Shared Isolation. Political Nostalgias and Spaces of Consolation

A widespread reading takes nostalgia (also) to be a passion of solitude, almost as if the two stood in a relation of affective cause and effect. Adopting the perspective of a semiotics of culture and memory, this paper complicates that premise and identifies in nostalgia the operation by which those who find themselves isolated with respect to the present - in a kind of diachronic isolation – convert a separation in time into a sharing in space, instituting a practice of co-presence. Nostalgia thus works as the passional device that makes isolation shared and, by that very fact, legitimises it in the eyes of those who experience it, preventing loneliness from being added to isolation. Drawing on Arendt’s distinction between isolation, loneliness and solitude, the paper shows how nostalgic communities reproduce a fixed-term communion in spaces that bear a relation to the memory they invoke, making ritual and togetherness an antidote to loneliness. The mechanism recurs with regularity: a lost temporality is idealised; a boundary is drawn in diachrony as a defence against the political present; a rite steps in to exorcise the finitude of that same gathering. The rite and the space, however, do not restore what the nostalgic subject lays claim to; they console its absence. Political nostalgia and its practices thus take shape as a secession from common time – a withdrawal from the pact of the present which, far from private melancholy, is enacted collectively.

Speaker bio

Mario Panico is a research fellow at the University of Bologna, where he teaches visual semiotics and is a member of “TraMe - Centre for the Semiotic Study of Memory”. In 2026 he was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Loughborough University (UK), and he is currently a fellow at the KNIR - Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. His research lies at the intersection of semiotics, visual memory studies, conflict studies and affect theory. He is the author of Spaces for Nostalgia: Difficult Memory and Spatial Consolation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), co-editor, with Federico Bellentani and Lia Yoka, of Semiotic Approaches to Urban Space. Signs and Cities (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2024), and co-author, with Cristina Demaria and Patrizia Violi, of Il genere del male. Immagini e voci di donne tra violenza agita e zona grigia (Milan: Meltemi, 2026).

Seminar co-organized by LIMS – ISR and ISIG within the event series “Solitudine e comunione nella religione e nell’etica”.

Referents: Giorgia Proietti, Valeria Fabretti, Sandra Toffolo