Figurabilità, montaggio, memoria : su un atlante di lavoro di Berlinde de Bruyckere

The paper explores the role of visual montage in the making of Berlinde De Bruyckere's sculptural forms, focusing on the 'atlas of insipartions' that the artist displays on the wall of her atelier while making her installations. This humble object will reveal its crucial role as a device capable of reinserting in a plural visual network the single pictures and media icons that served as sources for the works of art, thus activating through a visual form of montage the figural, and essentially "ptential", milieu of the image. The methodological ad theoretical concepts implied by such an operation are those of a "generative" visual semiotics and of the art theory of authors such as Louis Marin.