LABIM | Laboratorio di teoria delle immagini

LABIM - Laboratorio di teoria delle immagini is a research group of the Department of Art and Architecture at Università Iuav di Venezia. It is formed by scholars belonging to different research areas, with a common interest in the wide horizon of a theory of images, nowadays the focus of a lively scholarly debate across different perspectives. Theory of the images refers here to those approaches that aim at exploring the ‘visual thinking’ of the objects – through the artistic, aesthetic and cultural domains – starting from the plurality of the images in their irreducible cultural, historical, formal and material specificity. Maintaining the plural form of the word “images” implies the idea that only through plural and historically situated objects, as well as through the dialogue between different scholarly traditions, a productive reflection on the status of the “image” will be possible. Constitutively interdisciplinary, the research unit privileges the dialogue between different methodologies and traditions, encouraging the necessary translation between the different disciplinary domains of its members (history and theory of cinema and the arts, aesthetics, semiotics, curatorial studies, representation theory) and their models, paradigms, concepts and operations. The unit thus encourages the work around complex questions, rather than the separation according to the different disciplines. Among the themes explored in the first years of its activity: the plural temporality of the image, anachronism, montage as a transdisciplinary knowledge-productive operation. The research activity was developed in collaboration with insttutions such as: Centre Pompidou Paris; Fondation Pinault - Palazzo Grassi / Punta della Dogana; EHESS Paris; Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Lyon; Ecole Normale Supérieure; Université UQAM Montréeal; Universität Basel; Université Paris 8.