Diagrams are indispensable in scientific and philosophical thinking. They are both figures of thought and material signs — gestures in space and concepts in mind — yet they operate in rather enigmatic ways, suspended as they are between the readability of texts and an untranslatable image quality. Diagrams are as ubiquitous as they are context-specific and resist a comprehensive theoretical ‘diagrammatics’, yet they are applied every day, perhaps without us noticing. This workshop offers an opportunity to observe and reflect on diagrams, considering their materiality, visual tactics, and formal mechanisms. Through a shared, multidisciplinary exercise in ‘close reading’ and ‘slow looking’, participants will explore the open forms and conceptual possibilities of symmetry and reversibility, repetition and separation, cracks and connections, compasses, graph paper, dotted lines, arrows, and more.
The organizers welcome proposals for short presentations centered on single diagrams (commenting on one or two images maximum), from any discipline or historical context, including self-made diagrams, ranging from chess to thermodynamics, from genealogy to harmonics, from architecture to quantum physics…
Please send proposals by 17 June 2026 at the latest.
In English
10:30 Introduction
by Filippo Bosco and Yuri Di Liberto
10:45 Short Presentations
by Participants and Discussion
Organized by
Filippo Bosco and Yuri Di Liberto
With
Filippo Bosco
Cat Dawson
Yuri Di Liberto
Alexandra Germer
Aria Gilani
Kathleen Heil
Paul Heinicker
Andrew Hurle
José Antonio Magalhães
Stephan Roemer
Elisa Rosa Quarta
Tomi Seyi Laja
Image credit: Hans Kayser, Ton Cycloid, Lehrbuch der Harmonik, Occident Verlag, 1950