fruchtbarkeit” (Salgaro, Vangi 2015) of the concept of rhythm: such as architecture, psychology and avant-garde art. Combining theoretical and philological research, the talk seeks to explain the complex intermedial conjunction that animates the concept of rhythm in Panofsky’s thought, considering it a fundamental – and forgotten – chapter of his mediological thought.

The aim of the conference is to examine the state of art criticism in Italy, from the first experiences of the twentieth century to the present, and to verify the existence of a kind of canon of art criticism in our country. "Improper Weapons" aims to fill a gap in the field of art criticism by bringing together authoritative figures from the Italian art criticism scene and scholars, doctoral students, research fellows, researchers and college professors to explore a topic that has often been treated in a fragmentary and incomplete way.

In 1955 Ellen Auerbach, a German Jewish advertising photographer of the Bauhaus circles migrated in the United States, travelled to Mexico with her colleague Eliot Porter. To document the trip, she chose to use color photography for the first time in her career.
In my contribution I will contextualize, for the first time, Auerbach’s decision to use color in her work – which made her an early adopter of the new technique within the history of Modernism. Reconstructing this neue Frau intellectual path, long neglected by historiography, implies considering complex epistemological axex. Such axes cross the emancipation movements emerging in Germany in the early 1920s, taking in photography, one of the few media accessible to women artists, the Modernism of the Bauhaus, the rise of a mass visual culture, and —finally—the experience of exile following the advent of National Socialism. From a methodological point of view, looking at Auerbach’s exile production
from a trans-regional perspective allows us to retrace the steps of a diasporic Modernism, one that remained silent and peripheral to its post-war, North-American and male-coded canons. In a discourse where exile studies interweave closely with art theory, I thus intend to trace the paths of a Modernism that might have been, but that was erased by history and migration, demonstrating how the use of color in a non-Western exile context became a starting point for rethinking the aims and epistemic possibilities of the photographic medium within and beyond the modernist perspective.

The conference aims to address questions relevant to the ways in which emerging technologies, such as 360 photography, artificial intelligence, machine-made images, augmented reality, satellites, drones, etc. influence photographic practices and potentially expand contemporary visualities.  Can such technologies “expand” or “limit” the photographic vision and frame? And if so, what are the socio-political, aesthetic, and ethical implications of the use of such technologies in relation to photographic practices? How do emerging technologies impact on our relationship with photographic images, and on the medium of photography in general?

This conference addressed decisive aspects of modernism in its golden year of 1922, a year in which, as Jean-Michel Rabaté has suggested, “one might be tempted to replace ‘high modernism’ with ‘total modernism’” or argue that the main problematic “object of high modernism is totality just before it turns into totalitarianism” (Rabaté 2015). It is this claim for high modernism as “total modernism”, and its reverberations today, that this conference is committed to examine, exploring the ways in which “one sees a metamorphosis of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk into an artistic totality that combines all media (music, poetry, painting, staging, dancing, and film) and, moreover, superimposes the most experimental and the most popular” (Rabaté 2015).

ll Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca Bioetica (CIRB), in collaborazione con
il Seminario Permanente «Etica Bioetica Cittadinanza», con il Comitato Etico dell’Ateneo federiciano e con l’USR della Campania, promuove per il «Giorno della Memoria» una iniziativa di commemorazione e di studio. Il convegno, dedicato al tema «Identità e diversità: tra discriminazione dei diritti e persecuzione delle vite», si svolgerà online il 27 gennaio 2022 e potrà essere seguito in diretta sul canale youtube del CIRB. La sessione mattutina (ore 09.00), intitolata «L’annientamento delle diversità» e presieduta da Enrico Di Salvo, sarà aperta dai saluti dei Rettori degli Atenei convenzionati, di Andrea Patroni Griffi, di Domenica Addeo, di Daniela Lourdes Falanga, di Claudio Buccelli, di Emilia D’Antuono ed Enrica Amaturo. Dopo l’introduzione di Paolo Valerio, interverranno Rossella Bonito Oliva con una relazione dal titolo “Corpi negati, cancellazione della presenza”, Giovanni Dall’Orto con una relazione dal titolo “La persecuzione nazifascista degli omosessuali” e Camilla Balbi con una relazione dal titolo “Beyond the pink triangle: la (lentissima) memorializzazione dell’olocausto queer”.

