At one end of the spectrum is the book. Interestingly, many spoken word artists publish in a traditional format that simply reproduces the poem on the page – often effectively, even when stripped of its performative dimension. This is the case, for example, with Francesca Gironi’s poetry collection A. In other instances, the written collection is expanded through drawings, as in Maria Oppo’s Mostros, or/and audio CDs, such as Lello Voce’s Farfalle da combattimento. Whether in its traditional or expanded form, the book remains the most common mode of publication among spoken word performers.

Logo of the Zoopalco Poetry Label (ZPL)

However, other artists deliberately avoid the written page, viewing it as inadequate for conveying the full experience of performance. Instead, they often share their recordings on digital platforms like Bandcamp, offering an alternative means of circulating their poetry alongside the more conventional medium of book publication. A notable example in this sense is the spoken word record label ZPL, which released its productions as LPs without any accompanying written publication.

Other poets, such as Cristian Kosmonavt Zinfolino, are experimenting with what one can broadly define as videopoetry (for a useful overview on videopoetry: Valerio Cuccaroni’s Poesia Ibrida). The growing interest in this form of publication is evident in the frequent participation of spoken word poets in videopoetry prizes such as La Poesia che Si Vede and Sinestetica.

Books, LPs, Videopoetry: the proliferation of publication formats in contemporary Italian spoken word reflects the hybridity of the art form itself. However, these formats are not necessarily distinct from one another. In fact, many artists are actively exploring the interconnections between them in search of a more immersive media environment.

Such is the case with the aforementioned ZPL, where the sonic dimension of the LPs is expanded through additional formats, such as vinyls with typographical experimentation, verbo-visual compositions, and posters providing access to video clips. Refusing to commit to a single form of publication, ZPL instead adopts an intermedial approach that allows a poem or project to travel, adapt, and take shape across a range of medium-specific outputs, which together contribute in the creation of a shared, coherent environment.

The same intermedial approach informs Howphelia, a streaming platform for poetry developed by Angela Grasso and Luca Rizzatello, which merges digital and analog experiences. Through a subscription, viewers gain access to both a printed book of the performance and related video art content, along with livestreams featuring the artists and behind-the-scenes footage of the creative process. Howphelia’s goal is to foster a community in which the traditional passivity of the streaming audience is challenged by a more participatory and immersive experience.

The hybrid and flexible nature of contemporary performance poetry, already underscored by the choice of alternative forms of publication beyond the written page, is then further expanded by the intermedial approach adopted by Howphelia and ZPL. Going beyond the selection of a single output, these publications allow the poem to move across the different channels of the “media reticulum”, as Gabriele Frasca defined it, and, through the dialogue and interpenetration among the various modes of publication, to generate what can be understood as “ecosystems” of publication.

Image from the Howphelia website

L'articolo Forms and Ecosystems of Publication in Contemporary Italian Spoken Word sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Ketty La Rocca and Women Artists of the Italian Neo-avant-garde

Tuesday 11 November 2025, 9.30 – 18.00

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London

Organised to coincide with the first UK museum exhibition dedicated to the artist’s brief yet stimulating career, Royal Holloway University of London and the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art invite 250-word proposals for cross-disciplinary papers of 20 minutes, or short work-in-progress papers of 10 minutes, taking the above themes as a starting point and exploring them in the context of art history and literary or cultural studies.

Themes for investigation might include, but are not limited to:

• New readings of La Rocca’s work
• Intermedia experimentation in Italy c. 1960–75
• Italian feminism in the 1960s and 1970s

All proposals should be sent to symposium@estorickcollection.com by 31 August 2025.

See the full Call for Paper below.

L'articolo Ketty La Rocca and Women Artists of the Italian Neo-avant-garde: Symposium CfP sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In this enlightening conversation, our PIs discuss key concepts and findings from their collaborative research. They explore the meaning and significance of ‘intermediality’ in the Italian artistic context, shedding light on how this concept has evolved from the early 20th century to the present day. The interview highlights the book’s innovative structure, which focuses on seven pivotal years from 1900 to 2020, each representing a significant moment in the development of intermedial practices in Italy.

Our PIs delve into the role of technology in developing new media and intermediality, while emphasising that technological progress is not the sole driver of intermedial evolution. Moreover, the conversation addresses the implications of intermedial art forms for teaching Italian Studies, prompting a reflection on how these new approaches might reshape traditional curricula and pedagogical methods.

This interview not only provides valuable insights into the book’s content but also offers a glimpse into the collaborative process behind this groundbreaking research. Indeed, the three PIs share their experience of collaborative authorship, discussing both the challenges and rewards of this approach to academic writing.

