We are pleased to share that Dr Cristina Pividori has contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue Giorni di Guerra – Days of War, produced for the project Days of War – The Photographer’s Shadow, which marks the 110th anniversary of Italy’s entry into the First World War. The event brings together historical and contemporary visual work in Venice (Ca’ Foscari Zattere – Tesa Rooms) and at the Museo della Battaglia in Vittorio Veneto.
Pividori’s article, “The Dynamics of Postmemory: Visual Art as a Living Site of Remembrance”, appears in the catalogue (Italian/English) within the section The Photographer’s Shadow. It accompanies the exhibitions devoted to Heinrich Vogeler, Luigi Marzocchi, Daniil Revkovskyi & Andrii Rachynskyi, Stanislava Pinchuk and Albane de Labarthe, tracing how their engravings, stereoscopic photographs, data-maps, installations and textile works reactivate memories of war across conflicts from the First World War to Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Drawing on Hirsch’s notions of “liquid time” and the “dynamics of postmemory,” Pividori’s essay argues that these images do not simply document violence; they create encounters in which past and present, analogue and digital media intersect. These works transform archives into “living” sites of remembrance, asking how war is carried forward in bodies, landscapes and museum spaces, and what kind of ethical response contemporary viewers owe to images of conflict today.
This catalogue situates visual art at the centre of current debates on memory, trauma and representation, and we are delighted to be part of this collective reflection on how images continue to shape–and trouble–our understanding of war.
Reference:
Pividori, Cristina. “The Dynamics of Postmemory: Visual Art as Living Site of Remembrance.” Giorni di Guerra: L’Ombra del Fotografo, edited by Simone Da Dalt and Jasmine Mitaval, Editrice Storica, 2025, pp. 156–179.