“Things that Death Cannot Destroy”: The Afterlife and Performativity of Photographic Images (Linda Fregni Nagler)

This paper develops the Warburgian idea that images – as visual, anthropological and/or artistic objects – have their own afterlife by taking as main case study "Things that Death Cannot Destroy" (2009-), an ongoing archival collection of magic lantern slides by Italian artist Linda Fregni Nagler. Speaking of images as objects is in this case much appropriate, since the slides that the artist gathers (and rescues from oblivion) are photographs imprinted and coloured on glass between 1860 and 1940. She selects and shows them two by two in a choreographed projection that aims at highlighting their unexpected – sometimes even uncanny – formal correspondences. Thereby, Fregni Nagler rehabilitates the magic lantern as an ‘immersive’ optical device, which, already from the 17th century, preceded the slide projector and cinema (not to say VR and AR) in generating wonder for the visual revelations and juxtapositions it produced. The artist invites the audience to undertake an encyclopaedic (visual) journey that discloses archiving, collecting, and showing/displaying as cultural and political gestures, which are never neutral. Her work raises issues about the staging of the human figure, social categorisation, censorship and copyright. It also questions the legibility of images, as well as their afterlife and performativity, in the process of re-enacting them from the past, and making them visible and ‘errant’ again in a new here and now.