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.

In a historical and cultural moment, in which poetry could present itself as “phono-, ideo-, typo-, icono, photographical; mono-, stereo-, quadro-, ambiophonic; phonographic, bioscopic, kinetic; kinesic, eatable, odorous, tangible” (H. Damen, 1972), the international and countercultural experiences of Italian and Belgian visual poets drew a cutting-edge roadmap within the wider and multifaceted context of neo-avant-garde experimental poetry of the 1960s and 1970s by creating a unique model of interdisciplinary cooperation where verbivocovisual research, media discourses, and social criticism strongly converged. Combining insights from the fields of art history, literary criticism, and media studies, “Engaged Visuality” investigates the impact of new media, political imagery, and technologies on poesia visiva phenomenon by focusing on a bilateral case study rarely analyzed from a comparative and transcultural perspective: the foundation of the international poetry magazine “Lotta Poetica”  (first series: 1971-75) by Sarenco and Paul De Vree, i.e., the aim of Italian and Belgian interartistic exchanges, co-authored initiatives, and cross-disciplinary inquiries.

Organised by Maria Elena Minuto (Université de Liège; KU Leuven) and Jan De Vree (M HKA Museum, Antwerp), the symposium is supported by a multitude of European institutions and research teams. Interdisciplinary Italy is present in the person of Professor Giuliana Pieri, who is part of the Scientific Committee.

For further details about the event and how to apply, please consult the Symposium’s concept.

Submissions deadline: June 30, 2021

Paul De Vree, Hysteria Makes History, 1973. Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community © M HKA

L'articolo Engaged Visuality: The Italian and Belgian Poesia Visiva Phenomenon in the 60s and 70s (International Symposium) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

To apply for the summer school: Email the organisers on limae@tcd.ie by May 31^st

To attend the public lectures (Henry Jenkins and Massimo Riva): Details on how to access the two public lectures will be circulated nearer the time. Please just note the dates for now.

Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School Programme

L'articolo 2nd Interdisciplinary Italy Postgraduate Summer School, 1-2-3 July 2021 sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In our practices, Ellen and I are both interested in the technical and conceptual crossings between design, art and craft in relation to data visualization (in this case text and textiles), often working through social design issues, sexuality and gender-challenging themes.

</unravel;> is a performance of the making of a 25-meter knitted manifesto which unravels ideas and preconceptions of binarisms: craft and design, analog and digital, female and male, zeroes and ones. Through the hacking of binary systems, we challenged the notion of gender binary tout court.

The performative design piece was presented during Degree Show 2: Design, at Central Saint Martins, London. For this final collaboration, we found there was no better way to talk about binarisms than by using the binary system par excellence: weaving and the Jacquard loom is the first form of programming. The process took two months of researching, experimenting and prototyping. During this time, we learned how to set up a knitting machine, we hacked the Brother 950i, worked out on how to knit type and wrote an essay on gender binaries.

Perfectly summed up in the word textus, text and textiles are deeply linked and interconnected with coding. Language and knitting are coded systems themselves: a set of rules and functions. In this process of interlacing yarns and ideas, the medium becomes the message. The project was based on thorough research about the links between the binary language of weaving-knitting and that of computing, as well as about the stereotypes around gender and technology: our focus was the contrast between the male-dominated computer hacking, and the domestic female ‘quick and easy’ hobby of knitting.

Fig 1 Vintage domestic knitting machine, Brother series (source:web)
Fig 2 The Jacquard Loom, invented in 1800 (source:web)
Fig 3 A punch-card used to create patterns in the Jacquard loom (source:web)
Fig 4, 5 Vintage posters advertising domestic knitting machines (source: web)

extract1

The yarn is neither metaphorical nor literal, but quite simply material, a gathering of threads which twist and turn through the history of computing, technology, the sciences and arts. In and out of the punched holes of automated looms, up and down through the ages of spinning and weaving, back and forth through the fabrication of fabrics, shuttles and looms, cotton and silk, canvas and paper, brushes and pens, typewriters, carriages, telephone wires, synthetic fibres, electrical filaments, silicon strands, fibre-optic cables, pixels screens, telecom lines, the Net, and matrices, the World Wide Web to come.

