Aby M. Warburg - What are time and movement of an ellipse?

Over the last decades, the thought and work of German art historian Aby M. Warburg (1866-1929) has become the object of multidisciplinary research in different parts of the world. Though the many topics covered by his research would stand as reason enough for the present increasing interest in Warburg, it has been the impact of his original insight into his practice that has steadily stepped forward, especially in what concerns Warburg’s way of connecting disciplines and epochs, his continual bridge making between Arts, History and Culture in different times (classical antiquity, middle ages, renaissance, modernism) and civilizations (European and Pre-Colombian American eras), more often taken apart due to their distance in time and space.
Based on an anthropological concept of history, and especially on the history of images, Warburg invents (in the sense of heuriskein) its own movement and its own correspondence for forms, gestures, small details and singularities of plastic representations, which gain new meanings in his studies and which can be charted in a process of revitalization as “posthumous life” (Nachleben) of plural meaning, in transfer between what is farthest away from us and what is nearest to us.
Warburg argues for a concept of history that resorts to memory theory as a social and collective project, and he understands and analyses the history of art as a link between discontinuities. Viewing art as the space that allows both for the fixation and the non-fixation of movement, Warburg claims that art should thus enable that the creation of distance between the artist, the observer and the outer world takes place as a form of awareness of a double unstoppable movement between complementary areas of knowledge.
The core of his studies was steadily amplified, as Warburg went on researching and setting up guidelines for others to establish links between the study fields, which he contemplated systematically, such as classical antiquity, anthropology, architecture, library and documental sciences, cultural sciences, dance, aesthetics and philosophy of art, ethnology, philosophy of language, photography, history, history of art, history of religion, iconology, image and communication, memory, mythology, psychology, psychiatry, symbology, sociology, cultural theory.
As a result of our own understanding of art and culture, in the line of Warburg’s thought, we have decided to take the ellipse as the aggregating methodological image, as it opens onto the perception of the world and the reconfiguration of its memory, exactly the contemplated goals for the conference that we here present. The conference will hopefully summon the concurrent voices, methods, procedures and routes that have marked the scientific project of the German scholar in his dialogue with his contemporaries and his forerunners planting seeds for posterity.
We announce an International and Interdisciplinary Conference, on the thought and work of Aby M. Warburg under the theme What is time and movement of an ellipse?
The Conference is to take place on April 15th and 16th 2010, hosted by Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa and Universidade Católica Portuguesa, with sessions on both locations.