Federico Bellentani

Università degli Studi di Torino | UNITO · Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze dell'Educazione

This paper aims at delineating the basic principles for a semiotic approach to monuments and memorials. Monuments are built forms erected to confer dominant meanings on space. They present an aesthetic value as well as a political function. Often, political elites erect monuments to promote selective historical narratives that focus on convenient e...

From the mid-1980s, the textual paradigm ignited a representational approach toward landscape within human geography. In this context, human geographers largely used the metaphor of landscape as text. Due to a rigid concept of text, this research assumed that landscapes could manifest selective worldviews and dominant discourses of power. Subsequen...

This article draws on interpretative semiotics to address how spatial designers endow the built environment with meaning. From a semiotic perspective, designing the built environment is an activity that extends beyond its physical reshaping. Designers use complex sociosemiotic strategies to funnel users’ interpretations, drawing upon their manifold...

This volume analyses the interpretation of monuments and memorials by connecting analytical frames developed in the fields of semiotics and geography. It concentrates on post-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe, with a focus on Estonia. The main argument is that connecting semiotics and cultural geography can provide an innovative framework to under...

The paper presents a biosemiotic approach to the study of the built environment, its representations and practices in social media. First, it outlines the main developments that make semiotics hold a significant position in the study of urban space and the built environment. It then goes on to overcome the limitations of the binary opposition parad...

Monuments exist in many different forms, but what is common among them is that they have both commemorative and political functions. While articulating specific historical narratives, monuments convey the worldviews of those in power. As such, they encompass a set of meanings, identities and events, while concealing others. National elites are awar...

Espaces, Temps, Sociétés Dans ce second volume, les contributions portent plus spécifiquement sur les rapports entre espaces, temps et sociétés ; elles montrent, tant du côté du temps, de la mémoire et des rituels, des mythes et du projet, que de celui de l’espace, des traces, des empreintes et des frontières, comment la circulation des valeurs sé...

Tipico elemento degli edifici mediterranei, il balcone è un luogo di confine tra la sfera privata e quella pubblica: permette di avere contatto con l’esterno, rimanendo nella propria residenza privata. Per dirla con Lotman, è uno spazio di confine che permette la traduzione tra l’esterno e l’interno della dimensione domestica. È un vero motore gene...

While monuments exist in different plastic and architectural forms, such as statues, buildings, squares, temples, gardens, pyramids, cenotaphs, obelisks and even entire areas of a city, what they seem to have in common is a function that is at once commemorative and political.As a certain type of public material incarnation of information, containi...

Monuments and memorials are built forms with commemorative as well as political functions. They articulate selective historical narratives, focusing attention on events and individuals that are preferred by elites, while obliterating what is uncomfortable for them. Articulating historical narratives, monuments can set cultural and political agendas...

Les recherches antérieures ont étudié les monuments et les mémoriaux comme des constructions purement esthétiques, d’une part, et comme de puissants outils servant la reproduction de l’autorité et du contrôle, d’autre part. Ce faisant, ces recherches ont, volontairement ou non, créé un fossé entre les dimensions matérielle, symbolique et politique...

Memorials are built forms with commemorative as well as political functions. They can articulate selective historical narratives, focusing attention on convenient events and individuals, while obliterating what is discomforting for an elite. While articulating historical narratives, memorials can set cultural agendas and legitimate political power....

Totalitaarsete režiimide pärandi säilitamise küsimus kütab sageli üles tuliseid poliitilisi vaidlusi. Osa inimesi näeb säilitamises või-malust tegeleda keerulise aja-looga, uskudes, et nii saame minevikust õppida ja ehitada paremat tulevikku. Teised aga arvavad, et traumaatilise mineviku ruumiliste jälgede pühkimine aitab ravida režiimi ohvrite eba...

La reedición del pasado es un medio de control político que transforma nuevas construccio- nes sociales en hechos naturales. La historia, como conocimiento, si bien se transmite como algo objetivo, dado e inalterable, es en reali- dad un complejo de significados subjetivos producidos socialmente. Tiene la función de institucionalizar la realidad, e...

Lo scopo di questo articolo è di presentare, in un modo certo ancora parziale e provvisorio, un workshop, e i risultati di un primo lavoro di osservazione sul campo, tenutosi a Prijedor (Bosnia Erzegovina) nella primavera 2013 (“Identities of Places, Places of Identities, before and now”, 26-30 April 2013, Prijedor).