KUNSTHISTORISCHES INSTITUT IN FLORENZ MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT
La memoria delle catastrofi naturali. Tre regimi di storicità e di «artificazione» in Europa (dal XII al XXI secolo)
Résumé
In this contribution, I propose to outline the different modalities of the relationship between memory, works of art and natural disasters. The general scheme is as follows. Between the Black Death (recalled by Boccaccio's Decameron) and the first third of the 18th century (marked by the Marseilles plague and Defoe's Diary of the Plague Year), a mode of representation and management of disasters was slowly put in place, aiming to constitute them as memorable and historical events. A mutation occurs in the middle of the 18th century, when what I will call (borrowing from Rancière) an aesthetic regime of the representation of catastrophes develops. This regime is based on the historical distance and oblivion of catastrophes, their fictionalisation and metaphorisation. It dominated until the middle of the last century, perhaps until the awareness of the gravity of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s. The third regime, which began at the end of the last century and which is our own, is marked by the return of natural disasters and the relative erasure of eventfulness, counterbalanced by the invention of Xevents ('Extreme Events'). Nowadays, the central question of human responsibility is inseparable from the multiplication of artistic practices and aesthetic conducts with therapeutic, charitable and memorial aims in a context of devaluation of the image and explosion of the volume of information.