The full text of the interview is available here.

L'articolo Intermedia in Italy: Barbara Burns talks to C. Brook, F. Mussgnug, and G. Pieri about Their New Book sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Pedro Cano, Fedora, da Le città invisibili, acquerello su carta, Blanca, Fundación Pedro Cano.

I went to the exhibition for a very specific reason: I hoped to see somehow materialized the world of cosmicomic tales, to which an entire room is indeed dedicated. The pleasure of entering it was all the more intense as it was the first room sufficiently distant from the hypnotic repetition of the proposed musical background that one finds from the beginning of the journey into this exhibition until the very end. The setup, in which the first editions of the “astronomical” volumes (Le cosmicomiche, Ti con zero, La memoria del mondo) are exhibited alongside the originals of their respective cover works, is structured by a large diagonal that connects a painting by Richard Serra dedicated to Calvino, possibly depicting a large black hole, and the historic map of the Luna by Gian Domenico Cassini preserved at the Paris Observatory, on which the eye bounces from a more playful lunar illustration taken from a book. In this room, the connections underlying Calvino’s narratives become tangible: fragments of reality integrate into poetic and fairy-tale constructions, as in the microcosms of Joseph Cornell and Mark Dion.

Vittore Carpaccio, San Giorgio che uccide il drago e quattro scene del suo martirio, 1516. Venezia, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Benedicti Claustra Onlus.

Invisible but dynamic connections that have more to do with travel than with the network: between the observation of the real and the imaginary, between the given and the possible, between historical or physical space and the world of fairy tales. Normally, the reader is supposed to travel through these itineraries that Calvino creates and tells us through the act of reading, while in the exhibition, the audience is invited to physically traverse them inside the writer’s “mental workshop.”

Tullio Pericoli, Italo Calvino, 2012. Collezione dell’artista / © Tullio Pericoli.

An exhibition succeeds when its narrative transcends the limitations of mere written words, invoking a unique essence that cannot be easily replicated by a simple essay, as it intimately connects with and draws inspiration from the showcased works. In Favoloso Calvino the physical dimension of the writer’s visual imagination allows, much more than illustrating his writings, to experience his gaze.

What I truly admire about Calvino is his unpretentious naturalness in describing and narrating reflections that arise from diverse occasions, including visits to art exhibitions. One cannot but wonder, what he would have thought about not only this exhibition, but the overall turmoil in Rome as well as in Genoa with the exhibition Calvino Cantafavole at the Palazzo Ducale to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of his birth.

Arianne Palla studied art history at the Sorbonne before specializing in restoration at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, focusing on mosaic techniques. Currently, she works as a restorer between Paris and Florence, maintaining her research interests in the field of visual and applied arts with a focus on interdisciplinary approaches.

L'articolo Astronomical Connections: An Intermedial Journey at Calvino’s Exhibition in Rome sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In Italy, electronic literature has a rich history. It was born in the cultural milieu of the Neoavanguardia in the early 1960s and, since then, it has produced a significant number of experimental works and practices which can be generally grouped as follows: ‘combinatory literature’, ‘kinetic and interactive poetry’, ‘hypertext fiction’, and ‘network writing’. Under these umbrella categories, a number of genres have emerged, including Nanni Balestrini’s computer poetry, Gianni Toti’s video poetry, Luigi Longo, Luisa Lux and Fabrizio Venerandi’s kinetic poetry, Caterina Davinio’s net-poetry, Enrico Colombini’s interactive fiction, and the various forms of network writing by Wu Ming (distributed narratives), Kai Zen (hypertext novel), Michela Murgia and Francesco Pecoraro (blooks), Tommaso Pincio (social network novel), and Scrittura Industriale Collettiva (wiki novel), to mention just a few. These hybrid genres tend to be multimodal and mostly employ, as well as question, technological processes such as coding, networking, hypertextuality, interactivity, virtuality, and simulation. In spite of the richness and international significance of Italian electronic literature, a systematic reconstruction of its historical phases, along with its milestones, protagonists, key genres, and the critical issues they raised, has not yet been undertaken globally. Similarly, the social, political, ideological, moral, linguistic, and educational functions of electronic literature have barely received any attention.

