News of the second phase of this project (2015-2018)

We are delighted to announce that we have won an AHRC standard grant of £680,000 to enable us to continue this project from summer 2015 until the end of 2018. The new project is called Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: interart/intermedia.

For the next few months, you won’t see new activity on this website as we transform this into a much more interactive, online space for the new project. The website, once launched, will be a dynamic space for co-writing across artistic disciplines and for exploring and sharing theories of interartistic and intermedial practice. We hope to create a hub for those of you engaged with these kinds of ideas and practices. Please check back here next November to see the new website.

Our research questions for Interart/Intermedia

These questions follow on closely from what we were doing in the first, networking, phase of this project. We’ve refined them and we’re looking now specifically at the relationship between interartistic practice and experimental creativity.

Our research goes beyond the narrow focus of monodisciplinary research to reveal a more comprehensive picture of interartistic encounters and new kinds of experimentation. We challenge and amend established ideas of cultural centres and peripheries, to focus attention on individuals and groups who are actively engaged in creative boundary-crossing and on institutions who fostered or hindered interartistic exchange. Our project introduces a new and original focal point: we seek to examine how a multidisciplinary approach subverts widely accepted canons; what looks central under the lens of the monodisciplinary microscope may not be so from an interartistic one.

These are the questions:

Why has interartistic practice changed so markedly over the course of 20th and 21st century? What has influenced these changes?

Why have avant-garde and activist artists critiqued and transgressed the boundaries between the arts in 20th and 21st century Italy? What effect has this had on creativity?

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, interartistic practice has been palpable in periods of uncertainty and radical social change, frequently associated with the avant-garde. It also appears to have emerged most strongly where political and cultural conventions are challenged, especially by activists. The first area our project explores is the transgressive nature of interartistic and intermedial creativity.

What theories do we need to develop in order to discuss hybrid cultural objects and avant-garde interartistic practice?

We will fashion a theoretical discourse to facilitate new research across the arts and media and underpin work done in our own project. This will highlight the social, creative and psychological dynamics of interartistic creativity, rather than the demands and constraints of disciplinary fields.

Our planned outputs

In the next phase, we’ll be moving from the exciting network of people established in the first phase to producing some significant publications, an exhibition, workshops, teaching material and setting up a research centre. This is what we have planned:

A monograph, Rupture and Renewal, that aims to rewrites the cultural history of Italy in the 20^th and 21^st centuries from an interartistic perspective;

A monograph dedicated specifically in the relations between the arts in Italy in the Digital Age;

A further edited book that will provide the theoretical underpinning for interartistic research for a broader intellectual community;

Sample interartistic/intermedial teaching material for secondary schools;

Together with the Estorick Collection, an interartistic exhibition in London, a catalogue, and a CPD day for museum curators;

3 workshops on theories of interartistic practice to take place in London and Birmingham;

A Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Modern Languages to be set up at the University of Birmingham (UK).

We will also be developing dedicated events for postgraduates and postdocs. Much of the work we will be doing is targeted at informing ideas about interartistic practice and empowering people to explore, in a theoretically informed way, interartistic practice.

The rest of the current website here belongs to the first phase of the Interdisciplinary Italy project (Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2015: art, music, text), which has now closed.

We thank all those who have supported us in the first phase of this project and helped us to develop this second phase.

Clodagh Brook (Principal investigator, University of Birmingham), Florian Mussgnug (Co-investigator, UCL), Giuliana Pieri (Co-investigator, Royal Holloway), Emanuela Patti (Senior Research Fellow, University of Birmingham)