Books by Luca Acquarelli
The narrative of the Fascist empire - a period of greatest consent and the ideal place where the ... more The narrative of the Fascist empire - a period of greatest consent and the ideal place where the past and future activities and policies of the regime seem to converge - is the subject of an in-depth study in this book, carried out through the vision and reading of propaganda images. While historical events are obviously in the background, the book focuses more on the iconographic and narrative structure of the empire, the result of the gigantic propaganda machine set up by the regime. What mythologies did the propaganda images embody? How were the social meanings of the wide-ranging visual culture of the time structured (posters, covers, films, works of art, exhibitions, postcards, architectural designs, etc.)?
The study proposes a wide range of interpretative hypotheses, crossing theories of art and image with political philosophy, cultural history and the sociological and semiotic dimension. Unlike the traditional historical approach, the methodology developed here is specific to works of visual culture, which think of images as sites of political, social and mythological elaboration. The book proposes for the first time a study of this type and extent on the iconography of imperial fascism, with images that have been largely unknown or rarely studied. In concluding this extensive recognition, the author also opens up to the theme of the difficulty of elaborating, in the contemporary world, the memory of this traumatic historical period.
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by Francesco Zucconi, Laura Iamurri, Luca Acquarelli, Emilia Héry, Claudio Pirisino, Elisa Francesconi, Laura Moure Cecchini, Carmen Belmonte, daniele dottorini, Stefano Chiodi, Anne-Violaine Houcke, and Olivier Maillart Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2021
Fascism has left significant traces in Republican Italy. Not only in terms of buildings and
monu... more Fascism has left significant traces in Republican Italy. Not only in terms of buildings and
monuments clearly bearing a Fascist imprint but also via the persistence of Fascist-era values and political rhetoric which has continued, in a more or less explicit way, throughout the republican period, despite anti-Fascist principles being deeply rooted in the Italian constitution and its society and culture. The arts have long reflected this difficult Fascist legacy and suspended memory of a phenomenon that left a traumatic mark on twentieth century Italian and European history. This volume constitutes a first analytical and comparative attempt to analyse the artistic work which has cast a critical eye – in the visual arts and film, theatre, performance art and literature – on this inconvenient past from the post-war period to the present day. It is work of art as site of a theoretical re-working of traumatic memory, the co-presence of different historical times, the “concretion” of certain obsessively repeated symbols and an incessant reappearance of Fascism’s semantic and ideological sphere – and its imperial colonialism – as a transcendental rather than historical object.
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L'objectif commun qui anime les articles de ce livre est d'aborder la question du sens des images... more L'objectif commun qui anime les articles de ce livre est d'aborder la question du sens des images à partir de la tension qu'il y a entre leurs formes et leurs forces. Ces deux termes ont une longue tradition dans les disciplines ayant parmi leurs objectifs l'analyse du sens des images. Ils ont inspiré un second couple de notions souvent utilisées dans le jargon des théories de l'images : le figuratif et le figural.
Au croisement de plusieurs disciplines, de la psychanalyse à l'histoire de l'art et de l'esthétique à la phénoménologie, la philosophie, la morphologie et la sémiotique, ces quatre concepts ont ouvert des pistes de travail au cœur d'une recherche sur le sens et la subjectivité. Ils ont surtout une valeur relationnelle, c'est-à-dire qu'ils déploient toute leur opérativité lorsqu'ils se rencontrent, dans une tension réciproque.
Ainsi, un rapprochement entre ces termes ne représente pas une mise en parallèle, mais plutôt un ensemble problématique, c'est-à-dire un ensemble de catégories théoriques traversé par plusieurs disciplines, qui, dans le cas de ce livre, est interrogé par le biais d'un débat sur les sens des images et de leurs agencements. En faisant dialoguer des approches plurielles de l'image, tout en préservant l'autonomie des démarches d'analyse, ce débat pousse les disciplines à sortir de leurs certitudes pour faire face à des questions renouvelées.
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Acquarelli L., «La fotografia e il colonialismo. Visioni sul Congo» in Acquarelli, Baraldi, Gnocchi, Russo, Tenebre Bianche, immaginari coloniali fin de siècle, Diabasis, Reggio Emilia, 2008, pp. 171 - 228.
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Papers by Luca Acquarelli
Studi Culturali, 2023
The aim of this article is to explore the communication of highly legitimised luxury brands beyon... more The aim of this article is to explore the communication of highly legitimised luxury brands beyond a marketing interest or communicative effectiveness in order to focus on «non-economic» concepts of luxury which are studied in particular from the perspective of the French philosopher Georges Bataille and taken up in some recent studies on luxury. After recontextualising certain Bataille concepts such as «profitless expenditure», «heterogeneous part of society» and «transgression» in the contemporary world, the article analyses certain luxury brand communication campaigns as an observatory on luxury’s non-economic aspect and revealing the heterogeneous dimension of society. In particular, the article focuses on a series of case studies in which luxury strategies are visible with goods of high heritage and symbolic value and the way that, through appropriation mechanisms, luxury «feeds on» this non-utilitarian value, in part by «homogenising» it, in order to prevent the appeal of the various brands being routinised. The article also analyses the appropriation by luxury of a difficult heritage, a building in Rome that is a key emblem of Italian imperial fascism.
