The projects of Gian Maria Tosatti (Rome, 1980) are characterized by a trans-disciplinary aspect that questions the possible connections between the presence of the object, the space-time dimension in which it is inserted and the viewer. Environmental installations take shape, combining the constructive gesture of the artist with the active experience of the viewer.
The analysis of Antichrist imagery in Anglo-French Apocalypse manuscripts from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century shows the power of visual exegesis in medieval apocalyptic tradition. Based on Berengaudus’ commentary, such imagery presents Antichrist either as a beast or as a human figure, revealing how the medieval world envisioned the final opponent of Christ.
Starting from Claire Bishop’s research, expressed in Radical Museology, this text aims to analyze the curatorial approaches pursued by the directors of the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), the Reina Sofia (Madrid) and the MSUM (Ljubljana). Exploring their relation with the local communities, the text reflects upon the museum’s role in our time.
This paper aims to reconstruct the events that led to the foundation of Bologna’s Museo civico medievale and to analyse its display, which was projected in just three months in 1985. In fact, some museological principles, deeply rooted in the contemporary Bolognese culture, could be applied on that occasion, for instance the significance given to the context in the fruition of the work of art.
This paper intends to focus on Riccardo Benassi's artistic research, analysing the role of language in his works and the different expressions through which it is presented, from the more conceptual dimension of neologism to its expanded form in architectural and public space and in the video essay.
Still life painting, as is well known, is characterised by a scarcity of historiographic information. This makes the work of Art historians difficult, as they are often confronted with paintings lacking autorship. This is the case study of Pseudo Vitali, discussed in this article in the light of new evidence including his possible identity as Giacomo Monticelli.
This article aims to provide some initial leads for a re-reading of Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, a Bolognese artist known mainly for his ‘informative’ engravings. In particular the contribution analyzes the links that the artist managed to weave with some patrons, who appear as clients of his works or as dedicatees.
The texts presented have been written in preparation for the final exam of the course Storia del disegno e della grafica, held in the academic year 2020-2021 and entitled Contaminazioni semantiche tra disegni e stampe in Mantegna, Parmigianino, Passerotti: aspetti della poetica, dello stile e del collezionismo. By means of essays the students had the possibility to follow their own individual interests, investigating a topic of their choice that in some ways they considered related to the disciplines of the history of drawing and graphics.
This paper shows the reconstruction of Betty Danon’s work of art, from the beginnings of her career to the 1970s, starting from the documents in her archive stored at the Archivio del ’900 of Mart – Museum of modern and contemporary art in Rovereto (Italy).
AbstractPlatforms for standardising and sharing data between research and care are in construction, as they have been for some years. Currently, they take the form of creating a large ‘knowledge bank’ linking health records and biological samples with explicit consent for research use. Researchers will be able to work with the data without being able to identify patients, through pseudonymising techniques. This virtual research space is described as a walled garden. In this chapter, we ask what/who/when is a person as they are disassembled, transformed, layered and valued; emerging from and disappearing into data that are disaggregated and segregated. Together—an anthropologist, an epidemiologist and a patient who is fortuitously known as the gardener and has participated in many research studies since 2013—we hope to re-aggregate data and reconstruct a fuller history in which the patient is recognisable. This enquiry necessarily raises questions about the different ways in which a person is figured and distributed through personal experience, ethnography and biomedicine.
The article is dedicated to Pietro Fancelli’s work. It has been taking shape through a progressive reevaluation of the artist’s career since the beginning of the twentieth century with the studies on the seventeenth century in Bologna by Renato Roli until the latest papers by Angelo Mazza. Besides, the essential reference to the manuscript written by Fancelli, has allowed to link the preparatory drawing representing Alessandro e Timoteo to the much praised curtain which has been lost.
This research examines the arches erected between 1282 and 1290 on the left side of the church of San Giacomo Maggiore in Bologna. At first, workers linked to the Byzantine art of northern Italy were involved in the construction, but in the 14th century they were replaced by local artists. A renewed documentary investigation carried out in the archives of the Bologna Superintendency has uncovered some critical issues regarding protection.
AbstractFiguring is posited as always accompaniment; something that does not discernibly alter the visual and sensual dimensions of an entity, that remains apparently aloof from its configuration, but which nevertheless prompts a reorientation of engagement; which at least raises a degree of uncertainty about what it is we are confronting in an appearance that otherwise has all the hallmarks of an integrity and coherence. Mobilizing various strands of critical Black thought, the focus here is on the urban, and how there is always something only partially used, something that remains just out of reach, or is deemed irrelevant that accompanies all that is standard operating procedure, all that are demarcated and zoned spatial arrangements. Accompaniment is a submergent infrastructure that suggests something else than what is recognized.
AbstractStarting with the premise that figures are woven through the vernacular language we use to describe media, this chapter argues that figures are essential for making sense of the shaping and conditioning influence that media-technical systems exercise on contemporary life. It develops this proposition by placing the example of cloud computing in dialogue with Donna J. Haraway’s concept of figures. Cloud computing is a figure that renders heterogeneous, complex, and often-unrepresentable media-technical systems inhabitable. That is, this figure constructs a distributed media-technical system as an inhabitable “milieu.” Conversely, cloud computing also reveals figures’ methodological potential for “figuring”: that is, they can also be used to understand how computational systems construct modes of inhabitation.
AbstractThis chapter explores the prospects of assembling “research personas” as a qualitative method that uses the positionality of the researcher situated amidst algorithmically suggested content for studying how digital personalisation is produced, encountered and experienced. Building on past and ongoing digital methods projects concerning the networked flow of misinformation, disinformation and authenticity, the research persona method looks not onlyinsidebut alsoacrossalgorithms and digital methods approaches that repurpose the methods of the medium. As an immersive method that is both a product and mode of studying “figuration”, configuring research personas can show how personalisation is produced and accomplished by the interplay of various actors, devices, interfaces, infrastructures, user practices and data flows.
AbstractThis chapter discusses three figures of speech: the organization Not In Our Name (NION), #JeSuisCharlie and #MeToo and describes the ways in which, as figures of speech, they constitute persons through a consideration of the use of names, pronouns and numbers. Concerns include whether the person so constituted is singular or plural, how participation in the figure of speech is configured, whether the persons are recognized to be ‘proper’, and whether and how the persons can speak the truth. The conclusion brings these concerns together in the proposal that what distinguishes the persons of #JeSuisCharlie and #MeToo is that they are ‘stuck in the middle’ with ‘People Like You’.
AbstractIn this interview, the artist Felicity Allen discusses her residency as part of the research project People Like You: Contemporary Figures of Personalisation, which included the making of the film Figure to Ground—A Site Losing Its System. The interview locates the film in relation to Allen’s ongoing practice of Dialogic Portraits and considers the notion of the figure in relation to three meanings of site: the site as in a specific site and its parallel ‘non-sites’ as elucidated by the US sculptor Robert Smithson; the site as the commonly foreshortened term for a website; and sight.
AbstractThis chapter sets out a conceptual agenda for exploring the work that figures do in contemporary cultural politics. It pays attention to how figures operate as affective technologies of power by tapping into public feelings and their potential to organise alternative forms of life. It brings three writers: Donna Haraway, Erich Auerbach and Michel Foucault, whose work engages with the politics of figures and figuration, into dialogue to provide a conceptual outline for thinking about the work that figures do. This chapter further argues that adopting a critical and creative practice in relation to figures reveals their cultural and affective power in sculpting worlds: how they lure us towards particular political architectures and provide substance for alternative ways of being and relating.
AbstractAir pollution is often understood through a composition of different kinds of data that increasingly include personal exposure measurements. This chapter is based on our involvement in an interdisciplinary project in Delhi that is combining computational methods and embodied data to simultaneously map, know and respond to air pollution. We use the concept and method of figure, and specifically the figure of ‘the child with asthma’, to explore the tensions that emerge when participants are both objects (sensing bodies that measure air pollution) and subjects (knowing bodies that experience and respond to environmental exposures) of research. This dynamic relationship allows for different ways of figuring out exposure in public health, and thereby possibilities for approaching personalisation that go beyond individualised notions of risk and harm.
AbstractAre we made up entirely and without residue of the data that defines us, or is there a disjunction between our data shadows and our embodied selves? How do we come to recognize ourselves, our selves, in the pronouns that interpellate us online, and what is it exactly that we recognize? What does it mean to occupy the semantic and positional space of the pronoun ‘you’? And is there a continuity or a discontinuity between the systems of surveillance and data aggregation that address us and the systems that don’t? The markers of identity generated by such systems work by both individuating and classifying us; this chapter seeks to think about the range of possible relations between that generality and that particularity.
