The thematIc orderIng of the Images In BIlderatlas Mnemosyne Is both tantalIsIng and threatenIng, revealIng that each of the materIals has the value of a hIstorIcal clue. Here, creatIve potentIal memory comes Into play and the seemIngly harmonIous state of the Images gaIns Importance through the structurIng of a problematIc of comprehensIon by means of the montage technIque. In the successIve order of the Images, theIr reconcIlIatIon, whIch is essentIally Interrupted among themselves, often leads to an alIenatIon rather than the fusIon brought about by montage.

the art of producing ghost images

Bilderatlas Mnemosyne is an ironic and critical project of modern times, as relevant for art history as it is for cultural history. The discussions on the ghost atlas, carried to the present day with attempts to revive the panel assemblages, capture different human expression patterns through stories of obsessive cultural memory and question their relationality with deviations in the order of the image. In this process, the unconscious orientation towards deviation reveals the extraordinary reality of the imagination that effectively gave birth to Warburg’s art of producing ghost images. It is therefore normal for Warburg’s approach to appear in the surreal structure of the atlas format, in the blurred space of a repressed past, of things not yet and still unformed or manifested. The atlas format is, in fact, a convenient model of artistic expression for revealing the imagery substituted in the psycho-geography of the mind by means of a set of symbols and images, and for making visible the confusing thesis of the relationship between civilisations. In this respect, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne is an order of representation shaped by the remembering memory, which deals with cultural ruptures or time jumps observed in different disciplines, and precedes traumatic conflicts through images and symbols expressing intense emotions, and reveals them in the grey area formed. In addition to being Warburg’s repressed dark cave, it is a contradictory map and a great queer collage where all kinds of hedonistic constructions are expressed, activating thought algorithms that have not yet been disclosed. It is an anti aura interrogation that moves from the iconic and glorified work of art to the critical and contemporary change dynamics of hybrid forms.

In other words, the representational images exhibited in the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne phantasmagoria, the uncanny space of a fictional experience, are forced into inter-temporal psychic migrations to such an extent as to arouse desire, and are transformed into ghosts stripped of their colours, becoming new art objects of early modernist sensibility. However, when looking at such an alienated apparatus, it is possible to see the original, experimental, sincere and irrational qualities of the sense of ordinariness created by rapidly grasped nomadic images, a logic of sensation that is dialectically constructed but fed by a disrupted flow. Moreover, against the harmonious and aesthetic disciplinary logic of art history, a different understanding of culture and art history has emerged, shaped by the transitivity of the conceptual pair of art-science, in which a magical inter-image solidarity is intrinsically woven. Here, provocative images, which are transformed into counter-images, shake the existing imagination, highlight an invisible system of relations, and even bring it closer to the practice of art. What Agamben refers to as Science Without a Name is precisely at this point a commentary on the mysterious and unnamed side of culture and art consciousness, which is exhibited here in a new and fragile way. (1) This anonymous or collective psychic plane, which Warburg traces, harbouring intertwined and assembled images of passion and anticipating the future, is fuelled by the power of an imagination characterised by purely aesthetic deviations. And this heterogeneous situation is also the manifestation of a subjective sensibility that structures an antithesis by fusing symbols with each other.