Appropriation of Memory: From Trento’s Fascist Heritage to Contemporary Populist Iconography.

Public space often appears static, fixed, and devoid of meaning. Yet a closer look reveals how deeply it is shaped by history and how closely it reflects the transformations of society. Streets, squares, and landmarks carry the weight of difficult pasts and dissonant heritages. 

In Trento, the traces of Fascist attempts to appropriate and conquer public spaces remain visible; but today, who truly “owns” this space? And what efforts have been made to question, problematize, and historicize these legacies? The struggle over memory also plays a central role in the reshaping of contemporary political narratives, by use of symbols and historical figures. Through which media do these reinterpretations take place? How does an image become an icon associated with a specific event or cause? What mechanisms allow visual culture to influence collective memory and public debate of today? 

These questions, and many others, will be addressed by Univ.-Prof. Anna Schober-De Graaf, Professor of Visual Culture at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, and Dr. Virginia Magnaghi, researcher in modern Italian art history at the Max Planck Institute for Art History. Their dialogue will explore how public space, visual symbols, and historical memory intersect, revealing the ways in which societies negotiate their past while constructing the narratives of the present.