The Earth Is a Great Memory: Mnemotopes and Phototextual Practices in Dialogue with Vincenzo Agnetti

The exhibition La terra è una grande memoria, “The Earth Is a Great Memory”, held at the Vincenzo Agnetti Archive in February 2025, emerges as a poetic response to theoretical inquiry, engaging with memory, territory, and representation themes. At its core lies an interdisciplinary dialogue between conceptual art, design, and phototextual practice, shaped in close conversation with the legacy of Italian artist Vincenzo Agnetti (1926-1981). Agnetti’s work, where critical theory cyclically becomes artistic production and vice versa, offers a complex and nuanced vision of memory. For him, memory is “the art of forgetting” (Agnetti V., 1969). Forgotten ideas are internalized and transform into cerebral fuel, stratifying within us and within the places we inhabit, both physical and mental (Agnetti G., 2024). As Agnetti states, memory ultimately “sets our arms and legs in motion” (ibid.). His notion that “the earth is a great memory”, taken from a 1972 interview with Corriere della Sera, thus provides the exhibition's title and curatorial framework. In Agnetti’s view, every human gesture detaches from the self and is inscribed into the land as performative sedimentation. Within this conceptual perimeter, the Mnemofoto project was conceived. Initiated in 2020 as part of doctoral research in Communication Design, Mnemofoto investigates the convergence of place and memory through an interdisciplinary perspective encompassing anthropology, media studies, social sciences, and perception theory. From this emerges the idea of the mnemotope (Galasso, 2024), a new interpretive model defining the physicalconceptual space where individual and collective memories are layered, preserved and emerge. Created in collaboration with photographer Stefano Scagliarini, Mnemofoto is an open, evolving phototextual project that invites public participation. Individuals are asked to recall and narrate personal memory places, emotionally charged sites akin to Bergman’s “wild strawberry fields” (1957). In three phases, these places are identified, photographed, returned to the participants, and materialized in portraits in their homes. The result, a series of phototextual triptychs, translates the three-dimensional density of memory into two-dimensional image-text compositions. In the exhibition, these spatial-mnestic stories became an installation, a shared wall, a sort of topographic mosaic of individual memories, where text and image are mutually interpreted. What was presented is the current state of the Mnemofoto project, a deliberately unfinished work that seeks ongoing resonance between academic discourse and artistic practice, opening new expressive possibilities. Displayed in dialogue with select works by Agnetti, such as Libro dimenticato a memoria and his feltri, the exhibition frames his poetics as both boundary and interpretive medium. Agnetti’s fusion of image and text functions as artwork and metacommentary, a conceptual caption, guiding visitors with an embedded critical lens. The Earth Is a Great Memory becomes more than a title: it is a performative invocation. It invites viewers to consider how memory shapes and is shaped by place, and how artistic practice can excavate, embody, and re-perform memory through images, words, and spatial participatory experiences.