Uno Nessuno Centomila: estetiche pratiche e politiche del mimetismo / One No One One Houndred Thousand: Aesthetics Practices and Politics of Mimicries
One No One One Houndred Thousand: Aesthetics Practices and Politics of Mimicries
Advisory Editor: Filippo Fimiani
http://www.unisa.it/docenti/filippofimiani/index
In principle and most generally, imitation implies and maintains the difference between the object to be represented and its representation. In art, but also in public life—as in fashion and politics, for instance—, to recognize the gap between the real and its image, between the model and his or her imitators or followers, means to guarantee the value of symbolization and to safeguard the proper perceptive and cognitive pleasure of form. Actually, the same principle regulates the relation between the original and its copy or its reproduction, between the original and the fake, that applies to the imitation of something or someone thought or felt to be prestigious, powerful or glamorous, as well as to the ‘embodied simulation’ of moving bodies and expressive gestures, either real or represented, whether they be film, photography, painting, or statue.
However, in the case of mimicry and camouflage strategic and momentary suspension of this difference may be required by both biology and art so as to preserve the identity or survival of such form of life or such autonomous figure. In such cases of mimetism, mimesis relates to some other—thing or being—by one’s altering one’s own shape, by one’s transfiguring one’s own outward public appearance or ‘façade’. Imitation may thus turn into mimetism, mimetic desire may turn into conformation and identification, or even conformism and assimilation, thus potentially leading to the destruction of one’s own otherness, but it is always the struggle for the survival of—biological, corporeal or social—identity that prevails.
In mimicry, the image does not reveal itself as such, but is to be perceived unambiguously as what it is not—as a hieroglyph. In the animal realm, as well as in war and in the public sphere, camouflaging consists in adopting the aspects, traits, colours and shapes of a given environment. This is a twofold process. On the one hand, by blending in one wishes to remain hidden so as to mislead and trick the others and keep a secret; but on the other hand, it is also a process that aims to recognition by a milieu or group, that betrays a craving for communication, normality and familiarity and thus tries to create a domestic and agreeable appearance so as to share a way of life.
Mimicry, camouflage, transvestism, chance or cryptic anamorphism, fascination are all ways of changing clothes, habits and habitats which are to be found in nature as well as in culture, in all the symbolic fields created by human beings during their history. Art and artification, aestheticization, stylization, and beautification are all practices reflecting the need for biological and social adaptation. They are boundaries-creating processes that produce functional and fictional frames in ordinary life. Thus they can persuade and convince by creating consensus and belief, but they can also make possible a different common sense, a sensorium—a sensorial medium and an aesthetic mediation open to a new world with new types of experience.
This study conference—which initiates an annual academic seminar sustained by the University of Salerno—aims to investigate mimetism as a fundamental and polymorphic aesthetic performance and practice. It will consider its shapes, topics, matters, media, rules and effects in nature, art, and culture at large. What does mimesis mean, when imitation turns to mimicry? How may one describe imitation, emulation, and simulation? Are they related to different or similar objects? What are the senses they impact, individually or together—sight, touch, smell, taste, hearing? How sharp are the boundaries between perception, image consciousness, and public and political recognition of an identity? How may one think anew the concept, value and function of the medium in the biological, artistic, ordinary and social contexts of mimicry and camouflage?
Program:
Monday 27 15:00
Greetings of Annibale Elia
(Director of DSPSC)
Virgilio D'Antonio
(President Area Teaching)
and Pina de Luca
(Delegate Arts and Culture)
Introduction of Filippo Fimiani
Chaired
Pina De Luca
15:30
Alfonso Iacono
(University of Pisa)
Figures of substitution
16:15
Laura Bazzicalupo
(University of Salerno)
Subjectifications and contagion
17:00
coffee break
17:45
Andrea Borsari
(University of Bologna)
Human mimicry: for an anthropology of mimesis
18:15
discussion
Tuesday 28
10:00
Chaired
Filippo Fimiani
Adalgiso Amendola
(University of Salerno
The laws of imitation
10:45
coffee break
11:00
Barbara Carnevali
(EHESS Paris)
Fashion
11:45
Betrand Prévost
(Bordeaux-Montaigne University)
Expanded camouflage. On aesthetics individuation
12:30
discussion