A kaleidoscopic view of the modernization process of three disciplines

Review of Lucio Piccoli (2024). Empatía y visión. Entre espacios de urbanismo, fotografía y diseño en Argentina y Alemania (ca. 1900–1950). Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder GmbH, 312 pp.

Abstract

The book under review presents kaleidoscopically the modernization processes of three disciplines, urbanism, photography and design, from particular episodes of the trajectories of Werner Hegemann, Grete Stern and Tomás Maldonado. The concept between spaces is the one that allows the construction of an assemblage between disciplines and geographies, intellectual transfers and personal displacements, exiles, migrations and cross-fertilization of ideas. Empathy or Einfühlung and new vision or neues Sehen are the notions that link the production of the aforementioned figures. The book reconstructs the multidirectional sense of the processes of disciplinary modernization, the different points of articulation and the modes of circulation of global practices and knowledge. The artistic and personal itineraries of the protagonists of the interstitial instances developed are the tools to highlight the scope and evolution of the concepts of empathy and vision.  The research envisions the possibility of elaborating a narrative strategy that reinstates the particular moments of the analyzed episodes in a framework of integral meaning. It presents new ways to write modern cultural history from the overlaps, mismatches and incongruities, starting from a theoretical analytical matrix that allows the development of an integral narrative from the fragments.