1. Semiotics, cultural studies and visual culture:
memory, post-memory and genres of testimonies
The main goal of this line of research is to advance a research
project I've been working on for several years, whose main
objective is an epistemological and methodological comparison
beteween a semiotics of culture and a socio-semiotics on one
hand, and cultural studies and visual culture on the other end. In
specific, the aim is to focuss on the categories which,
besides being discussed in both field of research, guide the
investigation of contemporary cultural forms, as those of
text, practice, discourse, image and genre. Such categories will be
examined by looking at the interdisciplinary theme of memory, at
the processes of oblivion and remembering which preside
the recomposition of traumatized individual and collective
identities. It is a topic that will be developed within the
activities of the Centre for the interdisciplinary study of
memories and cultural traumas - TRAME (www.trame.unibo.it) of the
Dipartimento di Discipline della Comunicazione. Therefore, the aim
is both to advance the research on the semiotic specificity of the
categorie of individual trauma and cultural trauma, and to explore
the new directions of research of the field of trauma and visual
studies, such as the debate on concepts as that of
"multi-directional memory" and that of "post-memory", and on the
intersection between Holocaust Studies and Post-colonial
Theories.
2. Narrating trauma: the documentary status of
images
With the help of some methodological tools developed in the
research project n.1, this line of research will focuss on the
contemporary transofrmation of the categories of "document" and
"documentary". What is today a document, and how, in respect to
memory and its writing - in respect to testimony -, does nowadays
constitute an evidence? And how do images, in all their current
permutations and translations, participate in the construction of
what is considered "authentic" and "real"? This research will
concentrate first of all on a corpus of documentary texts,
from social photographies to so-called "docu-auteur" documentary
movies, to visual artists' installation, in order to find and
compare different strategies of the visual representation
of testimony. In specific, the research project will concentrate on
the "documentary turn" of memory studies in order to investigate
the specificity of a genre charactherized by its ambivalent
positioning between reality and fiction, authenticity and
manipulation.
3. Gender, testimony and violence in contemporary visual
culture
Developing some of the results emerged in the research projects
n. 1 and n. 2., the specificity of female testimonies of extreme
experiences will be tested, that is the role of gender in the
writing of visual trauma. Starting from the academic debate on
gender and trauma, the project will focus on how theories have
been integrated and translated by female visual artists and
film-makers who produce texts, perfomances and video-installations
which, along with questioning the ways women are particular kinds
of victims, also help re-defining the relationship between women
and violence in the contemporary cultural imaginary.
