Born from an exchange of ideas between Michel Costantini and Göran Sonesson during the congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies held in Perpignan, in the south of France, in 1988, the International Association for Visual Semiotics (Asociación Internacional de Semiótica Visual, in Spanish, Association internationale de sémiotique visuelle, in French, the three official languages of the association), whose abbreviation is AISV-IAVS, was officially founded as an association under the French law in 1989 in Blois, France, where the first international congress was held in 1990.
The congress had in that opportunity more than one hundred of visual semioticians coming from all over the world. At that time, the association was called International Association of Semiology of the Image, or AISIM (according to its acronym in French), and its name was changed in 1992.
As its name indicates (visual semiotics), the main objective of the IAVS is to gather semioticians all over the world who are interested in images and, in more general terms, in visual signification, without privileging any particular interpretation of semiotics, and without favoring any semiotic tradition in particular.
The IAVS has also organized meetings or sessions together with the International Association of the Semiotics of Space, mainly during the IASS congress held in Dresden, Germany, in October 1999. Other joint sessions were held during the IAVS congress in Quebec City. The IAVS has also organized sessions on visual semiotics during the congress of the IASS in A Coruña (2009), and regional European conferences in Lisbon, in 2011, and Urbino, in 2014.
The first president of the IAVS was Michel Costantini in 1989. The first elected president was Fernande Saint-Martin, from the Université du Québec à Montréal. The second president, elected during the congress in Berkeley, California, in 1994, was Jacques Fontanille, from the University of Limoges. Ana Claudia de Oliveira, from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, was elected president during the congress held in Sao Paulo in 1996, and Paolo Fabbri, from the University of Bologna, was elected president in Siena in 1998. Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, from the University of Liège, and member of the Groupe µ, was elected president during the congress in Quebec City in 2001, and has been re-elected at the general assemblies held in Lyon 2004, Istanbul 2007 and Venice 2010. José Luis Caivano, from the University of Buenos Aires, was elected president in the conference of 2012. The current president, since the conference 2015, is Göran Sonesson, from the University of Lund, Sweden.
Chronology of members of the executive committeeedit
1989-1990 (nominated in Blois)
president: Michel Costantini
secretary: Jean-Jacques Huby
treasurer: Geneviève Cittanova
1990-1992 (elected in Blois)
president: Fernande Saint-Martin
vice-presidents: Göran Sonesson, Claude Gandelman, Michel Costantini
general secretary: Jean-Jacques Huby
deputy secretary: Geneviève Cittanova
a treasurer was not elected
1992-1994 (elected in Bilbao)
president: Fernande Saint-Martin
vice-presidents and secretaries (not differentiated): Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, Göran Sonesson, Claude Gandelman, José María Nadal
1994-1996 (elected in Berkeley)
president: Jacques Fontanille
vice-presidents: Göran Sonesson, Claude Gandelman, José María Nadal, Jean-Marie Klinkenberg
general secretary: Michel Costantini
executive secretary: Ana Claudia Mei Alves de Oliveira
deputy secretary: Kim Young Hae
financial delegate: Pascal Sanson
1996-1998 (elected in Sao Paulo)
president: Ana Claudia Mei Alves de Oliveira
vice-presidents: Oscar Steimberg, Michel Costantini
general secretary: Lucia Corrain
deputy secretary: Kim Young Hae
treasurer: Stefano Montes
1998-2001 (elected in Siena)
president: Paolo Fabbri
vice-presidents: Eduardo Peñuela Cañizal, Marie Carani, Michel Costantini, Ana Claudia Mei Alves de Oliveira, Göran Sonesson, Oscar Steimberg
general secretary: Manar Hammad
deputy secretary: Kim Young Hae
financial delegate: Martine Joly
2001-2004 (elected in Quebec City)
president: Jean-Marie Klinkenberg
vice-presidents: Eduardo Peñuela Cañizal, Marie Carani, José Luis Caivano, Julieta Haidar, François Jost, Pascal Sanson
executive secretary: Göran Sonesson
treasurer: Michel Costantini
2004-2007 (elected in Lyon)
president: Jean-Marie Klinkenberg
vice-presidents: Eduardo Peñuela Cañizal, Marie Carani, José Luis Caivano, Pascal Sanson, Alfredo Cid Jurado
general secretary: Göran Sonesson
treasurer: Michel Costantini
2007-2010 (elected in Istanbul)
president: Jean-Marie Klinkenberg
vice-presidents: José Luis Caivano, Eduardo Peñuela Cañizal, Pascal Sanson, Alfredo Cid Jurado, Nükhet Güz, Rocco Mangieri
general secretary: Göran Sonesson
treasurer: Michel Costantini
2010-2012 (elected in Venice)
president: Jean-Marie Klinkenberg
vice-presidents: José Luis Caivano, Eduardo Peñuela Cañizal, Alfredo Cid Jurado, Nükhet Güz, Rocco Mangieri, Isabel Marcos, Tiziana Migliore
In its beginnings, the IAVS used the journal EIDOS, Bulletin international de sémiologie de l’image, created previously by the research group with the same name in Blois (François Rabelais University, Tours), as the organ of research. However, after 1996, the IAVS started to publish its official journal, VISIO, Revue internationale de sémiotique visuelle, with the financial and logistic support of the CRSHC and the CÉLAT, at the Faculty of Literature, Université Laval, in Quebec City.
