La terra è una grande memoria: Il design della comunicazione come atto di resistenza mnestica

Clorinda Sissi Galasso; Anna Contro

doi:10.82068/pgjournal.2026.23.42.07

Authors

Clorinda Sissi Galasso Polytechnic University of Milan Author
Anna Contro University of Genoa Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.82068/pgjournal.2026.23.42.07

Keywords:

Mnestetic Resistance, Communication Design, Mnemotope, Mnemophoto, Ototext

Abstract

Communication design today faces a saturated and accelerated ecosystem that weakens its critical capacity as a cultural agent. It shares this systemic vulnerability with memory, especially individual memory, now overwritten by hyper-visibility and the delegation of recollection to technical devices, generating forms of marginalization and atrophy in the representation of the self. This text investigates how the discipline can become a practice of mnestic resistance, capable of recognizing, translating, and remedying such vulnerability through a shared action, considering interdisciplinary exchange as a resource. The notion of the mnemotope, understood as a non-institutional place of memory where traces, emotions, and lived experiences intertwine, offers an interpretive framework for understanding memory as a situated and relational phenomenon. Within this perspective lies Mnemofoto, a phototextual project that gathers, photographs, and restores places of individual memory. The project reactivates intimate narratives and restores authorship to the subjects involved, transforming the designer into a mediator of the relationship between place, memory, and testimony. The subsequent exhibition The Earth Is a Great Memory, held at the Vincenzo Agnetti Archive, amplifies these dynamics by placing the phototexts in dialogue with the artist's poetics and works, particularly with his concept of dimenticato a memoria, "forgotten by heart".

Author Biographies

Clorinda Sissi Galasso, Polytechnic University of Milan

Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano. Her research focuses on communication and representation systems of memory, with particular attention to the valorisation of archival documents. She investigates the relationship between memory and place, with a specific emphasis on the concept of the mnemotope and on phototextual practices. She is the author of Zone di memoria. Il design per gli archivi del territorio (2018) and Mnemotopes. Designing the Memory of Places (2024), both published in the Design della Comunicazione series by FrancoAngeli.
Anna Contro, University of Genoa

PhD candidate in Museology at the University of Genoa, following her graduate and postgraduate studies in Art History and Art Criticism at the University of Milan. Her doctoral research focuses on the management of public art in Northern Italy during the years of the Second World War. She is an art historian and public official at the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio for Liguria, and for the past four years she has collaborated with the Archivio Vincenzo Agnetti, where she curates the historical archive and conducts research in her role as Executive Director for the preparation of the artist's catalogue raisonné.

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The Earth Is a Great Memory

Communication Design as an Act of Mnestic Resistance

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