Theoretical Notes
Urban Philology emerges from the intersection of Modern Philology, visual art and urban research. Its theoretical framework considers the contemporary city as a material text: a space continuously written, overwritten, erased and reinterpreted.
These notes identify some of the conceptual references that inform the practice. They are not intended as a fixed theoretical system, but as working tools through which urban traces can be observed, interpreted and transformed through artistic practice.
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Focus: Urban Semiotics & Literary Archaeology.
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Keywords: Palimpsest, Collective Memory, Layering, Italo Calvino.
THE CITY AS TEXT & PALIMPSEST
Urban Philology considers the contemporary city as a material text and a living palimpsest, in which buildings, inscriptions, signs, posters, graffiti, repairs and erasures record successive acts of writing and rewriting.
Like a text transmitted through revisions, overwritings and omissions, urban space preserves traces of different moments, voices and forms of power. The city is never a neutral background, but as a surface in which memory, erasure, rewriting, and forgetting become materially visible.
Urban Philology approaches these traces as urban witnesses: fragments through which processes of transformation, preservation and erasure can be observed and critically reinterpreted.
References: André Corboz · Andreas Huyssen · Walter Benjamin
TRACE / URBAN WITNESSES
A trace is neither a complete document nor a pure absence. It is a fragment through which something no longer fully present can become perceptible.
Urban traces may appear as inscriptions, fragments of posters, faded colours, erased graffiti, architectural scars, repairs or gaps in the urban fabric.
The artistic act begins with attention to these partial forms of evidence: observing what remains, what has disappeared and what the surface itself records.
INSCRIPTION / ERASURE
Writing and erasure are not opposite processes. Every act of inscription modifies the surface on which it appears, while every act of erasure leaves its own material evidence.
Urban surfaces therefore contain a continuous negotiation between visibility and invisibility: what is allowed to remain, what is overwritten, what is removed and what survives despite attempts at removal.
Urban Philology examines this tension not only conceptually, but materially through painting.
FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE
A trace is neither a complete document nor a pure absence. It is a fragment through which something no longer fully present can become perceptible.
Urban traces may appear as inscriptions, fragments of posters, faded colours, erased graffiti, architectural scars, repairs or gaps in the urban fabric.
The artistic act begins with attention to these partial forms of evidence: observing what remains, what has disappeared and what the surface itself records.