Opera aperta. Italian electronic literature from the 1960s to the present (2022) provides a full reconstruction of the history of Italian electronic literature from 1961 to the present day, introducing the cultural milieu in which it originated and examining how it developed across decades. In my book, I argue that Opera aperta does not only coincide with the birth of the first Italian electronic literary work, namely Nanni Balestrini’s Tape Mark I, but also provides a theoretical and methodological framework to analyse Italian electronic literature across decades from both an aesthetic and critical perspective. Umberto Eco reflects on a number of artistic questions that lie at the intersection of different social and technological theories, such as cybernetics, system theory, pragmatism, and Marxism, showing how formal experimentation and political intention are strictly intertwined and critically address some important questions about our relationship with technologies, such as automation and alienation. Ultimately, the modern concept of ‘opera aperta’ proves to be an effective methodological tool for exploring the ‘open textuality’ of electronic literature and how artists have come to terms with the novel forms of expression offered by new media.

Opera aperta. Italian electronic literature from the 1960s to the present (2022) is the runner-up of the N.Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature 2023, a prestigious award given for the best work of criticism, of any length, on the topic of electronic literature. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation from N. Katherine Hayles and others, this annual prize recognizes excellence in the field. The Prize for 1st Place comes with a $1000 award, with a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level. One prize for Honorable Mention is awarded and consists of a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level.

L'articolo Opera aperta: Italian Electronic Literature from the 1960s to the Present sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The summer school explored the concept of transnationality in Italian comics and how both transnationality and intermediality can be used as methodological approaches for the study of comics and, more broadly, visual media. Dr Manuela Di Franco introduced the concept of transnationality as a methodological approach to the study of comics and delivered a workshop on reading and analysing a comic by Italian popular comic artist Zerocalcare. Prof Nancy Pedri (Memorial University of Newfoundland) delivered her keynote on transnationality in documentary comics, and explored intermedial storytelling practices of comics, linking the talk with Prof Clodagh Brook’s introduction to intermediality. Prof Brook’s seminar explained intermedial approaches, as well as the history of the field, and encouraged participants to reflect on how intermediality can be used in their research.  Dr Lisa Maya Quaianni Manuzzato introduced alternative comics and comics zines to show how different production practices can impact the transnational dimension of comics in Italy. The summer school ended with a workshop on comics zines creation delivered by local artists, the Bad Way Press, who showed how alternative printing works and guided participants in creating their own zines. The workshop was an opportunity to put into practice concepts addressed during the seminars. It also offered an opportunity to connect with artists.

Participants collaborated to analyse comics from a scholarly perspective, engaging in group discussions on methodological approaches in comics and visual studies. These discussions provided an opportunity to reflect on how comics integrate into the broader landscape of Italian popular culture. The summer school not only facilitated academic exploration but also fostered new academic collaborations among participants. The exchange of ideas during seminars and workshops created a dynamic environment where scholars and artists could connect, leading to the initiation of potential research projects and partnerships. The hands-on activities, particularly the zine-making workshop, allowed participants to apply theoretical concepts practically, further strengthening their understanding and appreciation of comics as a significant cultural medium. This collaborative and immersive experience emphasised the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in the study of comics and visual media, highlighting their role in contemporary cultural and academic contexts.

The summer school, alongside the Interdisciplinary Italy website remain important legacies of the Interdisciplinary Italy project, which is carried on through these channels, and through the continuing research of the Interdisciplinary Italy research group (Brook, Mussgnug, Pieri, Bellardi, Brioni, Di Franco, Lima, Patti), and the postdocs and PhD students who work with the members of the research group.

L'articolo Report of the 5th Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School (Dublin 2024) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Co-authors: Clodagh Brook, Florian Mussgnug and Giuliana Pieri

We draw your attention to the publication of our new book, which explores the development of intermedial practices in Italy across the 20^th and 21^st century.

The book is published by Legenda and available on open access (i.e. free to download) at the following link: https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/vc-6

Abstract: In Italy at the turn of the twentieth century, the arts drew suddenly closer: a curtain was raised on a magical new hybrid art, cinema. There followed an escalation in the birth of new hybrid genres like sound art, video art, graphic art and performance art and new sites and technologies for hybridity were developed: television, video projection, museums as white boxes, computers, the Internet. Some of Italy’s best- known artists and groups got involved in various ways, from the Futurists, to Bruno Munari, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Gruppo 63, Gianni Toti, Niccolò Ammaniti, and Wu Ming. Many artists we know less well often charted this in-between creative world. This book is rooted in the hypothesis that the ever-closer relations between artistic practices have been a key cultural force driving creativity since the start of the twentieth century. It attempts the first large-scale mapping of this force, providing a new framing, and along the way attempts to uncover some of the reasons behind this change.

Authors: Clodagh Brook is Professor in Italian at Trinity College, Dublin; Giuliana Pieri is Professor of Italian and the Visual Arts at Royal Holloway, London; Florian Mussgnug is Professor of Comparative literature and Italian Studies at University College London.

