ShoWar

ASERI, as part of the ASERIncontra review , is pleased to present the volume

ShoWar
The war in Ukraine as a spectacle

by Anna Maria Lorusso and Marco Santoro 
The Mill

Tuesday 9 December 2025, 5.30 p.m.
in ASERI, Via San Vittore 18, MILAN

live streaming is also planned

Introduces:
Damiano Palano, ASERI Director

Speakers:
Anna Maria Lorusso, Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Languages. University of Bologna

Marco Santoro, Professor of Sociology, University of Bologna

Anna Sfardini, Professor of Intercultural Communication and Media, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart 

The book:

What happens when a war goes pop? When his images and sounds immerse us – albeit at a distance – in the trenches and ruins of the cities, in a continuous live social and television broadcast? The war in Ukraine is – like all wars, but perhaps more than the others – a war of ideologies, narratives, images and mirrors, as much as a war of armies and militias with cannons, tanks, missile launchers. The interweaving of traditional modes and images with hyper-technological resources offers the "spectacle" of an anomalous, unprecedented war – recognizable as a war, but usable as a war film. To the Instagram and TikTok live broadcasts of this conflict, the media have added their live broadcasts, in a media hypertrophy in which many boundaries have definitively jumped. This volume proposes a reflection on the meaning, or rather the meanings, of the media representation of the Ukrainian conflict for those who observe and experience it from a distance, for those who witness the "show" of war, which goes beyond yet another "show of pain", defining instead a constant condition of immersion in the conflict, with the live of images and sounds that makes us active and present witnesses of the events in progress: participate, in our own way, more than ever. With an approach that treasures the tools of semiotic analysis, visual studies, media theory and sociology, some of the "protagonists" of the ShoWar are analyzed in the contributions that make up the volume: from the figure of President Zelensky to the role of sport, from the protection of artistic heritage to the remediation of cinematographic images, up to the role of the great musical stages and the multiple images of Italian talk shows, which have further confused entertainment, propaganda and information, offering us a "knowledge of war" with aggressions and exasperated front lines in the studios and television lounges in imitation of war itself.

Authors:
Anna Maria Lorusso teaches Semiotics of Culture and Analysis of Journalistic Texts at the Department of Arts of the University of Bologna.

Marco Santoro teaches Sociology of Journalism and Sociology of the Arts at the Department of Arts of the University of Bologna. 

Participation is free upon registration. 

live streaming is also planned

Info: info.aseri@unicatt.it