Still dead. Materiali per una tavola warburghiana

The photographic image has the ability to magically manifest the memory and testimony of death. The game lies in the overturning of the meaning of still life, an English term translated as “immobile nature” and in Italian “still life”, to still dead. This “genre” is declined in different ways: still dead of a landscape, which records the spoils of war such as, for example, the first photographs documenting the Crimean War (1853-1856) by Richard Fenton; the ambiguous photographs of the “hidden mothers” and the different possibilities of representation of a dead person and his specific scenographic context that continues to be repeated until today.