(from: Zeros + Ones. Digital Women and The New Technoculture, Sadie Plant, 1991, knitted text for </unravel;> Issue 1)

The 25-meter long knitted essay produced during the Degree Show includes a title, 4 chapters and a bibliography, and it is a collection of extracts and quotes by authors that inspire us in our practices: Margaret Atwood, Sadie Plant, Marshall McLuhan, Monique Wittig, Donna Haraway, Anni Albers, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, just to name a few.

The project also explores the communal spirit of a craft; a space in which people can share thoughts and opinions. Craft as a vehicle for political change.

For our second iteration, specially commissioned for our participation in the London Design Festival 2018 within the Creative Unions Exhibition (Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins), we produced </uravel;> Issue 2: Histories or Tales of Future Times, we knitted a 25-meter long fairy tale, challenging gender stereotypes in the fine line that divides History from a Tale.

The point is that we have not formed that
ancient world—it has formed us. We ingested
it as children whole, had its values and
consciousness imprinted on our minds as
cultural absolutes long before we were in fact
men and women. We have taken the fairy tales
of childhood with us into maturity, chewed
but still lying in the stomach, as real identity.

(from: Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, A. Dworkin,1974, knitted text in </unravel;> Issue 2: Histories or Tales of Future Times )

According to Joseph Campbell “myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life.” Folk tales and folk art (craft) are both parts of an inseparable interwoven net. They contain the spirit of the collective unconscious. We asked ourselves: what is the impact of those stories in shaping our perspective on gender? Our research focused on the dangerous promotion of gender stereotypes through fairy tales and the authors and thinkers that challenged those representations. With this project we wanted to write a different tale, in an optimistic attempt to imagine a more inclusive and queer future.

Each day for the duration of the performance we knitted one chapter of this tale, each told from the perspective of a new narrator. The structure of the written piece was, this time, inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron framed narrative structure – a literary technique of a story within a story. In The Decameron, ten characters/narrators shelter in a secluded villa outside Florence to escape the Great Plague, and each one tells a story every night.

And on day the first
the first narrator
sat by the spinning yarn
and thus begun:

(beginning of each chapter, inspired by The Decameron)

In our story, all voices are one and multiple at the same time. The narrator is an archetype, made out of an indefinite plurality of narrators. The story is a combination of perspectives, that we ambitiously put together inspired by Vladimir Propp’s formulas for creating stories.

You can find the texts and the bibliographies in the project’s website: www.projectunravel.com

Fig 6, 7, 8, 9. </unravel;>. Performance during Degree Show 2: Design, 2018
Fig 10. Knit detail
Fig 11. Prototyping sessions
Fig 12. Second installation for London Design Festival ’18, Creative Unions exhibition
Fig 13, 14, 15. The title for </unravel;> Issue 2 was inspired by one of the first collections of fairytales, Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals, 1697, written by Charles Perrault

L'articolo De-code Gender: A Knitted Perspective sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The approach to new media art was insecure, due in part to the early relationship between communication technology with private industries and military technology, and in part to the intrinsic interdisciplinarity of new media, which made it difficult to categorize. As noted by Maria Grazia Mattei, at the beginning of the 1980s the “official culture was totally disinterested in new artistic expressions and in the use of the computer outside of the sphere of labour.” Further, many critics, art historians and curators interpreted new available technology simply as tools that marked a continuation of the long relationship between art and science. This was indeed the approach of the Venice Biennale in 1986. At the same time, as originally suggested by the exhibition Information held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970, new media art had been included in the realm of conceptual art. However, such a definition might have prevented a committed study of new media art in relation to its medium contingency and its interdisciplinarity. In those same years, new media art curators, artists and activists, were convinced that these newly available tools marked a paradigm shift and had a greater impact on artistic practices.

Their approach found a voice in events such as the Electronic Art Festival of Camerino, a joint venture between the public university of Camerino, in the region of Marche, and tech-companies interested in the potentialities of employing new technologies in art. The annual festival ran from 1983 to 1990. Thanks to the collaboration with the private technology industry, the festival was able to fund experimental work such as that presented by artists Franco Angeli, Alighiero Boetti, and Giulio Turcato in 1984. Even though, as noted by scholar Francesca Gallo, the atmosphere around newly available technology was permeated with words such as ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Electronic Resurgence,’ due to the more prominent position of those who embraced the non-medium-contingency-approach, and a recalcitrant attitude towards working with younger artists, these experiences were at the mercy of events with a relatively short life span or that could not guarantee, or have not planned for, a proper presentation and conservation of the work on display. If exhibited in larger contexts, new media art work remained permeated by a halo of uneasiness; if exhibited in dedicated festivals and venues, artists and curators were accused of producing “initiatives […] meant for a minority of elitists.” [1] This conundrum was resolved once information technology started to permeate the artist studio to such an extent that it was no longer possible to push it back.

