Research
Research projects under way and recent ones: from the sensory memory of the Spanish Quarters in Naples to the polyrhythms of the Caribbean, the culture of hospitality in the Mediterranean and the rhythms of the city.
Featured project
Unsheltered people — people in street situations
How does a person who needs somewhere to sleep read — and resist — a city designed to keep them away?
Read moreDigital remediation of cultural heritage in Naples’ Quartieri Spagnoli through body memory, soundwalking and a web data space, developed with the Suor Orsola Benincasa University (2026).
Presentation of the body memory strand of Spanish Quarters Memory (digital performance remediation for cultural heritage), built on the idea that memory is not just an archive but a living process of interaction between our bodies and the rhythms of everyday life. Research team: Viviana De Rosa, Gaia De Gennaro, Rosa Buanne and Rocco Mangieri; hosts at Sor Orsola: Antonio Perri and Paola Villani; Monday 4 May, 11 am.
Screen from the project’s digital data space on gestures, heritage memory and third spaces: frame sequences of hands playing cards and handling game pieces, a photograph of a room with card tables and an old map of Naples with marked points. The interface offers Home, About the data space, Explore the data space and Explore the collections, plus a search box.
Screen from the project’s digital platform on devotional heritage in Naples: street votive shrines (the “’E Cuoncelle”, miniature churches born in the 18th century), popular sacred iconography, the devotion to the Blood of San Gennaro and the Sansevero Chapel with the Veiled Christ. The text is illustrated with photographs of a weathered Madonna statue and framed portraits left at a shrine.
The soundwalking strand of Spanish Quarters Memory, a project on digital remediation for cultural heritage. A web “data space” maps fixed soundwalking locations across the district and links them to audio and video material.
Semiotic research on the event, on architectural atmospheres in the age of AI and on collective semiosis.
A semiotics paper on the event, produced within research project A-88-15-10 at the Laboratory of Semiotics of the Arts of the Universidad de Los Andes. Illustrated with the painting Caritas Romana, its first section opens on the event of the gift.
A paper on Herzog & de Meuron's Beijing Olympic main stadium (2003–2008) and the hybrid human and non-human, AI-mediated assemblages that produce meaning in design. This page links the interlaced roof structure to basket weaving, with the author's study of the woven topological pattern.
A collective-creation project on the semiosis of group making, presented as a work in progress on the El Signo inVISIBLE website, whose menu lists journals, categories and projects.
The rhythms of the city seen while walking, and the hospitality practices of the Mediterranean.
A study of the rhythmic interactions and synchronisation of bodies in public space and city architecture, seeking semiotic invariants in the poly-rhythmic, polyphonic choreographies of a city like Rome. It reads urban life as a “dance of life” shaped by space, culture and today's technological devices.
A study of hospitality practices in Mediterranean cultures from the perspectives of sociosemiotics and geophilosophy. It opens with the Bedouin custom of sheltering any traveller for three days and with the Mediterranean as a space of exchange and interaction where writing and history began.
