From 3 to 5 November, the international, interdisciplinary conference Giorni di Guerra: La Photo-Graphika del Trauma (Days of War: Photographics of Trauma) was held in Venice. The event was organised by the Museo della Battaglia di Vittorio Veneto and Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, in collaboration with the ICLA Research Committee on Comics Studies and Graphic Narrative.
The conference explored the representation of war across three main media—photography, literature, and illustration/graphic narrative—from a comparative and transmedial perspective. The project arises from Alessandro Scarsella’s monograph Teoria di un conflitto mondiale (Marietti, 2023), which foregrounds the anthropological dimensions of war representation and the interaction of different languages in personal and collective narratives. It investigates the cognitive models and social behaviours that shape war stories, extending well beyond the immediate context of conflict.
The programme combined two main conferences and an international seminar with teaching exhibitions, readings, and film screenings, all devoted to examining how war is mediated through photography, writing, graphics, and comics.
On November 4, Dr Umberto Rossi delivered one of the keynote lectures on the influence of the Great War in comics by Hugo Pratt, Jacques Tardi, and Disney. His talk explored how the lived experience of conflict informs both the creation and interpretation of war narratives, emphasising the enduring role of truthfulness in war literature since the 1920s and its impact on writers, artists, and audiences alike. The presentation concluded with a discussion of postmemory in the works of Pratt and Tardi, highlighting how inherited memories of past conflicts continue to shape their storytelling.
