Image and Memory: Installation-Narratives in Ieda Magri and Maria Grazia Calandrone

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of the novels Uma exposição by Ieda Magri and Brilha como vida by Maria Grazia Calandrone, focusing on the articulation between image, memory, and narrative. Through the analysis of visual fragments — such as photographs, newspaper clippings, poems, and drawings — the article investigates how the authors build literary paths that not only revisit the past but critically reshape it, composing a kind of sensitive montage or installation-narrative. The reflection draws on the concepts of Jacques Rancière, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Walter Benjamin to examine how images, as they emerge within the texts, function as memory operators, establishing a tension between the visible and the sayable, between lived time and narrated time. Rather than offering a linear restitution of experience, the novels construct fragmentary and experimental trajectories in which memory is updated and transformed in the very act of exposition.