[1] Lettera di Lola Bonora a Mario (Convertino?) Archivio Centro Video Arte, U-TAPE ’86, 1986, Fasc. 585

View of the installation site of “Tecnologia e Informatica” at the Corderie as part of the 42. Venice Biennale, (1986)

L'articolo Curating New Media Art in Italy in the 1980s: The Uneasiness of Medium Contingency sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Sirio Luginbühl (Verona, 1937–Padua, 2014) was an informed witness of his age. From politics to sexual liberation, from class struggle to feminism, from consumerism to ecological issues, he translated some of these topical themes into an innovative, modern, and controversial language. In line with this trend of the time, Luginbühl wanted his films to disturb and go beyond the
boundaries. Moreover, he was author of many important texts such as Cinema underground oggi (1974) and Lo Schermo negato (1976), with Raffaele Perrotta.

The exhibition was intended as the end event in a preservation and digitisation project held by the lab La Camera Ottica of the University of Udine and the National Film Library (CSC-CN) in Rome. On one side, Luginbühl’s cinematic masterpieces and historical documents have been presented in order to contribute to the reconstruction of the history of experimental cinema. On the other side the public – and above all the new generation of digital natives – was offered the possibility to deepen the
material apparatus of cinema: film camera, projector, and celluloid. In fact, even though it is necessary in order to give a wider access, the digitisation of film implies the loss of particular and specific aspects of experimental cinema, such as the noise of the projector. If museums and institutions that hold audiovisual works do not also show or declare the original supports and
apparatus, it is easy to forget that the film image in motion made use of mechanical technology and an optical medium that requires chemical processing.

For this reason, the first floor was dedicated to the technology of cinema, where visitors could watch a projection of Il bacio (Amarsi a Marghera) (1970, 8mm), reprinted for the occasion. Thanks to the installation that made use of a period projector, it was possible to reproduce the sounds of the apparatus as well as the peculiarities and defects of a non-digitised film image.

Under the care of Home Movies: Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, another room of Palazzo Pretorio was assigned as a laboratory space in which the public could get close to the cinematographic apparatus. Here visitors were able to touch, color, scratch, and cut the film to learn the difference between formats and standards. New (digital) technologies permit on the other side the spectator to ‘enter’ into the work, placing the film under the magnifying glass the defects, the errors, and the signs of deterioration of the original material, but also those signatures of the work of the film-maker expressed through scratches, cuts, paint applied directly to the celluloid, and inserts made, often in an amateur way, with unsuitable materials.

L'articolo Sirio Luginbühl: Experimental Films sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Italian social centers were not necessarily in opposition with existing traditional art spaces or exhibition opportunities as many artists working out of social centers—among which, the collective Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici, Rome-based artist, Agnese Trocchi, and Florence-based artist, Tommaso Tozzi, and others—were often featured in international exhibitions or institutional venues. However, during the period under consideration, social centers allowed for experimentation with new technologies, acting as incubators for artistic exploration, a role that has been overshadowed by the general perception of their function as laboratories for political activism.

An example of these artistic practices is Museo virtuale interattivo – Centro sociale virtuale (Virtual Interactive Museum – Virtual Social Center) by Tommaso Tozzi. The work was presented in occasion of the exhibition Soggetto-Soggetto (Subject-Subject) at the Castello di Rivoli in 1994. The museum environment is reconstructed virtually, although the look of the virtual walls is a rendering of the physical walls of the social center Ex-Emerson in Florence. The installation blended the space of the Castello di Rivoli with the one of the Ex-Emerson bringing the collaborative practice of sharing as typical of social centers to an institutionalized environment. At the same time, it allowed users connected via a BBS to interact and to modify the arrangement on the virtual walls of the museum and to feed into the installation their own content.

The interest that social center participants and managing collectives demonstrated towards information technology early on makes these sites a relevant case study, in particular in relation to “collaborative” art and contemporary disruptive artistic practices as well as to the development of a digital aesthetic.

