Texts and Images. Dialogues, Tensions, Movements

International Conference

1 December 2026

The conference will take place in Palermo

Accademia di Belle Arti

Palazzo Fernandez, Aula PF 23

Via Papireto, 22, Palermo

Deadline for abstracts: November 13 th , 2026

This conference represents the first joint initiative of the institutions involved within the framework of a shared research project, which will unfold through two interconnected international conferences. The first will take place in Palermo in December 2026, hosted by the Accademia di Belle Arti and the University of Palermo, in collaboration with Tallinn University. A second conference is planned for 2027 in Tallinn, extending the dialogue initiated in Palermo and further developing the project’s shared research agenda. Together, the two events aim to foster sustained academic exchange and strengthen collaboration across institutions and disciplinary boundaries. Texts and images have long been placed in dialogue, yet the nature of their relationship remains open to question. They may complement, translate, frame, interrupt, contradict or transform one another. Their encounter produces meanings that cannot always be attributed to either medium alone. Rather than treating text and image as autonomous forms, this conference invites us to explore the spaces, movements, and tensions that emerge between them. Texts and Images. Dialogues, Tensions, Movements aims to bring together scholars, artists, and researchers from different disciplinary and methodological backgrounds to reflect on the relationships between textual and visual forms. We are interested not only in the ways in which texts represent, describe, interpret, or accompany images, but also in how images can generate, transform, question, or resist textual meanings. The conference welcomes contributions that investigate the structures, practices, and receptions through which texts and images encounter one another. Particular attention may be given to processes of juxtaposition, montage, translation, ekphrasis, illustration, documentation, citation, appropriation, fragmentation, and visual or textual narration. We are also interested in the movements through which images and texts circulate across media, disciplines, historical periods, and cultural contexts. Possible areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to:

• Text-image relationships: dialogue, complementarity, tension, contradiction, interference;
• Structures and forms: composition, sequence, montage, juxtaposition, framing, fragmentation;
• Writing with images / seeing through texts: visual anthropology, ethnography, art history, literary studies, cultural studies;
• Ekphrasis and translation: the passage between visual and textual languages;
• Photography and writing: captions, archives, fieldnotes, diaries, documentary practices, photo-texts;
• Anthropology and visual practices: ethnographic images, multimodality, sensory and embodied forms of knowledge; 
• Artistic practices: artists’ books, installations, cinema, graphic narratives, experimental writing, contemporary art; 
• Reception and interpretation: how viewers/readers construct meaning through the encounter between words and images; 
• Movements across media and disciplines: adaptation, appropriation, circulation, remediation, intermediality; 
• Historical and cultural perspectives: changing relationships between textual and visual forms across different societies and periods; 
• Digital and contemporary practices: screens, interfaces, social media, memes, generative and computational images, new forms of visual-textual production. 

We particularly encourage proposals that cross disciplinary boundaries, question established distinctions between verbal and visual forms, or experiment with forms of presentation in which text and image are themselves placed in dialogue. The conference is conceived as a space for encounters between different perspectives rather than as an attempt to establish a single theory of the text-image relationship. Contributions may be theoretical, methodological, ethnographic, historical, artistic, or experimental. We welcome proposals from anthropology, visual studies, art history, literature, philosophy, media studies, cultural studies, sociology, communication studies, archeology, and the arts, as well as from researchers and practitioners working across these fields.

Modalities of participation and deadline

Send abstracts by November 13th, 2026, to Kristiina Rebane (kristiina.rebane@tlu.ee), Stefano Montes (stefano.montes@unipa.it) and Giancarlo Germanà Bozza (giancarlo.germana@abapa.education). Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words and should include:

• a title;
• 3 keywords;
• a short biography (maximum 5 lines, not included in the 300-word limit).

Applicants will be notified as soon as possible. The conference will take place in person only, in Palermo, at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Via Papireto 22. The languages of the conference are English and Italian. Each presentation will last 20 minutes. Registration is free of charge. No grants are available. Travel, accommodation, and food costs are to be covered by participants.