L'articolo New Book: Intermedia in Italy: From Futurism to Digital Convergence sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Transnational Italian Comics

11-12 July 2024, Trinity College Dublin

Organised by: Manuela di Franco and Clodagh Brook

The study of comics as an interdisciplinary field has surged in recent years. Studies like Stein, Denson, and Meyer (2013) have examined how graphic narratives have overcome national boundaries and connected with global culture from a visual, literary, and cultural perspective. More recently, Comberiati, and Spadaro (2023) have investigated Italian comics and their transnationality, introducing the specificities of the Italian fumetto to a field still focused on (and dominated by) anglophone comics. The study of transnational Italian comics reveals the symbiotic relationship between national and global cultures and sheds light on the discursive power that the medium of comics had in shaping modern Italian popular culture.

The 5th Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School aims to contribute to the flourishing field of Comics Studies and actively engage with the study of Italian fumetti and their global cultural exchange. The study of Italian comics allows for a reflection on how transnational interactions can shape national culture and create a cultural product that combines both local and global contents.

Through lectures and hands-on workshops, the next summer school enables you to acquire the tools to interpret comics, understand their transnationality, and approach Italian popular culture from an overlooked perspective. By the end of the summer school, you will have acquired hands-on experience in the analysis of comics and a deeper understanding of how Italian culture has been shaped by an increasingly globalised context.

We welcome PhD candidates and Postdocs working in any field of Italian culture.

The Summer School is entirely free of charge.

Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof Nancy Pedri (Memorial University of Newfoundland)

To apply, please send a 150-250 word motivation statement and short bio (100 words) to Manuela.difranco@ugent.be by 30 April.

This Summer School has receive funds from the SIS and the EU.

In the PDF below, the full Workshop Programme:

L'articolo 5th Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School (Trinity College Dublin, 11-12 July 2024) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Indira Allegra, Texere: The Shape of Loss is a Tapestry (2022) © Indira Allegra

Always eager to explore…

Aren’t we so tired of hearing this word in academic writing?

Shall I say ‘observe’? Or ‘investigate’?

Even worse…

I’ll begin again.

I have always been eager to trace the geographies of where the ‘literary’ could be found, with a particular attention to those places where it was not supposed to be found.

Wordily, but let me move on for now.

Now that I look back at how my research has led me to my next book, A Textile Poetics of Entanglement, I ask myself why I should be comfortable with saying the above. Is that not the same as saying that I, as a literary critic, am going to see ‘literary’ everywhere I deem worth looking?

In trying to answer this moral dilemma, I will talk about my study on textile poetics, which looks at intermedial works that involve both the language of poetry and that of textile, from the second half of the twentieth century up to the present day.

Irene Albino and Ellen Johnson, Unravel (2018). © Irene Albino and Ellen Johnson

Up to this point, everything seems rather good. But…

I then move on to say that this study develops what I term a Textile Poetics of Entanglement which, in a nutshell, helps us renew our understanding of what lyric poetry can be considered to be today. In the process of doing so, I also claim that the works I look at are ‘textile poems’, which exhibit that kind of entanglement that supersedes any kind of hierarchical binary between the media involved.

Here, the trouble begins.

In wanting to protect a non-hierarchical division between poetry and textile, I find myself unable to find a language that can be aligned with this intention: saying ‘textile poems’ inevitably highlight the primary position of poems to which ‘textile’ is an adjective. If I were to say, ‘poetic textile’, attention would be on that work as a ‘textile’ before being a ‘poem’. What to do?

Maria Lai, Lenzuolo (1989) © Maria Lai

Elisa Biagini, Foresta bianca (2012). Courtesy © Elisa Biagini

My temporary solution is rather humble: to write this blog post. In here, with the language allowed and welcomed in this genre, I feel comfortable to both defend and denounce my work on ‘textile poems’, while also highlighting the broader challenges of engaging with intermedial works and interdisciplinary research.

Similar to other situations, we are asked to position ourselves and position our work accordingly. In the monograph this research will be published: I will write as a literary critic. In fact, the book is to be published in a series dedicated to Lyric Theory: where ‘textile’ cannot help but be an adjective to the noun ‘lyric’. My looking at those intermedial objects at the centre of my study cannot be ‘neutral’ in any way, but charged with the implicit absent-present agendas of any literary critic: literature. This is particularly problematic in the context of textile arts, craft, and theories, which are characterised by bringing together people scattered throughout a wide range of disciplines and professions as part of a shared, for the most part, intention of not ‘disciplining’ scholarship on textiles. This scattered nature of scholarship around textiles makes it more easily approachable, or appropriable, by scholars in other disciplines such as literary studies, who, regardless of their most noble intention, will hardly, or at least this is my case, be able to put forward an interdisciplinary approach and terminology that showcases the ‘intra-action’ of the entanglement of media and disciplines involved in their study.

