“Iperimmagine, visione sinottica e soggettività. Ipotesi sulla ‘forma atlante’"

"Atlas", the collection of images that the German artist Gerhard Richter has been sticking on hundreds of sheets since the Sixties, was often interpreted as the belated example of the “anti-subjective” gesture of the historical artistic avant-garde. A semiotic analyses of Atlas implies the shift from a mere “authorial” idea of subjectivity – largely based on the notion of “intentionality” – towards a semiotic subjectivity inscribed in the text itself. Atlas thus becomes the place of a discursive competence based on a device of visual enunciation that, according to Felix Thürlemann, is typical of the “plural image” or “hyperimage”, where a sort of “meta-enunciator” is responsible of “the choice of an ensemble of images and their spatial disposition”. Such a meta-enunciator is, in Atlas, the instance of a discursive competence that regards a specific aspect of the German post-war context, namely a missed mnemonic working-through. The paper explores that aspect through the analysis of a group of sheets and through the work of G.W. Sebald on the relationship between denied memory and “compulsion” of urban reconstruction in post-war Germany.