When Individual Memory Becomes Performance: Mnemotopes and Phototextual Practices in Dialogue With Vincenzo Agnetti

This chapter reconceptualizes memory as a performative process, moving beyond representational and archival paradigms toward a relational understanding grounded in experience, investigated through memory studies, artistic practice, and communication design. Through the concept of the mnemotope, developed within the “Mnemofoto” project and the subsequent exhibition “The Earth Is a Great Memory”, memory emerges not as a stable object but as an event arising from encounters among bodies, places, and mediating forms. Adopting a theatrical structure informed by performance studies, the chapter enacts memory as a sequence of activations. The Mnemofoto Wall functions as a phototextual dispositif that generates memory through participation, while the dialogue with selected works by Vincenzo Agnetti introduces oblivion as a generative condition. The archive is thus reconfigured as a living mnemotopic field, far from institutional and hierarchical frameworks. Ultimately, the chapter redefines memory not as an object of preservation, but as a process that unfolds through situated practices.