Detail of one of the tapestries in Numero Cromatico’s Exhibition Eternal struggle of my desire (Rome, Museo Nazionale Romano, Crypta Balbi, 2022) © Numero Cromatico

Scholarship on intermediality benefits from a sophisticated theoretical apparatus by now, while interdisciplinarity has become self-evident except by those institutions that seem to have just discovered the term. If as a doctoral student I was told to my surprise that looking at intermedial works involving visual arts and texts did not require any different toolkit, approach, terminology than those already in use in literary studies, I know that today this would not be repeated. And yet, I still find myself uneasy defending my work and presenting it as not as the result of my literary imprinting that I cannot that easily remove while walking around, be this while reading an advert on the tube to work or walking through an exhibition.

What service am I doing to these works then?

I am reading them.

Reading, observing, critically of course, is never a neutral act of criticism. This is the lesson I could learn while looking at these works, in the company of other scholars, artists, designers, artisans, and activists outside literary studies but within and across textiles.

What service am I doing to literary criticism then?

I am raising questions on how we can do it directly and with more respect towards our cross-disciplinary interlocutors who have probably looked at the works that we now look at for a very long time.  It is almost never true that we are filling a gap or looking at something that was never looked at before. And this is why Interdisciplinary Italy is a precious resource: it exists to foster that kind of collaboration, conversations, where every discipline within Italian Studies can enrich one another.

Courtesy © Alessandra Carnaroli

L'articolo The Limits of Literary Criticism and a Textile Poetics of Entanglement sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The two days saw a number of interactive workshops led by our keynotes speakers. Prof Emma Bond (Oxford), in a workshop entitled ‘The Museum as Interdisciplinary Space: Concepts and Practices’, drew on her extensive work with museum practitioners and curators to invite us to think about the museum space as fundamentally interdisciplinary and the place where theory and practice come into creative encounter with different communities of practice. Prof Charles Burdett, in his keynote lecture ‘Transnational Time: Approaches to Temporality in Research’, introduced us to the most recent developments of of his seminal work on transnationalizing Italian Studies highlighting the significance of understanding and promoting our discipline within the broader context of modern languages. Dr Adele Bardazzi (Utrecht) took on the challenge of AI in relation to poetry; her talk ‘Poetry’s Ends: Artificial Intelligence and Contemporary Italian Poetry’ reflected on experimental poetic practice, the (many) current limitations and flaws of AI in the field, and the expansion of the material and intermedial boundaries of poetic practice in twentieth and twenty-century Italy. Dr Julia Caterina Hartley and Roberto Binetti delivered a dynamic workshop on impact and dissemination which cast light onto a key concern in British universities.

The growth in importance of taking academic research to wider audiences has been a seminal shift in the way research is evaluated and conceived in Britain. It has led to a much greater engagement with communities and the wider public. Differentiating between impact and dissemination remains a key concern, guiding, from the very beginning, the way we plan how our research will travel beyond academia.

Networking and thinking proactively about the pipelines of interdisciplinary talent into our discipline has always been at the forefront of our project and an integral part of the Summer School programme. This has taken different shapes, from providing an open space for interdisciplinary exchange to sharing ideas and practical advice on career progression. The latter was a particular focus of the 2023 Summer School.

Prof Simon Gilson led an interactive session on pathways for PhD and early career researchers which mapped past and present routes into academic positions and industry opportunities for researchers. We run a CV clinic in which we gave one-to-one guidance and an outsider’s view that brought into sharp relief the need to be mindful of contexts and culture, and the need for careful tailoring of one’s profile to suit diverse institutions. The second day opened with a practical session on grants and fellowships.Prof Giuliana Pieri (Royal Holloway University of London) encouraged participants to think like a reviewer and interrogate one’s research project as a dispassionate outsider, who will invariably be less critical than ourselves in evaluating our work but whose work of evaluation needs to be made easier, with clear signposting and scaffolding of information. The day ended with an exhilarating session: in the elevator pitch participants took it into turn to deliver a one-minute elevator pitch on their current research project. We used the rehearsal room technique; each participant delivered their very brief speech, and received feedback on delivery, content, pace, and tone.

L'articolo Report of the 4th Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School (London 2023) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.