Events

Literary and Cultural Circulation Between Italy and Brazil

Workshop
As part of the 2024 celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of Italian emigration to Brazil, this workshop will explore the artistic and cultural ties between the two nations from the turn of the 20th century to the present. [more]
In the late 18th century, in the Amazonian drawing schools, as in Europe, copying and imitating academic prints was not only a means of disseminating thought and artistic knowledge but also an explicit principle of creative formation, helping artists develop their own unique style. [more]
Mettendo in dialogo storia, pratiche curatoriali e pratiche artistiche, il seminario interroga le potenzialità e i limiti delle arti visive nell’indagare, narrare, visualizzare e risignificare la difficile eredità del fascismo in Alto Adige, a partire dal film Plant Plant (2021) dell’artista Katrin Hornek. Intervengono Andrea Di Michele, Emanuele Guidi e Katrin Hornek. [more]
Il Convegno Internazionale di Studi si svolge nell’ambito del Progetto di ricerca Spazidentità. Spazialità materiale e immateriale dell’italianità dalla Repubblica Cisalpina al Fascismo : territori, città, architetture, musei. Programmes structurants, École française de Rome, 2022-2026. Axe Thématique : Création, patrimoine, mémoire [more]
In the early modern period, throughout the process of negotiation that gave shape to sainthood – whether officially recognized or aspirational – images were of paramount importance. Encompassing a wide range of media, from inexpensive medals and woodcuts to costly altarpieces, images were as crucial at the grassroots level of popular devotion as in the context of elite patronage. The conference Picturing Sainthood: Images and the Making of Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism investigates the role of images in generating, defining, and recognizing sainthood across cultures in the wake of Catholicism’s global expansion during the period of Iberian hegemony (c. 1500–1700). [more]
Questo seminario analizzerà la "Mostra dell'Attrezzatura Coloniale”, utilizzando i material culture studies e la storia delle esposizioni per indagare il ruolo della cultura materiale nella costruzione dell'immaginario coloniale, in particolare quello che presentava l'invasione dell'Etiopia come un “safari”. [more]

Humanist Cultures in Colonial Latin America

Research Seminar
What did it mean to be a humanist in sixteenth. century Tunja? Set in the Colombian Andes, Tunja was construed as a major artistic center of the colonial territory of New Kingdom of Granada by its first-generation of Spanish settlers, which included writers, captains, and clerics. In addition to building new homes and churches, these inhabitants of Tunja established a local intellectual network based on rivalry, innovation, and genealogy. [more]
The relationship between avant-garde artists and consumer culture has often been framed as antagonistic. Nonetheless, in the period between the First and Second World Wars, commercial display became a significant means through which modern design was introduced to the general public. Recent studies have demonstrated how commercial display practices have “contributed to the formulation of new forms of aesthetic experience, as well as art and design typologies” (Lasc et al. 2017: 5). Taking as a case study the Romanian avant-garde movement, this talk examines how the visual realm of retail practices intersected with new trends in art and design, in particular the introduction of modern design for the domestic interior in Bucharest. [more]
Questo Research Seminar si focalizzerà su spazi, luoghi e architetture della mascolinità dell’Italia fascista, utilizzando la storia di genere e della sessualità come utile strumento di indagine dei contesti urbani ed extraurbani del periodo. Un focus su tre città in particolare, Roma, Venezia e Catania, permetterà inoltre di articolare questi temi al dialogo tra Nord e Sud, e alle costruzioni di genere associate ai rispettivi immaginari geografici. [more]

Sogno e realtà: Italian Orientalist Painting

Research Seminar
The distinction between truth and fantasy has long structured studies of Orientalist painting in the Italian sphere. This lecture explores critical and historiographical blind spots regarding this problematic genre from the nineteenth century to the postcolonial era. [more]

“Présences Arabes”. Mapping out Paris as an Arab capital 1908-1988

Research Seminar
Morad Montazami will present and discuss the exhibition he curated, Arab Presences. Modern Art and Decolonization. Paris 1908-1988 (Musée d’art moderne de Paris), as the first attempt to gather a short 20th century global picture and micro-history of Arab artistic trajectories in Paris. [more]
With the First Tricontinental Conference in Havana (1966), the efforts of the revolutionary Cuban government were ratified with the configuration of a transnational movement of resistance and solidarity in the Global South (that included Latin America, Africa and Asia). The Tricontinental built an effective visual apparatus via cinema, photography as well as poster production that integrated the struggles of the three continents, creating an imagined community connecting revolutions around the world (from Vietnam to Central America and Nicaragua). [more]

Brazilian Art and the Return to Painting in the 1980s

Research Seminar
Reviewing the samba school processions during the 1987 carnival in Rio de Janeiro, art critic Frederico Morais cited Achille Bonito Oliva. The Italian art critic and curator had been in Brazil only a few days before, and caused outrage with certain derisory comments about the local culture; notably, that Brazilian art was inextricably associated with samba. [more]

From Caste to Kant? Göttingen's Enlightenment Racial Scientists and the 'Mestizos' of Peru

Research Seminar – Kant Jubilee 2024
What links an Inca princess to Immanuel Kant, and the son of a disgraced Peruvian conquistador to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach? On the occasion of the 300th anniversary of Kant's birth in 2024, this seminar traces how Iberian ideas of 'mixing' influenced German racial thinking in the crucial Enlightenment period. [more]
The aim of the workshop is to analyze how the relationship between artistic representations and new forms of entertainment contributed to the construction of Italian identities during the nation-building process. Particular emphasis will be placed on aspects related to gender, the exhibited and spectacularised body, race and colonial dynamics, as well as regionalisms and the social and class differences that entertainment has contributed to normalising and/or transgressing. [more]
This talk will explore the German artist Ursula Schultze-Bluhm’s art in relation to her experiences travelling in the post-war world and her construction in surrealist painting and writing of a ‘tourist imaginary’. [more]

The Art of Decolonization

Research Seminar
Focusing on the years of decolonization, this presentation will develop a transnational and transhistorical study of the artistic and diplomatic exchanges between France and Senegal from the 1950 to 1970s. [more]
L’Europa ha fatto realmente i conti con la sua storia coloniale? Italia e Germania, protagonisti tardivi della scramble for Africa, hanno davvero prodotto colonialismi minori? E oggi questi due paesi come si confrontano con quel passato, in che modo agiscono sulla memoria discorsiva e visuale, partecipando alla costruzione della loro narrazione nazionale? [more]

Italianisms in Soviet Architecture of the Thaw Era

Research Seminar
How do we trace architectural connections between two countries in the deeply interconnected and mazed twentieth-century world? The new look at the archival data can enrich our understanding of the workings of the architectural profession in the Cold War period. [more]

Gnoseology, Aesthesis, Decoloniality

Lecture
In this lecture, Prof. W.D. Mignolo will address the themes of decolonization and artistic practices, at the invitation of Museo delle Civiltà’s research fellow DAAR – Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal. The lecture is promoted as part of the collaboration between Museo delle Civiltà and the Bibliotheca Hertziana’s Research Unit Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture. [more]

Art as Project, Project as Art: Antonio Dias and Painting after Conceptual Art

Research Seminar
In this research seminar, Sérgio B. Martins explores two competing notions of project that informed Antonio Dias's painting in the early 1970s, one relating to the unfinished project as a subgenre of Conceptual art and the other to Italian debates apropos of the crisis of the historicity of modern art. [more]

Art and Power School

International Workshop
The Art and Power School is part of the Project Art and Power: Decolonizing Art History, which addresses the need to identify and analyze visual regimes and to critically reflect on the construction of power as a strategy of social dominance. [more]

Imperial Games: Visuality, Tactility and Synaesthesia

Research Seminar
This research seminar examines the role of boardgames, toys and optical devices in the construction of an imperial subjectivity in the nineteenth century. [more]
A partire dalla seconda metà del XIX secolo, l'attrazione delle accademie italiane, il fascino della tradizione artistica e la disponibilità di botteghe e maestri, determinarono l'inizio di un flusso migratorio irregolare di giovani artisti dagli Stati latinoamericani di recente formazione, che desideravano consolidarne il tessuto culturale e costruire una difficle identità nazionale. [more]
Starting from the film Notes for an African Orestes (1970) by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elvan Zabunyan proposes a reflection in the form of a comparative analysis between the epic poem, colonial history, and postcolonial emancipation in the arts, traveling between the African continent, the Caribbean region and Europe. [more]
L’intervento intende ricomporre la fortuna critica e la memoria visiva di un artista senese del Quattrocento in ambito surrealista: dalle pagine della rivista «Documents» alla mostra Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism al MoMA di New York, l’interesse crescente per la pittura ‘eccentrica’ di Giovanni di Paolo è esemplare dell’osmosi che esiste tra storiografia e arte moderna e interroga le dinamiche che definiscono questo scambio in termini di riscoperta critica, appropriazione culturale, intertestualità visiva. [more]

Exhibitions and Exhibitionism: Art in Public Spaces

Research Seminar
In this thought-provoking lecture, international artist Luis Camnitzer (born 1937) challenges the notion of art in public spaces and highlights its drawbacks. [more]
These study days will question the complex interaction between continuity, discontinuity, survival and rebirth by employing the epistemological tools of art history, visual anthropology and the history of ideas in order to reflect on the heritage, as well as on the creative processes that have ensured the posterity of a strange, complex, changing, close and distant Antiquity. [more]
The lecture explores the reuse of the colonial Baroque in the modernist discourse, and more specifically in Oscar Niemeyer’s early architectural work, as a means to forming Brazilian identity. [more]
In light of recent studies on artistic and political solidarity movements, this workshop proposes to connect a series of practices that emerged in the Euro-American context during the 1970s and 1980s. The starting point for this reflection is situated in Chile during the period of Augusto Pinochet's civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990) and takes into consideration its historical, political and cultural precedents. [more]
Although wandering in Rome was a common activity among its visitors, French travelers were unique in developing a distinct philosophical discourse on walking, inspired by the rebuilding of Paris. This conference traces their itineraries through texts and images that analyze Rome’s transformations between the 16th and the 18th centuries. It investigates their role in constructing Rome’s modern image through the physical engagement with its material, natural, and social environments. [more]
The material dimension of artistic artifacts is nothing but the coexistence and confluence of "minimal worlds". [more]
Brancusi’s work Maiastra will be the starting point of a reflection on the perception and reception of artworks inspired by folk tales and national mythologies in early 20th Century Balkans. [more]
Teresa Cristina di Borbone delle Due Sicilie fu la terza e ultima imperatrice del Brasile. Responsabile dei dialoghi culturali tra l’Italia e il suo paese di adozione, lasciò al Brasile un’importante eredità: la Collezione Mediterranea del Museu Nacional da Quinta da Boa Vista che subì un gravissimo incendio nel 2018. [more]
Quali sono le qualità attribuite allo spazio, a quello della città, degli edifici, dei musei, nella lenta costituzione di una “identità nazionale” italiana durante l’Ottocento fino agli anni del fascismo? In che modo la spazialità contribuisce a forgiare l’identità? [more]
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