Sguardo autobiografico e dispositivi iconotestuali in Michele Mari

The aim of the paper is to investigate the structure of authorship in three iconotextual and autobiographical work by Michele Mari: Filologia dell’anfibio. Diario militare (1995), Asterusher. Autobiografia per feticci (2015) and Leggenda privata (2017). In him diary, Filologia dell’anfibio, Mari writes in the form of a pseudo-treatise the period spent at the military recruitment in Como. The text is illustrated by drawings taken from him diaries of the time. In Asterusher. Autobiografia per feticci, following the tripartite form of the emblematic, Mari juxtaposed photographs of familiar objects and some quotations from his previous works. Leggenda privata is an autofiction where Mari narrates the years of him childhood and adolescence and him relationship with him parents. This work is also illustrated with some family photos and with others taken ad hoc, according to a wide variety of photo-textual combinations. For each of the three works Mari has carefully chosen a specific iconographic form: the picture book, the emblem and the atlas. These forms correspond to three different authorship modalities: unitary, decentralized and multiple. Mari’s autobiographical gaze is represented through the obsessive experimentation with these iconocentric forms.