Ri-animare l’inanimato: cadaveri, statue e corpi redenti, nelle immagini

The essay explores the relationship between dead bodies, statues and photographs, individuating in the images not only a means for petrifying bodies, embalm them in time — as argued by Roland Barthes, Regis Debray and Philippe Dubois — but also a form of re-animation of the inanimate. A sort of living relic, the image is the frozen testimony of a fleeting vitality, a paradoxical form of “visible hiding” in which life and death are intertwined. The essay demonstrates this process in some contemporary works, moving from one by Linda Fregni Nagler, The Hidden Mother (2013), a series of portraits of babies from the late XIXth century, made possible thanks to the presence of an adult hidden as good as possible in the background in order to keep them still. In these bodies of babies still alive, but in which lives their very same corpse, death is a phantom, but also a tangible fear behind the photographic.