Installation view of Tommaso Tozziâ€s project as part of the exhibition section “Concetto e Scrittura” at Anni Novanta, Galleria Comunale dâ€Arte Moderna in Bologna, and at the Musei Comunali in Rimini, 1991 – Image courtesy of the artist

However, the context of Italian alternative art venues and the work emerging from it has remained at the margin of art historical recounts. Even though an early display of art engaging with information technology took place at the Venice Biennale in 1986 (more than a decade before Documenta X signaled the advent of new media art to the world in 1997), it seems as the international stage did not provide a proper contextualization to make new media art accessible and comprehensible to viewers. In order to re-trace the history of Italian new media art, my project focuses on how official and alternative art spaces that supported and promoted experiments in the field of art and technology in Italy intertwined, as well as on the gaps that contributed in relegating the experience of Italian artists and activists at the periphery of new media art historical narratives.

Further readings:

___Disrupting Business: Art and activism in times of financial crisis, edited by Bazzichelli, Tatiana and Cox, Geoff, DATA browser 05, Autonomedia, 2013;

Ascott, Roy, “Distance Makes the Art Grow Further,” in Art at a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, edited by Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark, MIT Press, 2005;

Bishop, Claire, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents” in Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Verso, 2012;

Kester H., Grant, The One and the Many. Contemporary collaborative art in a global context, Duke University Press, 2011;

Jackson, Shannon, “Quality Time: Social Practice Debates in Contemporary Art,” in Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Routledge, 2011.

L'articolo Network Culture, aActivism and New Media Art in Italy sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Quali sono oggi i confini della letteratura, tra lâ€arcadia e il proclama, il laboratorio e la denuncia, il soliloquio e lâ€elogio? […] proprio qui, nella domanda che sopra ci siamo posti, quali siano oggi, i confini della letteratura, è da ricercarsi il tema centrale della nostra rivista, che si propone di organizzare attorno ad esso un libero repertorio di testimonianze dâ€ogni natura, affidando agli uomini della letteratura il compito di definirne, oggi, limiti, significato, valore. In questo potremmo confessarci illuministi della letteratura: che crediamo nella ragione letterariaâ€. Cfr. ‘Perché Questo e altro?â€, Questo e altro, 1 (1962), 56.

The piece pointed out the need to open up the field of literature to critical and creative interventions in order to encourage a reshaping of the confines and reach of this disciplinary field. Not unexpectedly, in the early 1960s, group work and interdisciplinarity featured prominently in the theory and artistic practice of many Italian poets and writers. By challenging the traditional understanding of literary inspiration and creativity as individual and verbal activities, they called for an open dialogue between artists from different disciplines as a strategy to renew poetic and literary language.

Gruppo 70, an Italian neo-avant-gardist group of artists and critics, played a crucial role in opening up the genre of poetry to the performative and visual languages of mass communication. The group included, among others, Lamberto Pignotti, Eugenio Miccini, Lucia Marcucci, Luciano Ori, Ketty La Rocca, Giuseppe Chiari, Emilio Isgrò, Roberto Malquori, and Michele Perfetti. They renamed their poetry poesia tecnologica, as a means to focus on the key nexus of art/technology/culture.

One of the questions we discuss in a recently published article* regards their political engagement with mass media and how this translated into interdisciplinarity: in other words, what rationale/ideology underpinned their interdisciplinary/intermedia practice?

The answer is to be found in the interconnection they saw between poetic expression and industrial world/mass media society. In addressing one of the most debated topics of his time, namely the relationship between the arts and industry, Pignotti argued that the latter was not a separate entity, something out there, that was to be found only in the machines and factories we usually associate with industrial production. Rather, through its technologies, industry had become pervasive in our imaginary through the material aspects of our daily lives, from our food to our entertainment — this is what he meant by ‘lâ€industria che non si vedeâ€, the industry you cannot see. As Pignotti highlighted, the assumption was that poets could no longer ignore that industry had an impact on the aesthetical relationship they establish with objects — as Pignotti provocatively argues, ‘the poet should ask himself whether the flower of his dreams, isnâ€t perhaps made of plastic before releasing his imagination at full gallopâ€. Hence, poets, Pignotti argued,  should modernize poetic language in such a way that it could both incorporate and critically reflect on these new languages and values.