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Acquarelli L., «Jonathan Crary», «Archive», «Figural», entrées du Dictionnaire d’iconologie filmique, sous la dir. de E. André, J.-M. Durafour, L. Vancheri, PUL, Lyon, 2022. https://books.openedition.org/pul/47378
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My article started from the observation that 360° films and, in general, virtual reality animatio... more My article started from the observation that 360° films and, in general, virtual reality animations make extensive use of the continuous scene, rarely using montage cuts.
This evidence is at the origin of the broader question of whether or not to consider the long take as an immersive figure. A question that immediately raises a series of theoretical problems concerning the assimilation of any scene extended for a certain length without montage cuts to the long take, an element of film language with a precise tradition.
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This article examines a case of censorship of an advertisement deemed
to be sexist and to denigra... more This article examines a case of censorship of an advertisement deemed
to be sexist and to denigrate the female body, and looks at the aesthetic and social stakes of the image in question and at the more general problem of the acceptability of the image of a sexualized body exhibited in public. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the article aims to highlight the complexity of the controversy that can arise when faced with an image accused of being sexist.
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Through a series of short analyses of visual objects the article questions the nature of the dial... more Through a series of short analyses of visual objects the article questions the nature of the dialectic distance/proximity.
This dialectic actually concerns a boundary that is at the same time necessary for its articulation, but also only partially expressible within it: the boundary between spectator and observed object/image/medium.
By trying to understand what distance is through the definition of some of its opposite forms (immediacy, oceanic feeling, Merleau-pontian flesh of the world),
we will look for an answer to this complexity through the intelligence of the images themselves. The chiasmic nature of the relationship between the seeing subject
and the seen object therefore seems to become a central theme.
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An interdisciplinary analysis of Inarritu's installation Carne y Arena between image theory, poli... more An interdisciplinary analysis of Inarritu's installation Carne y Arena between image theory, political philosophy and phenomenology.
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This article aims to study the dispositif of 360 degrees cinema following approaches derived from... more This article aims to study the dispositif of 360 degrees cinema following approaches derived from media theory and semiotics of enunciation. The article questions this new dispositif between traditional cinema and interactive virtual reality and then focuses on certain theoretical polarities that concern it as interaction/observation and immersion/ distanciation. The analysis of a 360 degree film like Pierre Zandrowicz's I, Philip (2016) will allow us to question more pertinently the topics of the frame, of the on-screen/ off-screen relation and of the enunciative situation of this vision experience and then open up towards a first hypothesis on the enunciative gesture.
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International Conference, Rome, April 8-9 2019, Villa Medici and Bibliotheca Hertziana
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We should finally bring fascism into our cultural heritage in its own right. This would be the on... more We should finally bring fascism into our cultural heritage in its own right. This would be the only way to interrupt, at least for a while, the jammed mechanism of its evocation to describe the present. Like a tooth in a gear that snaps back after a seemingly coordinated movement, the fashion of fascism does not go away. If fascism is in fashion, fascism makes the history of the contemporary: not because its structural elements are reproduced or repeated, but rather because it is evoked as a form of (evil) thought that for seventy years has not known periods of low season. This continuous reference does not go, as one might naively think, in the sense of a work of memory, but rather to reify the meaning of an era without the benefit of distancing its return, with the opposite effect of living our present partially in function of it.
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In Paris, in the recent prolonged period of Christmas acceleration of consumerism (and therefore,... more In Paris, in the recent prolonged period of Christmas acceleration of consumerism (and therefore, let's not forget, of the desire for fetishes), an advertising panel that covered the facade of the Galeries Lafayette with a female bottom just wrapped in very voluptuous panties provoked the indignation of the city administration. Censorship followed. The article tries to reflect on this event on the background of aesthetics of desire, commodification of bodies and renewed forms of seduction.
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The text "Distanziare per avvicinare: un'estetica che ci (ri)guarda" (Distancing to approach: an ... more The text "Distanziare per avvicinare: un'estetica che ci (ri)guarda" (Distancing to approach: an aesthetic that concerns us) analyses the aesthetic implications of the images taken by photographer Silvia Camporesi in her work devoted to the interiors of some Umbrian-Tuscan theatres. The photos constitute the exhibition "Dimora Teatro", commissioned and exhibited by the Laboratorio Fotografico Città della Pieve. The text is extracted from the catalogue of this exhibition.
