La città

Questa convegno fa parte della serie di due giorni “Celebrating the City”, che si terrà dal 10 all’11 maggio. Ulteriori informazioni su “Reading the City | Leggere la città”, il secondo evento della serie.

Le città, come ogni altra forma di insediamento umano e come le opere d’arte, sono in continuo mutamento, in un processo di formazione e rimodellamento, soggette ad essere cancellate, demolite, ridisegnate, rinnovate e conservate. Come una tela su cui sono documentati visivamente i segni delle attività artistiche—linee, graffi, chiazze di colore e macchie—i paesaggi urbani si accumulano e mostrano attraverso le loro particolari strutture, la pianificazione, l’architettura, i parchi e i monumenti pubblici, storie di creatività urbana e paesaggi di abitanti ancora solo immaginati . Così si potrebbe leggere la pletora di materiali e costruzioni che trasformano uno spazio in un luogo e i segni della memoria e dell’oblio. I siti rappresentano durate e cambiamenti e incarnano il senso del tempo.

Questo convegno ha riunito diversi accademici e intellettuali per discutere la città come un’entità ricordata e costruita—un artefatto architettonico tangibile e un prodotto dei nostri pensieri. Al centro ci sono la storia e le storie personali degli abitanti delle città, riflesse, o meglio impresse, sulla formazione degli spazi urbani della città e sulle sue delicate superfici ricettive.

I partecipanti includono: la storica dell’architettura Esra Akcan (Cornell University); lo storico dell’arte Dario Gamboni (Università di Ginevra); il teorico dell’architettura e giornalista Niklas Maak (FAZ Germania); la storica dell’arte Tanja Michalsky (Bibliotheca Hertziana Roma); l’architetto Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths, University of London); e l’architetto Mabel O. Wilson (Columbia University).

Scarica un PDF del programma dell’evento.

L’evento sarà presentato su Zoom ed è gratuito e aperto al pubblico. Il convegno inizierà alle 15.00.

La città: Tracce di memoria urbana è co-sponsorizzata dalla Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History.

The first Conversations/Conversazioni of the calendar year will feature David Nirenberg (2021 Resident), the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he is also dean of the Divinity School, and AAR Director Avinoam Shalem (2016 Resident).

“Ghetto” emerged as a word to describe a specific late-medieval phenomenon: the creation in Christian cities of segregated and walled neighborhoods in which Jews were required to live. Today its meanings are vaster, and it serves as a metaphor for many different types of containment and segregation. How did these urban spaces emerge? Why did they prove so useful as marginal spaces and a metaphor? And what work do the phenomenon and the metaphor do today?

This conversation, to be presented on Zoom, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2020–21 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

Giovanna Silva is a photographer and publisher. Trained as an architect, she works through travel, exploring cities and their recent histories with her camera. Silva will discuss her books, in particular the series Narratives, which gets its title from the personal narratives of the nineteenth century and is based on her exploration of war-torn places. She is currently working on a volume about Rome, as seen through the walks she took through the city with local resident-guides.

Silva is the 2020 ENEL Foundation Italian Fellow in Architecture, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture.

This event, to be presented on Zoom and held in English, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

Catherine Opie (2021 Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography) will discuss her work around community and home, as well as her recent road trip across the United States, with AAR President Mark Robbins (1997 Fellow). Focusing on the idea of a place as a portrait, she will also touch on her interests to explore the Vatican with her camera during her residency at the American Academy in Rome.

This Conversations/Conversazioni, to be presented on Zoom and held in English, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Eastern Time (12:00 midnight Central European Time).

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2020–21 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

Like plants and any living creatures, urban centers are born, and gradually grow and even die. We, the citizens living in these cities and metropoles, accept the city we dwell in, as the spatial framework for our movements, acts, and thoughts. Like the sea, the city engulfs and absorbs us. But then, when was the city visually regarded and alongside depicted as a comprehensive and intact entity?

In this short lecture by AAR Director Avinoam Shalem (2016 Resident), the specific and crucial moments of discovering the image of the city as a whole, its wide-ranging skyline, full profile, and clear outer borders, are highlighted. Thus, histories of the formation of distant gazes, which enabled us to capture the city as a whole—as an object of visual desire—are disclosed, and attention is drawn to the implications of these visual withdrawals. Likewise, the sense of detachment is exposed, in which distance moves beyond its denotation of spatial stance and appears as related to the discovery of the historical time.