At a practical level, interdisciplinarity and group work that emerge in one of Pignotti’s key theoretical writings, ‘La suggestione di Gordon Flashâ€, were suggested in the following terms. Rather than operating exclusively within their own areas of specialization, artists develop their work in a relational field in which all the experiences of their time converge. They act synchronically, not diachronically. They use what Pignotti calls technological languages (‘lâ€assunzione di linguaggi tecnologiciâ€): the language of advertising, journalism, narrativa rosa, thrillers, science fiction, humour, logic-science-mathematics, bureaucracy, business, economy, law, and so on. They also encourage the use of new and more powerful means of communication (‘lâ€urgenza di nuovi e più potenti mezzi di diffusioneâ€), including poetry read via loudspeakers at stadiums and painting exhibitions shown along the motorways. This is also how they conceived their collages, based on sampling materials taken from newspapers, comics, fotoromanzi, and advertisements, through découpage, which can be traced back to the legacy of the historic avant-garde movements, which were coming to the attention of a new generation of critics and artists in the early 1960s. This is an aesthetic strategy which, to some extent, recalls indeed the artistic forms of the historical avant-gardes, but also some of the mesh-ups and transmedia practices of the digital age. Yet, there are significant differences between the three phenomena.  We will explore them in the next posts.

* This topic is further explored in the following article: Giuliana Pieri and Emanuela Patti,  ‘Technological Poetry: Interconnections Between Impegno, Media and Gender in Gruppo 70 (1963-1968)’, Italian Studies, Volume 72, Issue 3 (2017), 323-337.

L'articolo Collaborative Artistic Theory and Practice. ‘Le ragioni dei gruppi’: Gruppo 70 sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The two conference days opened with Prof John Foot’s (University of Bristol) and Prof Giovanna Rosa’s (University of Milan) keynote speeches. Foot focused on the outskirts of Milan from the 1950s to the 1970s, with a special focus on the areas of Pero and Bovisa. He also compared the “Corea”, with their unplanned expansion of self-made houses built by Southern migrants, to the later planning of the Comasina area. Foot addressed both the problem of the definition of such areas and their legacy. What emerged was a diversified approach to migration and the planning of the outskirts across the two decades. Rosa explored the paradox of Milan as a Capital which wasn’t in opposition to Rome. Milan stood out as a city which has substantially neglected central politics to focus instead on its own administration. Still, in spite of its decentred position, Milan has stimulated, if not catalysed, the modern dynamics of cultural innovation in Italy thanks to its financial, industrial and publishing power, paving the way for a more democratic access to cultural products. Rosa focused part of her discourse on the key role played by Feltrinelli among others.

The two-day conference included a range of panels on literature, publishing, cinema, art, urban planning, architecture, photography, history, with particular attention to the multifaceted composition of the social-economic background of the city as well as its pioneering role in addressing modernity by means of innovative approaches. At the same time, several issues related to cultural negotiation emerged and gave account of Milan’s complexity. Overall, the definition of Milan’s role in orienting cultural transformations was the key question of the debate.

In one of the opening papers A. Baldini examined early-20^th-century Milan in comparison with other major Italian cultural centres. The interplay of professionalism, industry and artistic practices was discussed across the board: E. Gambaro explored the interplay of interests in Sereni, Fortini, Raboni, Giudici; E. Mattiato illuminated the evolution of the relation between Gio Ponti and the Corriere; A. Chella and E. Orlando respectively focused on the journal Questo e altro and Il Rinnovamento; M.G. Lolla described the pioneering role of the publisher Brigola, G. Cenati considered the development of comics in Milan over the second half of the 20^th century.

Much attention was also given both to central Milan and to peripheral areas of the city, also linking these places to various artists, such as Verga or Medardo Rosso, who addressed the figure of the prostitute and the ambiguity of the iconic Galleria Vittorio Emanuele (E. Nelsen; S. Hecker and C. Ramsey-Portolano); G. Tassi and F. Rabissi focused on Ottieri, Antonioni and Visconti, with their attempt to render the issues of modern Milan; M. Belova pointed out a peculiar technique in a poem by Raboni aimed at rendering the fluidity of Corso Buenos Aires; R. Pozzi explored Milo De Angelis’s Milan across his production.

