The Endless Periphery: Toward a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto's Italy (original) (raw)
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In celebration of the 60 th anniversary of the publication of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il gattopardo (1958, The Leopard 1960), this symposium presents an interdisciplinary discussion of the political, social, cultural and literary contexts directly addressed and/or connected to Tomasi di Lampedusa's masterpiece and Visconti's film. These papers will bring to the fore the island of Sicily with its multilayered cultural landscape. The 3-day symposium will offer the opportunity to discuss trans-historical issues of political and social unity and cohesion in the face of contemporary cultures of ideological fragmentation, devolution and identity politics.
A conversation on the margins of Italy
Image [&] Narrative, 2021
The Italian margin is largely made up of seacoast. At the furthest south, the border passes through the island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean Sea, whose space is at the center of Marco Poloni's work Displacement Island (2006). Starting from this work, the contribution develops a conversation that from the maritime border in the Mediterranean Sea lands on the internal European border between Italy and Switzerland. Engaging with the authors personal and research experience, the conversation touches upon different topics: the contemporary migrations across the maritime space, the Mediterranean Sea as a fluid space crossed by multiple flows, the dynamic link between north and south margins, the potential of photography and its assemblages in constellations as a form to imagine another space, the value of research and production of artworks in the field.
Land of Extremes: The Power of Sicilian Landscapes in Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo
Italica, 2021
Though Il Gattopardo has enjoyed resounding commercial and critical success since its publication in 1958, literary circles took issue with the novel’s treatment of history and lack of linear structure. In addition to studying the novel’s cyclical temporality, the present study will investigate the often underappreciated category of space, which has risen to prominence within Il Gattopardo scholarship in recent years. Lampedusa himself nods to the novel’s spatial character, insisting that: “La Sicilia è quella che è; del 1860, di prima e di sempre.” The present study argues that the extreme nature of Sicily’s landscape – where there is no mean between extreme pragmatism and pure abstraction – reveals the illusory nature of the Risorgimento’s promise of progress. Even as Garibaldi’s soldiers light the bonfires of history, Sicily’s timeless, fossilized quality reminds its inhabitants that nothing ever truly passes out of existence, and that revolution is cyclical not only in name.
2020
Visions of Italy Popular conceptions of Italy typically revolve around the visual: the beauty of its landscapes and its historic legacy of fine art and architecture. This dates back at least to the medieval period, and the innovations of artists such as Giotto and visionary writers like Dante. In the twentieth century, it is in the fields of cinema, photography, art, fashion and design that Italy has had the most marked impact around the world. Concurrently, Italy has also been a favoured subject of visual representation: from Grand Tour photographic albums to mainstream Hollywood films set in Italy, there is no lack of foreign representations of the country and its inhabitants. This conference will explore Italian visual culture, Italy’s relationship with the visual and the way in which Italy and Italians have been depicted. It aims to further a dialogue among scholars in the field of Italian studies who deal with visual culture in the broadest sense, from studies of visual arts and objects to literary works characterized by an emphasis on the visual. Papers and panels will address topics such as: Cinema and photography; Visual arts of all eras, from Medieval and Rennaissance to contemporary art; Fashion and design; Advertising and visual culture; Intermediality and cross-media representation; Visual representations of Italians and Italian culture abroad (e.g. Italian-Americans, the diaspora, etc); Visual representations of migration to and within Italy; Transcultural representations of Italy and Italians; Ekphrasis and visual culture in Italian literature; Visualisation within, and of, the work of medieval and early modern authors (e.g. Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca). Keynote speaker: Prof Stephen Gundle.
The future of the Italy’s Lazio region is quite uncertain at the moment. Since the 90s, the process of constitutional reform (as well as a larger political debate) has been addressing the issue of the nation’s capital . Any solution that is applied to Rome will deeply affect the whole Lazio region. Today, the province of Rome seems destined to become a metropolitan body, somehow detached from the rest of the region. However, responsibilities and competences have yet to be identified, and require a political agreement between the region and the state. The future of the region, once more, depends on the city’s fate. This game is an old one. Since the beginning, the region of Lazio has been an artificial product, the result of the reshuffling of administrative boundaries at the end of the 20s. The region took its present shape for political reasons, adding to the Roman area parts of neighbouring regions: the Eastern part taken away from Umbria and Abruzzo, and the Southern part from the province of Caserta in Campania. It is an artificial Region whose functional integration was imposed from above, controlled by a metropolitan centre that colonized large chunks of regional space over time, such as the Sacco valley, the Pontine Marshes, the coastal region and so on. It is also artificial in a more constructive sense. Even in physical terms, a large part of the region’s territory has been either reclaimed from damp and marshes or given over to heavy infrastructure and industries as part of the post-war national industrialization programs, such as those of the Cassa del Mezzogiorno (Salone, 2005). This artificial and recent nature is one of the reasons why the region has received very little attention, beyond the centrality, of Rome in political and scientific discussions. The metropolitan area of Rome does in fact occupy a prominent place in the hierarchy of regional settlements, hosting about 50% of the area’s population (as well as accounting for about 50% of the income, jobs and housing). The argument is that the region depends upon the capital, and conventional wisdom suggests that all development is led by Rome. Few exceptions are taken into account, the process of suburbanization being the most important to foster the standardisation of patterns of land use and social behaviour. Why this neglect? First, for geographical reasons, such as the ambivalent position of the region, the uneven historical distribution of population, the different settlement structure of the Northern and Southern parts, and the contrast between coastal and mountain regions. Second, for cultural and economic factors. The region has historically hovered between North and South Italy, as has the capital itself (Ferrarotti, 1970), recently confirmed by national reports (INU, 2008). Like the advanced Northern region, Lazio falls into the small group of Europe’s richest regions, while sharing the cultural basis and demographic traits of its Southern counterparts. It is not just a matter of chance that even the region’s coat of arms combines the emblems of the five provinces so that Lazio lacks even a unique symbol. Yet, the present-day image of the region is again suspended. Is it modern or traditional, advanced or backwards, diverse or unbalanced? All these impressions are obviously coloured by the viewer's perspective and motives, but they also have in common the fact that they depend on one’s attitude to the capital, as the region has not produced an impression independently. As a result of this conflict, the spatial representation of the region has progressively become more and more evanescent. The region stands in the middle of Italy, and its representation stand in the middle of the conflict between the Capital and the surrounding areas, being unable to grasp the sources of political conflicts, or to influence policy imagination The story reflects somehow the conflict between the queen and Snow White: who’s the fairest of them all? The immediate future will show whether Rome will became an autonomous entity, and if Lazio will be able to shape its own independent policies, and which one of the two will eventually carve out a role for a spatial strategy that explores their dual, yet entangled fate . Unless, of course, they both find another, more co-operative mirror.