Le dimensioni dell'Im-spazio. Teoria e storia

What is the Im-spazio? Coined in 1967 by the Italian art critic and curator Germano Celant, this term refers to the hybridisation of image and space that occurs within environmental works of art. Indeed, when artists create an environment, they work within the conceptual and architectural dimensions of the room, as they identify the image with a delimited space. Thanks to the enclosed totality of the room, a visionary process leads to a confusion of the difference which we conventionally recognise in our experiences between interior and exterior, subject and object, real and imaginary. Focusing on this imaginary dynamic, the thesis recovers the critical and art-historical approach pioneered by Celant, in order to deepen the study of environments as artistic media and place them within their most relevant theoretical framework: that of visual culture studies. Tracing the path of environmental art over the last century, from the avant-gardists to the most recent new media artists, the thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter presents a theory of the Im-spazio, combining Celant’s ideas with considerations of the environment from media studies, philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. The second one traces the history of environments through exemplary cases which serve as both a foundation for, and a demonstration of, the theory. The third chapter focuses on contemporary environments, which are now indivisible from their virtual and digital manifestations. The last one examines the relationships between the real and the imaginary that characterise this type of works, and on this basis proposes a classification of three kinds of Im-spazio. Overall, the Im-spazio is configured as a critical and methodologically constructed perspective that is applied to environmental art, revealing the theoretical and historical complexity which is intrinsic to this prodigious artistic medium.