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VR cinema is one of the cases of VR where the viewer-player (a polarity that we will try to descr... more VR cinema is one of the cases of VR where the viewer-player (a polarity that we will try to describe) remains more passive in terms of interactive gestures. Currently there is only one gesture for a sort of “interactive contemplation” (an oxymoronic nature that we will try to explain), that is the movement of the head which, recognized by the sensors, allows you to experience the immersive environment widening the viewer's field of view to 360 degrees. If we think that are aesthetics that appropriate the techniques and constitute them in "dispositifs", however, it seems useful to put forward the first general hypotheses on the front of genealogy of the supports and on the enunciative variants, ending up analysing then a short film of VR cinema ("I Philip" by Pierre Zandrowicz).
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Books by Luca Acquarelli
The study proposes a wide range of interpretative hypotheses, crossing theories of art and image with political philosophy, cultural history and the sociological and semiotic dimension. Unlike the traditional historical approach, the methodology developed here is specific to works of visual culture, which think of images as sites of political, social and mythological elaboration. The book proposes for the first time a study of this type and extent on the iconography of imperial fascism, with images that have been largely unknown or rarely studied. In concluding this extensive recognition, the author also opens up to the theme of the difficulty of elaborating, in the contemporary world, the memory of this traumatic historical period.
monuments clearly bearing a Fascist imprint but also via the persistence of Fascist-era values and political rhetoric which has continued, in a more or less explicit way, throughout the republican period, despite anti-Fascist principles being deeply rooted in the Italian constitution and its society and culture. The arts have long reflected this difficult Fascist legacy and suspended memory of a phenomenon that left a traumatic mark on twentieth century Italian and European history. This volume constitutes a first analytical and comparative attempt to analyse the artistic work which has cast a critical eye – in the visual arts and film, theatre, performance art and literature – on this inconvenient past from the post-war period to the present day. It is work of art as site of a theoretical re-working of traumatic memory, the co-presence of different historical times, the “concretion” of certain obsessively repeated symbols and an incessant reappearance of Fascism’s semantic and ideological sphere – and its imperial colonialism – as a transcendental rather than historical object.
Au croisement de plusieurs disciplines, de la psychanalyse à l'histoire de l'art et de l'esthétique à la phénoménologie, la philosophie, la morphologie et la sémiotique, ces quatre concepts ont ouvert des pistes de travail au cœur d'une recherche sur le sens et la subjectivité. Ils ont surtout une valeur relationnelle, c'est-à-dire qu'ils déploient toute leur opérativité lorsqu'ils se rencontrent, dans une tension réciproque.
Ainsi, un rapprochement entre ces termes ne représente pas une mise en parallèle, mais plutôt un ensemble problématique, c'est-à-dire un ensemble de catégories théoriques traversé par plusieurs disciplines, qui, dans le cas de ce livre, est interrogé par le biais d'un débat sur les sens des images et de leurs agencements. En faisant dialoguer des approches plurielles de l'image, tout en préservant l'autonomie des démarches d'analyse, ce débat pousse les disciplines à sortir de leurs certitudes pour faire face à des questions renouvelées.
Papers by Luca Acquarelli
This evidence is at the origin of the broader question of whether or not to consider the long take as an immersive figure. A question that immediately raises a series of theoretical problems concerning the assimilation of any scene extended for a certain length without montage cuts to the long take, an element of film language with a precise tradition.
to be sexist and to denigrate the female body, and looks at the aesthetic and social stakes of the image in question and at the more general problem of the acceptability of the image of a sexualized body exhibited in public. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the article aims to highlight the complexity of the controversy that can arise when faced with an image accused of being sexist.
This dialectic actually concerns a boundary that is at the same time necessary for its articulation, but also only partially expressible within it: the boundary between spectator and observed object/image/medium.
By trying to understand what distance is through the definition of some of its opposite forms (immediacy, oceanic feeling, Merleau-pontian flesh of the world),
we will look for an answer to this complexity through the intelligence of the images themselves. The chiasmic nature of the relationship between the seeing subject
and the seen object therefore seems to become a central theme.
The study proposes a wide range of interpretative hypotheses, crossing theories of art and image with political philosophy, cultural history and the sociological and semiotic dimension. Unlike the traditional historical approach, the methodology developed here is specific to works of visual culture, which think of images as sites of political, social and mythological elaboration. The book proposes for the first time a study of this type and extent on the iconography of imperial fascism, with images that have been largely unknown or rarely studied. In concluding this extensive recognition, the author also opens up to the theme of the difficulty of elaborating, in the contemporary world, the memory of this traumatic historical period.
monuments clearly bearing a Fascist imprint but also via the persistence of Fascist-era values and political rhetoric which has continued, in a more or less explicit way, throughout the republican period, despite anti-Fascist principles being deeply rooted in the Italian constitution and its society and culture. The arts have long reflected this difficult Fascist legacy and suspended memory of a phenomenon that left a traumatic mark on twentieth century Italian and European history. This volume constitutes a first analytical and comparative attempt to analyse the artistic work which has cast a critical eye – in the visual arts and film, theatre, performance art and literature – on this inconvenient past from the post-war period to the present day. It is work of art as site of a theoretical re-working of traumatic memory, the co-presence of different historical times, the “concretion” of certain obsessively repeated symbols and an incessant reappearance of Fascism’s semantic and ideological sphere – and its imperial colonialism – as a transcendental rather than historical object.