Photography is a linchpin of the cognitive, imaginative and social potential of modern man. As a
causal and mechanical image, as a reproduction technique, or as an extension of the visual senses, from its very outset, it fuelled key social changes, influenced the approaches to learning, interpretation, self-reflection and memory, and made major inroads into the system of art and ways in
which various art genres and the media functioned. Thanks to photography, the paradoxical dichotomy between truth and manipulation became a leitmotiv of the 20th century: and photography
shapes the further development of science, art and communication to this day. Photography is
one of the tools with which we approach the world and talk about it. As such, it is, first and foremost, a medium, a carrier of information about things and phenomena. Yet its own establishment,
in the sense of the photograph as an autonomous image or phenomenon characterized by a stable identity, history and theory, is far more complex. In the field of aesthetics, catachresis is a frequent topic of discussion. This is no coincidence. The radical polarization with which we
approach photography (art/craft, art/documentary, truth/manipulation, etc.) gives rise to its perennial subordination to ingrained interpretation mechanisms which, however, were created for other
types of image and originated in different methodological contexts. The results are, on the one
hand, the distortion of photography, which is genuinely atypical when compared with the four
remaining image types (painting, drawing, graphic art and collage), and on the other, the dissonance intrinsic to the way we address it in various situations. We still talk about "photography",
but it always takes on a slightly different and specific meaning.

In che modo il concetto classico di multimedialità si è evoluto nell’era moderna e postmoderna? Quali forme di ibridazione hanno caratterizzato i linguaggi artistici dal Novecento ai giorni nostri? Dispositivi e interfacce sono strumenti neutri o piuttosto veicoli di rimediazioni figurative e plastiche? Il convegno Transmedialità e crossmedialità: nuove prospettive, organizzato dal corso di dottorato in Visual and Media Studies dell’Università IULM, si propone di ridiscutere il tema dei rapporti tra le arti e dei corrispondenti codici espressivi alla luce del contesto mediale in cui tutti siamo quotidianamente immersi, in qualità di creatori e fruitori di contenuti. Il convegno si articola in due giornate, per un totale di tre sessioni. La prima, Nuove forme di scrittura e riscrittura dello spazio mediale, si interrogherà da un lato sugli sconfinamenti del testo letterario verso il teatro e le pratiche visuali, dall’altro sul legame tra tecniche di rappresentazione artistica e forme di conoscenza/testimonianza (fotografia, film-diario). La sessione Anacronismi e dislocazioni dello spazio espositivo promette una riflessione, dalla cave art al museo del futuro, sui luoghi dell’esperienza artistica contemporanea, anche in riferimento a particolari casi di studio (Banksy, Lawrence Abu Hamdan). Machinima e universi narrativi sono solo due esempi del complesso ecosistema al centro dell’ultima sessione Interface, entertainment e conoscenza, in un itinerario cross/transmediale dalla pornografia a Google Arts & Culture, dal ludico al didattico-educativo.
Ad aprire le tre sessioni saranno altrettanti ospiti, afferenti a ciascuna delle aree caratterizzanti del dottorato in Visual and Media Studies: Nadia Fusini (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) per Literature and Transmedia Studies, Marialuisa Catoni (IMT Alti Studi di Lucca) per Visual Arts, Pietro Montani (Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”) per Film and Media Studies.

The criticisms addressed by contemporary art theory, and especially visual studies, to Erwin Panofsky's thought essentially concern the historian's alleged indifference to the medial dimension of images, and to extra-artistic images: art history failed as Bildwissenschaft because it never confronted the media of modernity; iconology would have become a Bildwissenschaft if Erwin Panofsky had not encapsulated this methodology in an analysis of Renaissance allegories (Belting, 2001).
In the proposed work, this reading will be challenged, exploring Panofsky's reflections in a terrain hitherto completely unexplored by the historiography on the author: photography. A story never told, probably because of the private and "scattered" nature of the writings on the eighth art, entrusted to personal correspondences, or brief mentions in major writings and lesser-known articles. Beginning with an analysis of the relationship between painting and photography in Panofsky's writings, in which the author engages in a close dialogue with some of the most important media and photographic theorists of his time - such as Siegfried Kracauer and Heinrich Schwarz - I will bring to light the late Panofsky's  attention to the relationship between representational techniques and forms of knowledge, an attention that uncovers an unsuspected affinity between his mature thought and contemporary Bildwissenschaft.

