Preserving Meaning: Conservation and Trasformation in Religion, Ethics, and Technology

“Preserving meaning” defines an essential operation of culture. It gathers time into form, it extends memory into transmission, it shapes continuity through vigilance. In the deep resonance of the Latin verb “servo”, preservation emerges as an act of guarding, sustaining, reserving, transmitting. Preserving meaning is always a gesture of creation, an aesthetic and ethical performance that generates duration and intelligibility.
The conference “Il senso serbato / Preserving Meaning”, to be held from 16 to 19 December at the Center for Religious Studies of the Bruno Kessler Foundation, invites reflection on preserving meaning across domains of ritual, media, ecology, and technology. Preserving meaning does not signify immobilization, but modulation of temporality; it manifests as transformation through continuity, as survival through metamorphosis, as visibility through transmission.
Rites preserve meaning by reconfiguring forms of repetition. Images preserve meaning by radiating visibility across generations. Archives preserve meaning by instituting orders of memory, by projecting conditions of future legibility. Preserving meaning establishes the very possibility of cultural endurance.
Religion articulates this dynamic with particular intensity. Sacred texts, rituals, and traditions exemplify preserving meaning as vigilance, as the ethical care that retains the ultimate orientation of existence. Faith itself unfolds as an act of preserving meaning: guarding sense against dispersal, sustaining memory as promise, connecting finitude with transcendence.
Environmental conservation extends the same principle into planetary scales. Geological strata preserve meaning as temporal archives, ecosystems preserve meaning as living codes of biodiversity, glaciers preserve meaning as crystalline witnesses of climate. Preserving meaning here becomes ecological and ethical at once, a responsibility for the survival of signs inscribed in matter and life.
Artificial intelligence multiplies the stakes of preserving meaning. Algorithms memorize, filter, and recombine; they construct machinic regimes of retention that reshape memory, knowledge, and imagination. Preserving meaning within algorithmic architectures entails new forms of care, new logics of selection, new responsibilities of interpretation.
Preserving meaning today demands a multidisciplinary vision. Semiotics, religious studies, aesthetics, media theory, philosophy of technology, environmental humanities, and ethics converge in interrogating how meaning persists, how it transforms, how it survives.

SPEAKERS

Juan ALONSO ALDAMA | Université Paris Cité/PHILéPOL
Daria ARKHIPOVA | Università degli studi di Torino
Pierluigi BASSO FOSSALI | Università di Bologna
Alice GIANNITRAPANI | Università di Palermo
Dario MANGANO | Università di Palermo
Francesco MANGIAPANE | Università degli Studi di Palermo
Gianfranco MARRONE |  Università di Palermo
Tiziana MIGLIORE | Università di Urbino Carlo Bo
Maria Giulia ONDERO | F.R.S.-FNRS/ULiège
Karin PETERS | Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
Stefano TRAINI | Università degli Studi di Teramo
Bordenca Ilaria VENTURA | University of Palermo
Marco  VENTURA | Università di Siena
Hongbing YU | Toronto Metropolitan University
Nicola ZENGIARO | Università degli Studi di Torino

Cycle of Seminars: Conservation and Transformation in Ethics and Religion

Scientific coordination: Massimo Leone, FBK-ISR

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