Remediations
Tommaso Parrillo & Giulia Parlato
24x30 cm
156 pages
Soft cover
Editing and art direction by Tommaso Parrillo
Design by Ilaria Miotto
Text by Nicoletta Leonardi, Monica Maffioli
Published in October 2025
ISBN 979-12-80177-52-0
Witty #98
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Supported by Strategia Fotografia 2024 promoted by Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea of the Italian Ministry of Culture
From the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s, the Academies of Fine Arts assembled photographic collections that, even today, remain surprisingly little known. Remediations. Photographs from Art Academies offers an innovative approach to this heritage, seeking to “activate” it through a dialogue between past and present. The title draws on a neologism from media studies, inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s observation that the content of one medium is always another medium. In this spirit, the volume foregrounds remediation through two intimately connected technologies of reproduction: the photographic documentation of artworks and plaster casts — each mirroring and amplifying the other, both emblematic of the logic of the copy. The project unfolds through a dual perspective. Curator and publisher Tommaso Parrillo approaches the historical photographs preserved in the Academies as performative images. His editorial work takes shape as an act of deconstruction and rewriting: the photographs are reorganized into new constellations of meaning and rendered capable of activating fresh interpretations and sustaining plural memories. In doing so, they reveal how archives are not neutral containers but dynamic organisms, continuously open to resemanticization. In parallel, artist Giulia Parlato engages with the plaster casts, producing a new photographic series that reinterprets these historic teaching tools. Her images transform the casts into contemporary figures, which on the one hand acknowledge their status as replicas, while on the other destabilize their original pedagogical function. In dialogue with Parrillo’s reconfiguration of the archival photographs, Parlato’s work expands the symbolic and aesthetic potential of this heritage, opening it to new forms of perception. From the interplay of these two perspectives, the historical patrimonies of the Academies of Fine Arts emerge as a vital and dynamic devices, where past and present, archive practices and their reconfigurations, materiality and imagination continually interact. The result is an unprecedented visual glossary: a mosaic of images that dissolves chronologies and institutional frameworks in order to generate new aesthetic, symbolic, and retinal resonances.
