PhD Dissertation (2017-2021).

Defended Sep. 2021.

Supervisor: Kris Pint.

Co-supervisor: Koenraad van Cleempoel.

Doctoral committee: Barbara Baert, Arne Dewinde, Edith Dekyndt.

Jury members: Wendy Morris, Hannah van Hove, Mia You.

Collapse uses the swooning Virgin in Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross as a recurrent theme to develop a fragmentary autotheory on how invisible, historical and emotional impacts have outer consequences involving the self and others.

In order to do so, I borrowed from Aby Warburg’s Atlas methodology, juxtaposing Flemish Renaissance art with contemporary work, and stretched it further to treat texts the same way. Hence, the parallel between Warburg’s pathos-infused approached, and autotheory, where the biographical and the theoretical co-exist and perform each other.

One of the guiding questions of this project was what to do with religious heritage from a secular standpoint. The answer seems to be to use the deeply human stories revealed in the search for the divine.