We are happy to have our first seminar for 2025 given on site by Samuel Nyholm, a cartoonist, and professor of illustration at the Art University in Bremen. Samuel is originally from Lund, and we look forward to establish a collaboration on the topic of depiction, and in particular on drawing, where the links to the semiotic system of gesture are most obvious, possibly due to their grounds in bodily mimesis. The talk will start as usual at 15:15, but please come before that, on site and online, with cameras on. If you wish to join for a light dinner after the seminar, 17-19:00, let Jordan know by Monday, Jan 20.

What drives us to create images, to carve meaning into stone, clay, sand, or the stars themselves? With Heraclitus’s fragment no. 7 as starting point, we may explore how vision became the dominant sense in shaping our understanding of the world, and how early tools, from the flickering torchlight of Paleolithic caves to the optics and central perspective of the Renaissance, have both expanded, constrained, and somehow distorted our perception.

The alignment of early ritual architecture and recurring Ice Age symbols with celestial phenomena, alongside the alchemical explorations of the early 16th century, such as Paracelsus’s and Agrippa’s connections between alphabets and star constellations, reveals a persistent human impulse to bridge physical sensation and cosmic transcendence. Through pareidolia, the instinct to find patterns and meaning in the abstract. This impulse finds expression in Julia Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora, a pre-linguistic, rhythmic space where desire takes form as expressions of what is absent, lost, or imagined, rather than mere representations. Both the celestial light above and the dancing shadows of the cave have set in motion the primal act of drawing, a gesture of reaching outward, inscribing records of absence into the bark of eternity.

Hockney, D. (2006). Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. Thames & Hudson.

Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Columbia University Press.

Lewis-Williams, D. (2002). The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. Thames & Hudson.

von Petzinger, G. (2016). The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World's Oldest Symbols. Simon & Schuster.

Rappenglück, M. A. (1997). Does a rock picture in the cave of Lascaux show the open star cluster of the Pleiades at the Magdalenian era, ca. 15,300 BC? International Astronomical Union Colloquium, 178, 203–212.

Agrippa, H.C. (1533). De Occulta Philosophia.