the mnemosyne atlas and the contemporary. Notes from a survey between art and method
5.30pm
World Art Day 2025
A Trieste Contemporanea libraryline seminar dedicated to the figure of Aby Warburg
curated by Giulia Zanon and Filippo Perfetti.
On 15 April, for the occasion of World Art Day 2025 promoted by UNESCO, libraryline, the cultural initiative of the Trieste Contemporanea Library launched in 2022, is pleased to invite the Trieste public to celebrate the great art and cultural historian Aby Warbug (1866-1929) and his work Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. The event will take place at 5.30 PM at Studio Tommaseo (via del Monte 2/1) with the collaboration of the Seminario Vescovile Library of Trieste and the Altriformati association of Venice.
Giulia Zanon and Filippo Perfetti will curate a seminar devoted to the contemporary success of this famous work, which was designed to trace the re-emergences of Antiquity in Western culture (and left unfinished at Warburg’s death in 1929). The materials of the German scholar, which were transferred to London in 1933 to save them from the Nazis, his method, which in fact founded iconology and anticipated studies focused on visual culture, and Warburg’s conviction that the memory of the past activates the present, remain today the driving forces behind London’s Warburg Institute (directed by Sir Ernst H. Gombrich from the 1950s-1970s). The institute is one of the world’s leading centers for the study of the movement and boundary-crossing of art and culture—spanning time, space, and disciplines—to inspire, inform, and connect.
The Atlantean form is, using the words of Georges Didi-Huberman, “the visual form of knowledge, a knowledgeable form of seeing”. It is an object of thought that combines, overlaps and implicates two paradigms: the aesthetic one, of the visual form, and the epistemic one, of knowledge. Since its rediscovery in the 1990’s, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas has become the emblem of an investigation of the world through images. It is therefore not surprising that it is a constant reference, increasingly used (and abused) in the practice of contemporary artists.
Is the Mnemosyne Atlas really a useful tool for those who work with images today? This question is the basis of the seminar proposed by Trieste Contemporanea, which will put this work in relation to the field of contemporary art. Starting with the explanation of how it works and some principles that govern this “thinking machine”, Giulia Zanon and Fillippo Perfetti will investigate how Mnemosyne can be useful for an artist who does not seek in it only a formal mimesis. Through testimonies by artists from different backgrounds and different practices, there will be an attempt to restore the fruitful encounter between those who today engage with images – with the making of images – and the intellectual legacy of Warburg, in the Mnemosyne Atlas, who sought to make a unity of meaning of the image within a complex system that is rigorous and sensitive to every stimulus.
Giulia Zanon – She has her PhD from the Iuav University of Venice with a thesis on the history of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. Her interests focus on the history of culture, the survival of antiquity in the Renaissance, and the relationship between image and word. She is a part of the Centro Studi ClassicA and the Mnemosyne Seminar, the international epicentre of Warburg studies. She is an editor of La Rivista di Engramma.
Filippo Perfetti – He is a PhD student at the University of Udine. His fields of study include theories of image and montage, particularly in experimental cinema. He is part of the Centro Studi ClassicA and the Mnemosyne Seminar. He is an editor of La Rivista di Engramma.