A. Hajek, S. Daly, A. Baldi, G. Mancosu addressed cultural identities of women, workers and migrants, also considering films (Monicelli’s Renzo e Luciana) and documentaries (Asmarina). S. Bragato, F. Guidali, and G. Cimador’s papers gave an overview of debates around art and politics, particularly about Futurism, Realism in mid-twentieth century and alternative culture in the Seventies. A. Diazzi explored Milanese psychoanalysis through the activity of practitioner Elvio Fachinelli.

A limited number of papers dealt with literary genres and current debates. More specifically, T. Franco and F. Camilletti focused on the peculiar, dystopic Milan emerging from a recent work by Corrado Stajano and from Emilio De Rossignoli’s science-fiction in the Sixties; G. Raccis pointed out the recurring theme of nostalgia in contemporary writers and A. Palomba addressed the issue of postmodern / hypermodern definition.

The centrality of visual culture in the debate was at the core of D. Balicco’s and B. Carnevali’s joint paper focusing on the history and aesthetics of the Milanese underground “Linea Rossa”. This cutting-edge project was the output of diverse professional and artistic expertise such as the designer Bob Noorda. M. Sironi showed the significant influence of architectural elements on the style of book covers at the turn of 19^th and 20^th century and J. Mekinda discussed the importance of the Triennale di Milano in orienting design from the Thirties to the Fifties. Specialist L. Maulsby reviewed the huge legacy of Fascist architecture in Milan and A. Tommasini offered a look at the city’s contemporary urban landscape through Gabriele Basilico’s photography.

The event also featured an evening roundtable at the Laboratorio Formentini per l’Editoria with guests speakers U. Fiori (musician and poet), G. Biondillo (architect and writer), L. Cerutti (editor Mondadori), M. Zapparoli (Marcos y Marcos) and chaired by B. Pischedda (University of Milan). The very informal and animated discussion revolved around the impact of the city in shaping a bizarre blend of features in its citizens: their elusive “Milanesità”, their typical blend of pragmatism and decency, humour and indignation.

L'articolo Milan Crossroad of Cultures (conference report) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Figure 1, Simonetta Visconti, coat, wool, circa 1961 – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

These are the premises of the research project I am currently working on: Italy’s Textile Production and its Influence on the Ready-to-Wear System and its Aesthetics 1945-1985, which critically examines the rapid development of Italian fashion from a country of dressmakers and couturiers to a producer of mass-produced ready-to-wear at the forefront of international scene between 1945 and 1985. In previous studies on Italian fashion, the term “Made in Italy” was unpacked, analysed, criticised and connected historically with early modernity (Carlo Marco Belfanti, Renaissance and Made in Italy, 2015; Grace Lees-Maffei and Kjetil Fallan (eds.), Made in Italy, 2014; Eugenia Paulicelli, Fashion: The Cultural Economy of Made in Italy, 2014). Still, the accent has fallen more on the style and quality associated with the tag, than on understanding what the production of these goods entail.

Figure 2 Emilio Pucci, label with Capri and Florence symbols from a beach playsuit, cotton, 1955 – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

In my study, I look instead at the use of modern advances in technology, new fabrics and machine or technical developments that allowed Italian fashion to be branded with adjectives such as “traditional” and “artisanal”, as well as “modern”, “simple”, and “sporty”. In particular, I connect production and commerce with aesthetics, situating national change within global contexts and fusing textile, fashion studies and design history in a multidisciplinary approach. For instance, I plan to assess the extent to which artificial and synthetic yarns are employed in the making of textile used in Italian high fashion during the 1950s and the impact this had on Italian textile production, fashion exports and fibre imports as well as on textile and fashion’s design and style.

The importance of the material employed in making Italian fashion has often been considered a very significant characteristic of the country’s aesthetic, but its impact has not been yet critically assessed. I address this gap and contribute a new approach to the object-based study, by reversing the attention from style and composition to the materials and production and by uniting the usually separated studies of fashion and textile history.

My project heavily relies on primary research in archives in Italy, UK and USA. The variety of these sources (textile manufacturers, museum collections, departments stores, designers, couturiers) and their far-flung locations often make them quite challenging to navigate. However, the diversity and richness of the materials, from personal letters, to cloth samples, to sketches is contributing to inform the diversity of the field I am investigating.

Figure 4, Clerici Tessuto, textile sample, rayon and viscose, 1948, Clerici Tessuto

Lucia Savi is a PhD candidate at Kingston University, London

L'articolo Textile and Fashion Production in Italy 1945-1985 sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.