Images of the People. The Online Visual World of Three European Far-Right Parties.

• Applicant: Dr. Jacopo Galimberti
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 508005530

Images of the People. The Online Visual World of Three European Far-Right Parties. The main objective of the project is to provide an original understanding of the online visual strategies of European far-right parties. I aim to conduct the first cross-national analysis to focus on the visual production of AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Germany), Lega (Italy), Rassemblement National (France) on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. In particular, I will examine the still and moving images circulated by these parties between the 2019 European general elections and the 2024 European general elections. The research will develop in-depth qualitative analyses of motifs and figures, putting the parties’ visuals in an art-historical perspective. I will explore the rationales and genealogies of these images, paying close attention to their debts to, and breaks with, the iconography of the European far right and of the far left before the advent of social media. Via this unprecedented approach, Images of the People will complement current research on the party’s verbal messages. Indeed, while the online textual messages posted by far-right parties have been subject to investigations, their images have often been overlooked, or scrutinised through quantitative methods that are largely unable to account for the subtleties of far-right visual communication. The far-right parties’ conflation of mainstream and extreme messages, of authority and intimacy, is not only heavily reliant on aesthetics, but it is also deliberately based on the calculated ambivalence of images. This widespread tendency opens a vast transdisciplinary field of enquiry that requires a sustained engagement also on the part of Bildwissenschaflter*innen and art historians. Images of the People will supplement both social-science analyses of parties’ online verbal messages and current studies of political iconology with an innovative perspective on contemporary far-right parties that is predicated on the tradition of Martin Warnke’s work and the archive of images located in the Research Centre for Political Iconography of the Warburg Haus (Hamburg).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants