Paper short abstract:

This presentation narrates the use of the Bildatlas Mnemosyne applied as a methodology for visual analysis of wax prints fabrics. On a almost pure visual approach panels are build to demonstrate the multiple temporalities and cultural appropriations in the development of a textile print style.

Paper long abstract:

Waxatlas is a methodology of visual analysis developed following the study of Aby Warburg's Bildatlas Mnemosyne. The existence of a warburgian methodology is a highly debatable subject among Warburg scholars. Warburg used images to understand the tensions between antiquity and European Renaissance through the migrations of images to create a cultural psychological history of the depiction of human expressions. Although it may be difficult to find in Warburg's writings an explicit theoretical structure, several authors have examined Warburg's vocabulary as a means to access his highly personal approach to art history. Metaphor, expressive values, pathos formula, and specially Nachleben are the elements in Warburg's legacy that opened the possibility to an adaptation of Mnemosyne for the study of wax prints. Wax print is a hybrid fabric produced by coloniality. Its visual materiality is produced by various temporalities, geographies and impacts individuals and provoke sorts of feelings, emotions, and actions as it recollects memories yet to be lived. The cartography metaphor used by Warburg is well suited wax since wax material product of spatial and cultural circulation. Prints are not static, they do not encapsulate the time in themselves, they are dynamic, metamorphic, and difficult to grasp. The Waxatlas is a collection of purely visual panels that follows the development of wax prints and the tensions produced within colonization. Using metaphor as a tool it demonstrates that wax is the product of cultural hybridity, and this hybridization process has generated and continues carrying out emotions throughout decades within itself.