Polyphony of Gazes in an Emergency. What Images Relate and How. The Tangible and Intangible Elements of Suspended Time

The emergency situation started a ‘literacy’ (learning) about the webbased pandemic. Communicating through images, produced through the most varied media, has become more important than ever. In the absence of interpretational models to refer to, the images presented daily by mass media have been our ‘window on the world’. In the meantime, social media recorded avalanches of images of us closed in our homes and wanting to get out. Contemporary Italian photography (art) has also tried to provide answers by identifying different keys to interpretation. Designers, illustrators, cartoonists, street artists, media artists, varying their fucus, seeked to create a channel of communication between their inner perceptions and other people in the world. Graphics/signs printed on the floors/walls have helped us to create internalized views of the partitioning of public places. With respect to this multiform world of images and starting from a selection/analysis of the types of visual medium, the article aims to investigate and express a set of reflections on functions and messages, contexts, focus, encodings, instructive-symbolic power of this immense amount of images in relation to events, places, and people in this crisis situation.