La obra como investigación y "work-in-progres"

In his famous First Lesson in the Collège de France de 1937, Paul Valéry proposed the term poïétique to designate the study, not of a completed work of art, but of its production and conditions of realization. Contemporary art has crowned this perspective by talking about "work in progress". Artists knew this since way back, through their own experience. In particular, photographers who work on the photogenicity, in its temporal process of shaping. That is the general problem that this book explores and that has been thought of in the 6th. International Week RETINA.Argentina, in December 2019. This time, from a specific perspective, that of the investigative process, like that of a detective, in the manner of the writer Patrick Modiano, "in search of an evocative detail allowing to reconstitute a set, although there was no such set, but nothing more than fragments, stardust" (Patrick Modiano, L'horizon, 2010).Then, the works, the production of contemporary artists and photographers in particular, current and universal art - let us also consider Prehistory, Leonardo Da Vinci and Duchamp - appear under a new face, multiple, enriched, thanks to research, to a work that progresses to infinity and never ends: the recipient can continue indefinitely the research and the work.