This lecture, to be presented on Zoom and held in English, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

Andreas Scholl, director of Antikensammlung Berlin, and Lynne Lancaster (2002 Fellow), Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor at the American Academy in Rome, will discuss “The Pergamon Panorama in Berlin: Where Tradition and Innovation Converge.”

Scholl will speak on the Pergamon Panorama in Berlin, a project that takes the nineteenth-century concept of the cyclorama and uses a combination of traditional methods and digital technology to bring it into the twenty-first century to re-create the ancient city of Pergamon. A conversation between Scholl and Lancaster about the project will follow the presentation.

This Conversations/Conversazioni, to be presented on Zoom and held in English, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2020–21 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

Pliny the Elder called Rome an “urbs pensilis,” a hanging city. The expression was clearly a reference to one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the horti pensili or Hanging Gardens of Babylon. In this talk, AAR Humanities Professor Lynne Lancaster (2002 Fellow) will explore how the image of ancient Rome was influenced by the Hellenistic conception of the Seven Wonders of the World by focusing on one of the Wonders: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

In making his comment, Pliny was referring to a very large drain, the Cloaca Maxima, and the network of underground service tunnels and sewers that supported the city, but Rome also had hanging gardens like the Wonder itself—gardens that were supported from below so that they “floated” over the city. Both the conceptions—the hanging city and the hanging gardens—were expressions of technological feats of engineering, which made Rome the ideal city to host and even to be a Wonder.

This lecture, to be presented on Zoom and held in English, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

Augustus and other emperors established some 150 colonies in the provinces and Italy itself. Population displacement is but one aspect of the turmoil such settlements incurred. Did such colonies, said “to embody the Roman people’s unparalleled greatness,” contribute to an imperial “Romanitas”? How did their urban forms contribute to making “Roman” the empire’s sixty-million-plus population of differing cultures, languages, and religions, especially given the lag time to actually build such cities?

Mussolini’s regime self-consciously invoked ancient models, not only by staging him as a new Augustus through urban works, but by founding entirely new towns—147 of them in the 1930s. Focusing on the best-known case (the Pontine Marshes reclamation), this conversation will explore parallels and differences across eras. How did the state-driven settlements of Italians from one region to another inspire or discourage senses of citizenship? Were rituals of foundation as important under Fascism as they were in antiquity?

Mary T. Boatwright (2021 Resident) is professor emerita of classical studies at Duke University, and Mia Fuller (1998 Fellow) is the Gladyce Arata Terrill Distinguished [Associate] Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The discussion will be moderated by Lynne Lancaster, Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor at the American Academy in Rome.

This conversation, to be presented on Zoom, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2020–21 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

In August 1967, a group of artists in Chicago created a mural of Black heroes, The Wall of Respect, which quickly became a rallying point for activists, neighborhood residents, and cultural workers and spawned a broader community mural movement not only in Chicago but nationwide. It is uncontroversial to say that such murals represented the aspirations and political struggles of communities. But art critics and historians have tended to downplay their political agency as well as their artistic importance, thinking of them as affirming but ultimately anodyne expressions of identity.

What if instead we consider murals as interventions in and contestations of urban space? What would it mean to think of murals as shaping space and people’s experience of it, mediating relationships among groups, staking claims to visibility, belonging, and the right to the city? Rebecca Zorach and Nicole Marroquin will address these questions with examples drawn from the long history of public art and political movements in Chicago.

Rebecca Zorach (2021 Resident) is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History at Northwestern University, and Nicole Marroquin is an interdisciplinary artist and associate professor of art education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

This conversation, to be presented on Zoom, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2020–21 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

If art is a vehicle for reframing preservation, what impact could that have on practitioners? Or the public’s attitudes toward preservation as a discipline? This Conversation/Conversazioni will explore the emotive power of place, space, and objects, particularly as they relate to memory, presence, and endurance over time.

Jorge Otero-Pailos is an artist, preservationist, and professor and director of the Historic Preservation Program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Sheena Wagstaff is Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The discussion will be moderated by Elizabeth Rodini, Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome.

This Conversations/Conversazioni, to be presented on Zoom and held in English, is free and open to the public. The start time is 12:00pm Eastern Time (6:00pm Central European Time).

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2020–21 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.