The exhibition theme of La Nuu 2024 is Atlas, the burden of images. The curatorship of this year's edition is a tribute to the work Atlas Mnenosyne, which the art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) began in 1924 and left unfinished because of his death.

Named after the Greek mythological titan Mnemosyne, daughter of Gaia and Uranus (the philological origin of her name in ancient Greek means ‘memory’), Atlas Mnenosyne embodies the main lines of his work.

With this colossal project, Aby Warburg created his own iconographic method characterised by an asystematic and fragmentary cartography, whose diffused limits propose a network of relationships to reflect on images, their memory and their destiny. According to the author himself, the Atlas is ‘a machine for thinking about images, an artefact designed to trigger correspondences and evoke analogies’.

Its key concepts, ‘survival of images’ (Nachleben) and ‘pathos formulas’ (Pathosformel) are at the root of the development of later research such as Panofsky's Iconology, Hans Belting's Anthropology of Images or the more recent Visual Studies of Keith Moxey, W. J. T Mitchell and Gidi-Huberman.