MESSORI Rita

My research focuses mainly on three themes.
The first concerns the importance of Poetics into the philosophical Aesthetics, in particular the relationship between philosophical, aesthetic experience, understood as a sensitive-perceptive and affective experience, and metaphorical language. The philosophical importance of metaphor, understood as an expression of symbolic activity and as the origin of human language, is investigated both at the theoretical level and at the level of the history of ideas. The aim is to underline the cognitive and ontological meaning of the metaphor that emerges in the course of 20th-century Aesthetics, both within Hermeneutics (see Martin Heidegger, Ernesto Grassi, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida) and within French Phenomenology (see Maurice Merleau -Ponty and Mikel Dufrenne). In particular, the French Phenomenological Aesthetics shows the close relationship between the birth of the symbolic process and the corporeality, between metaphor and gesture. From a historical-philosophical point of view, the relationship between pre-verbal language and verbal language is investigated in the era of French Enlightenment, in particular in the Materialism of Denis Diderot and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac. Two important results of this line of research are: a. the connection between the question of the birth of language and the question of the birth of arts, in particular performative arts (such as pantomime and dance); b. the relationship between the sensitive experience of the spectator and the descriptions of paintings in the Salons.
The second line of research concerns the aesthetic idea of Landscape; in particular, this idea is investigated in the French Phenomenological Aesthetics of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Henri Maldiney. For both philosophers the pictorial representation of the landscape is an expression of the aesthetic, sensory-perceptive and affective experience. The aesthetic experience is made by a bodily subject, who is completely immersed in the space-environment, who crosses it and explores it; in this way an aesthetic synthesis is created between subject and world, based on interaction. The aim is to show the need to overcome the traditional model of landscape, as a representation based on the contemplative vision (of a detached spectator), and to elaborate a new performative model of landscape, based on interaction (between subject and world-environment). From a historical-philosophical point of view, the birth of a non-contemplative but performative model of landscape is identified in the Age of French Enlightenment, and in particular in the materialistic philosophy of Denis Diderot (see in particular the essays on painting and the Salons).
The third line of research concerns Applied Aesthetics, and in particular the study of new ways of experience of the arts’ work through new technologies. In the future, the use of virtual reality and augmented reality will change the status of the experience of art and in general of cultural heritage. Therefore a philosophical and aesthetic reflection on these decisive transformations is necessary. Through the new technologies it will be possible to move from a static conception to a dynamic conception of Cultural Heritage. Indeed, the identity of the individual and of the community can be built in the course of an active experience of cultural heritage. For example, the story telling of the artistic processes, of the poetic practices, can allow the spectator to make a more conscious experience of the arts’ work as a creative product. In the same way the use of augmented reality can change the experience of the landscape in its spatial and historical dimension.