TIBER: A PULSIONAL PORTRAIT OF EUROPE

Abstract

The conference and Exibition project Agents of Concerns: Images and Empathy brings together an international group of artists and scholars to examine the complex ways in which images affect our emotional and cognitive understanding of the experience and mental states of others.

Contents of my speech, abstract: And might it not be that we also have appointments to keep in the past, with people who have some connection with us,so to speak? (G.W.Sebald) Last year a friend lent me a book about the Deutsche-Romher, artists that came to Rome in the 1800s. Opening it, Ifound a collection of photocopies taken from a1991 BVRLINGTON magazine. The text tells of the relationship betweenyoung artists meeting each other at Café Greco. It presents thirty 10 cm. portraits made by Samuel Amsler: refined faces on which the light of intelligence shines, high foreheads, and jackets that minimize the shoulders' width. Only one of them, Carl Fohr, beautiful, looks down sadly. Reading the text, I discovered that on 29 June 1818, they all went to the Tiber, and he subsequently drowned; his portrait is posthumous, done to give him a dignified tomb. I immediately empathised with these forgotten artists, taking thirty similar size polaroids: these snapshots bring them here and now, immersing them in a rosy light. I also began two long-format drawings, an investigative story about the mermaid hidden in the whirlpool who caused his end, well known to Bocklin. Near the drawings celebrating the forgotten young artists, I put the crazed cartography of the numerous travels of the restless brothers in the pulsional portrait of Europe and other archival papers. (https://www.giovannacaimmi.it/works/tiber/) I wish to participate in the conference with a video of the sequence of my intervention and a short lecture commenting on my empathising with archival images. Bologna, 2023 Giovanna Caimmi