Transizioni di memoria prosegue le attività del Centro Studi della Fondazione Fossoli in continuità con il precedente Sites of Transit in Europe from WWII to the present. History, Spaces, Memories (2018) da cui è stato tratto il volume Camps of Transit, Sites of Memory. Past, Present, Perspectives di prossima uscita presso Peter Lang nell’ambito della collana Cultural Memories. Il convegno si radica nella missione primaria dalla Fondazione Fossoli che si occupa di promuovere la ricerca e di conservare e tramandare la storia e le memorie dell’omonimo Campo e dei luoghi di memoria carpigiani a questo connessi, il Museo Monumento al Deportato politico e razziale di Carpi e i locali della ex Sinagoga.

In 1962 Eugenio Battisti published L'Antirinascimento, profoundly renewing the field of Renaissance studies in Italy. The following year, the historian would found and edit Marcatré - the historic four-monthly journal devoted to experimental art and literature. This contribution aims to review for the first time the Battisti's publicity immediately preceding these experiences (in particular the articles written between 1954 and 1962 in the pages of Il Mondo), considering it as a "laboratory" for the profound critical and art historical renewal of the 1960s. In particular, I will focus on the complex interdependence between historical studies, popularization, and attention to the contemporary that mark the author's critical and theoretical activity.

Le critiche consuete mosse dalla teoria dell’arte più recente, specialmente quella proveniente dalle fila dei visual studies, al pensiero di Erwin Panofsky in generale, e al sistema iconologico in particolare, riguardano essenzialmente la presunta indifferenza dello storico amburghese per la dimensione mediale delle immagini (considerate dalla critica “perfect, transparent media through which reality may be represented to understanding”) e per le immagini extra-artistiche. In quest’articolo ci si propone di mettere parzialmente in discussione questo paradigma critico, ormai canonizzato, investigando, in una prospettiva transmediale, le riflessioni di Panofsky in un terreno finora inesplorato dalla storiografia sull’autore: quello della fotografia. Le riflessioni sul nuovo medium – sporadiche, incidentali, eppure singolarmente acute e coerenti – attraversano, infatti, un arco di circa trent’anni, arricchendosi nel dialogo con alcuni dei più importanti intellettuali della Germania dell’anteguerra e dell’America del dopoguerra, e restituendoci un capitolo dimenticato della “preistoria” delle teorie mediali contemporanee, e un suo interprete insospettato.

With the development of photomechanical printing techniques around 1900, the dissemination of visual information about art objects expanded on an unprecedented scale. For the first time, editors, publishers, gallerists, auctioneers, artists, art historians, and associations had access to a seemingly unlimited supply of images. Together with photographers, studios, and photo agencies, these figures became key actors in a distribution model in which photomechanically reproduced artworks played a central role. As a consequence, those who worked in the fields of art and art history now had to deal with entirely new visual objects: from illustrated books and periodicals to facsimiles, postcards, calendar pages, and clipping collections. All these items were kept on shelves and in boxes, included in scrapbooks, or pinned to walls, as part of personal or institutional archives. They served both as research documents and as evidence of personal visual obsessions or new collective ideas.

L’Università IULM di Milano, in collaborazione con il Center for Visual Studies (CVS) della IULM, promuove il convegno, “Armi improprie. Lo stato della critica d’arte in Italia”, a cura di Vincenzo Trione, che si terrà il 27 e il 28 aprile 2023 negli spazi dell’ateneo. Il convegno mira a indagare lo stato della critica d’arte in Italia, dall’inizio del Novecento a oggi, proponendosi di verificare l’esistenza di una sorta di canone della critica d’arte del nostro Paese. “Armi improprie” intende colmare un vuoto nel campo degli studi di settore, esplorando un tema finora trattato in modo spesso
frammentario e parziale.
Attraverso i contributi di numerosi studiosi e critici d’arte italiani, si analizzerà l’apporto di libri divenuti “classici” della disciplina e, grazie a un’adeguata mappatura, si tenterà di restituire il ruolo chiave giocato da riviste di settore, periodici e quotidiani italiani nell’affermazione e nella diffusione di metodi e prospettive interpretative.