Bodies Across Borders: Oral and Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond
Florence, Italy | European University Institute
The workshop focuses on methodological approaches to the intersection between memory and mobility in visual works and contemporary artistic practices as one of the key concerns of the Bodies across Borders. Oral and Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond, the Research Project funded by the European Research Council and based at the European University Institute of Fiesole (Italy). The unfolding of multiple temporalities connecting different people, geographies, and legacies links the field of visual arts with the contemporary processes moulding notions of exile, diaspora and migration as able to disclose new forms of narration. The workshop brings together scholars from different backgrounds whose work has challenged disciplinary boundaries and methodological frameworks in order to discuss transversal issues such as: the relationship between different forms of visuality; connections and discontinuities between social memory processes and aesthetics; social practices involved in processes of production, circulation, exhibition, and reception of artistic works.
Morning Session: Aesthetic Traces of Temporal and Spatial Transits
The session points to the interweaving between the artist, understood as a memorial figure, and the artwork considered as the aesthetic trace of the reworking of languages, codes, traditions, in a context of multiple spatial and temporal transits and passages. The discussion will focus on different approaches to new figurative paradigms and on discontinuities and continuities within the field of visual art, envisaged as marked by processes of reproduction and deformation at work in the larger cultural and social landscape.
Afternoon Session: Archival and Mapping Impulses in Artistic and Visual Practices
The session explores the increasing relevance acquired by the archival and cartographic 'impulse' within contemporary artistic and visual practices. It aims to put into motion a conversation able to call into question traditional ways of understanding the relationships between art and politics as well as between political theory and visual practices, opening up new cross-disciplinary perspectives.