What do the viral video of the aerobics instructor giving a live lesson on Facebook while in the background parade the military ready to make the coup in Myanmar, the Brazilian opposition memes that praise a shrimp for sending Jair Bolsonaro have in common at the hospital and the new president of Chile Gabriel Boric listening to Taylor Swift’s “Folklore” during a Q&A live on Instagram? In the eyes of a distracted observer, little or nothing. For the 44 thousand people who follow @iconografiexxi on Instagram, however, they are all images that fall into a common category: that of things that shouldn’t exist, but exist anyway.
To animate the project Mattia Salvia – journalist and editor who in the past has dealt with politics at Vice and Rolling Stone – collects photos, videos and memes “with the eyes of a historian of the future”. The result, to quote the official page of the project, is “a reasoned archive of aspects of the present that run the risk of going unnoticed”, a research space that pays particular attention to aesthetics, cultures and subcultures
Iconografie is a research space created to observe the present “with the eyes of a historian of the future”, paying particular attention to its trends, its aesthetics, its cultures and subcultures. Despite having existed since 2019, the archive exploded as a cultural phenomenon on Instagram during the pandemic, following live, with a different look at historical events such as the reconquest of Afghanistan by the Taliban or the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“I started collecting these images around 2016, when many people began to realize that there was something wrong with the present,” Salvia tells Italian Tech. “When Trump was elected to the White House, a lot of people made jokes that we had entered the wrong, absurd timeline. Gradually, the accumulation of contents has brought out some red threads that connect them, as if they were communicating with each other “. Graduated in philosophy and avid reader, Salvia perceives his own as a gatekeeping job: “I find most of the contents and then people see them for the first time on Iconografie”. As? “Over the years I have built up a feed of sources – journalists, photographers, local activists, primary sources or almost. Probably good journalists who follow certain areas of the world see the same things I see, but some things are important if you are looking for news, others are important for Iconografie, and the two do not always coincide “.
Something that would never have been possible without the Internet. “The disintermediation that brought the Internet is the central condition for the birth of projects like mine: a journalist and I see the same things, but we look at them with different eyes and intentions. Without the internet, we would only know what is told by those looking for news, not by those looking for something else ”. Depending on the day, that “something else” could be anything from photos of Taliban in bumper cars to photos of anti-China protesters wearing a Winnie the Pooh mask. In many cases, what creates the feeling of estrangement typical of @iconografiexxi’s posts is precisely the fact that they help to show how the space between once distant cultures has shrunk.
Not surprisingly, one of the red threads identified by Salvia is the interaction of groups that until recently were considered outside modernity with modernity itself – just think of the Taliban who post the same memes as the white supremacists in the United States. “We are witnessing the emergence of everything that is not the West in the matter of self-representation, with a consequent downsizing of the West”, she says. This explains the fact that, although Iconografie is an Italian project – and although there is a sister page, @italografie, which deals only with the eccentricities of contemporary Italy – a very large part of the posts published on the Instagram page show neither Europe nor the United States. “Most of the things that happen in the world don’t happen in America or Europe. Most people don’t live in America and Europe, ”Salvia simply says.
At the heart of the reasoning behind @iconografiexxi – and the quarterly, monographic magazine, which complements the work done on Instagram – is the concept of “great convergence”, which means the inversion of a trend that has begun with the discovery of America and the colonial wars that followed in the following centuries, which created significant economic and cultural divergence between the West and the rest of the world. “The second phase of globalization and the rise of Eastern countries also leads to the breakdown of certain monopolies previously in the hands of the West,” he explains. “This is one of the main junctions of the present, from which a series of very evident consequences in the work of Iconographies descend freely: the erosion of the middle class, the populist revolt in the West which is configured in an anti-convergence perspective, in defense privileges and an accentuation of right-wing identity politics. But also the taking over of one’s representation by other peoples and cultures and the erosion of the Anglo-American cultural monopoly – just think of the South Korean winning the Oscar or what becomes viral on social media worldwide, like the video of the gymnastics instructor from Myanmar or the ship aground in the Suez Canal. All things that no longer happen in the West ”.