Au croisement de plusieurs disciplines, de la psychanalyse à l'histoire de l'art et de l'esthétique à la phénoménologie, la philosophie, la morphologie et la sémiotique, ces quatre concepts ont ouvert des pistes de travail au cœur d'une recherche sur le sens et la subjectivité. Ils ont surtout une valeur relationnelle, c'est-à-dire qu'ils déploient toute leur opérativité lorsqu'ils se rencontrent, dans une tension réciproque.
Ainsi, un rapprochement entre ces termes ne représente pas une mise en parallèle, mais plutôt un ensemble problématique, c'est-à-dire un ensemble de catégories théoriques traversé par plusieurs disciplines, qui, dans le cas de ce livre, est interrogé par le biais d'un débat sur les sens des images et de leurs agencements. En faisant dialoguer des approches plurielles de l'image, tout en préservant l'autonomie des démarches d'analyse, ce débat pousse les disciplines à sortir de leurs certitudes pour faire face à des questions renouvelées.
This evidence is at the origin of the broader question of whether or not to consider the long take as an immersive figure. A question that immediately raises a series of theoretical problems concerning the assimilation of any scene extended for a certain length without montage cuts to the long take, an element of film language with a precise tradition.
to be sexist and to denigrate the female body, and looks at the aesthetic and social stakes of the image in question and at the more general problem of the acceptability of the image of a sexualized body exhibited in public. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the article aims to highlight the complexity of the controversy that can arise when faced with an image accused of being sexist.
This dialectic actually concerns a boundary that is at the same time necessary for its articulation, but also only partially expressible within it: the boundary between spectator and observed object/image/medium.
By trying to understand what distance is through the definition of some of its opposite forms (immediacy, oceanic feeling, Merleau-pontian flesh of the world),
we will look for an answer to this complexity through the intelligence of the images themselves. The chiasmic nature of the relationship between the seeing subject
and the seen object therefore seems to become a central theme.
divulgation blogs: Alberto Bagnai’s Goofynomics. Despite its success, this blog has not been yet the object of semiotic or communication analysis. However, we think that this blog is a good case study in order to understand the strategies of communication for a political-informational proposal on the Web. Thus this article proposes some hypothesis on the actantial and temporal organisation of the narrative system of Goofynomics, that has progressively become an intermedial object since its birth, a bit more than four years ago.
starting from a reflection on the heterogeneity of times in history.
Mentre l’attualità della cronaca porta quotidianamente alla nostra attenzione, in maniera più o meno manifesta, la persistenza delle forme e dei valori che hanno determinato il Ventennio, riflettere sul fascismo attraverso il prisma delle arti contemporanee significa confrontarsi con un termine il cui significato è quantomeno sdoppiato: da una parte l’esperienza storica del regime che ha governato l’Italia dal 1922 al 1943; dall’altra, per estensione, la forma stessa del potere totalitario. Lo sguardo delle arti contemporanee sembra dunque articolarsi in due direzioni: il fascismo italiano come evento storico (confrontato alla difficoltà della/e sua/e memoria/e) e il fascismo come meccanismo di relazione e di rituale del potere.
Frutto della collaborazione fra Università Roma Tre e l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales di Parigi, il convegno si inscrive in un percorso analitico iniziato nell’ottobre 2016 all’EHESS con il seminario Le regard des arts contemporains sur le fascisme italien. Réinterprétations, remontages, déconstructions (artscontemporainsfascisme.wordpress. com). Esso intende indagare la capacità espressa da singoli oggetti artistici di intervenire in modo puntuale sullo spessore memoriale del Ventennio. Necessariamente, tale lavoro si intreccia con quello di sondare le diverse strategie compositive mediante le quali le arti contemporanee hanno saputo mettere in atto un lavoro di reinterpretazione, rimontaggio e decostruzione critica dei sistemi di valori, delle iconografiee e, più in generale, dell’immaginario fascista.
et temps de l’histoire (Ensba Lyon / CEHTA-EHESS
Paris) s’interroge depuis 2009 sur le rapport
entre art contemporain et régimes de temporalité
historique – là où l’art élabore, par ses moyens
propres, la remise en question d’une conception
progressive et linéaire du temps historique. [...