Magic Signs

Project ref.: 002 Gambino – Pulvirenti

The invisible becomes a magic quality of the word, which is able to push poetry to the fringe of absolute. This metaphysical tension takes advantage of metaphors, of dreamlike images, of images produced in altered states of mind. In fact, the question about the threshold between visible and invisible bases on the study of dream and of its symbolic system. The cognitive inquiry about the connection between individual and collective conscience and unconscious, as well as between memory of the past ad of the present, of irrational and reason, of invisible and visual, begins with the study of dream and is already present in the first studies about the symbolic displacement of sense of the romantic and pre-romantic time (Schubert, 1814) (Alt, 2005). The research unit will focus on the modalities and the procedures through which dreamlike images drive to this symbolic shift of sense and to the creation of new mythologems and poetic forms of the invisible, like in Novalis’ work and as E.T.A. Hoffmann tries to do sometimes.