Research Question

How does hegemonic culture, in Gramsci’s interpretation, constitute itself and operate by repressing imaginaries and desires that are considered unacceptable, thereby producing what is defined as cultural repression (Orlando, 2025)? How can new media remediate it, reactivating it in the present and directing it towards the imagination of new futures? What is excluded does not disappear, but rather persists as a latent possibility, operating in the present in the form of unrealized narratives and imaginaries. Cultural repression becomes an analytical category for investigating the processes of meaning-making in a culture structured by practices of selection and marginalization. From this perspective, artistic practice assumes a central role as a device of mediation and reemergence, which is capable of activating these possibilities and making them shareable. New media operate as environments of remediation, where the past is reactivated and transformed: remediation thus becomes a cultural and political operation, through which art contributes to the reappropriation of narratives and the construction of collective imaginaries.

Methodology

The research methodology is practice-based, using data collection phases with a mixed approach. The research involves:

1. Analysis of historical sources.
2. Creation of workshops, involving cultural associations in Catania that have already been contacted and are interested in this phase of the project. The workshops are aimed at collecting personal and collective memories and oral histories, to build a knowledge base for the subsequent design phase.
3. Collection and reworking of materials through the co-creation of an interactive and immersive device, developed with foreign research organizations; this will enable critical reflection on open-source technologies.
4. Public restitution of the device and data collection, aimed at observing the reactivation of the imaginaries that have emerged, which will counter the dynamics of exclusion.

Case Studies

The case study examines ‘doñas de fuera’ as a vestige of an imaginary rooted in the Sicilian context, which is linked to practices of care and mediation between the visible and the invisible (Geremia, 2024). These liminal figures, beginning in the 15th century with the Inquisition, were progressively linked to witchcraft through processes of marginalization. The materials emerging from the workshops will be incorporated into an interactive installation, whose display in public and urban contexts will trigger a second phase of data collection, aimed at observing the resurgence of these imaginaries and evaluating their effectiveness as a remediation device.

Data Analysis

The analysis of the collected data will focus on the narratives and imaginaries that emerge and are negotiated in the co-participatory process. The results will serve to validate the entire research process, through assessing the method’s effectiveness in reactivating cultural repression, producing counter-narratives, and the model’s transferability to different contexts.