Giovanna Brambilla's 'Aldiqua' Explores Death and Mourning Through Art

Giovanna Brambilla has published 'Aldiqua. Immagini per chi resta' (Lubrina Bramani Editore, 2023), a 160-page essay examining how art helps the living process grief and loss. The book's title, coined by Brambilla's daughter, deliberately avoids the word 'death' to focus on those left behind. It originated from a talk Brambilla gave in Bergamo for the Associazione Le Piane after the worst months of the Covid-19 pandemic. The volume includes works by Picasso, Raphael, Therese Frare, Cildo Meireles, and Giuseppe Stampone, among others. Brambilla does not arrange the works chronologically but thematically around rituals of loss and farewell. She discusses how art addresses the public/private dichotomy in mourning, citing examples such as the dual photographs of Aldo Moro's funerals—private and state—which the family opposed. The book opens with a preface by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and references Marcel Duchamp's epitaph 'After all, it is always the others who die.' Brambilla argues that art fulfills the human desire for immortality and remembrance, as seen in Stampone's 'Duration,' which depicts an empty alphabet to symbolize that grief has a duration but no fixed image.