Fellows Project Fund

A Difficult Heritage: The Afterlife of Fascist-Era Architecture, Monuments, and Works of Art in Italy

Fellows Project Fund
Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History
Via Gregoriana, 28
Rome, Italy
Conference/Symposium
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Monday, March 11–Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Conference - March 11 and 12 - A Difficult Heritage

Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani, still from Freedom of Movement, 2018

Many urban projects realized during the Ventennio remain part of the Italian landscape and, together with architectural monuments and works of art, create a constellation of surviving images of Fascist visual culture in contemporary Italy. As part of the national cultural heritage these artifacts are protected by preservation laws. However, in the ambiguous process whereby Italy confronts its Fascist and colonial past, they have also become a nexus of critical debate and political struggle.

The two-day conference focuses on the material history of Fascist-era works of art, monuments and architecture in Italy, and examines their afterlife and reception in the longue durée. In order to frame the contemporary debate, a transdisciplinary approach and a historical perspective will take as its starting point the iconoclasm following the Fall of the Regime (July 25, 1943). Papers will explore the ambiguous transition from Fascism to the Republic and the dynamics of postwar censorship. Moreover, the critical examination of artistic historiography, together with the main narratives of the history of Italian art, aims to underline elements of continuity throughout the twentieth century. It also permits a reexamination of the damnatio memoriae implicating some of the artists close to the Regime and the role played by private collections in the preservation and survival of Fascist-era works of art.

Probing the theoretical concept of “difficult heritage” in relation to the peculiarities of the Italian case, and in a comparative perspective with other nations, the conference addresses issues of restoration, display, and critical preservation of Fascist-era artifacts located in public and institutional spaces. The event aims to foster a discussion open to different disciplines such as history, history of architecture, heritage studies, literature, philosophy, and anthropology, and to examine the potential contribution of art history to the topic. Strategies of memorialization and the role of contemporary art interventions will be discussed in an open dialogue with artists focusing on political monuments and multilayered memories in public space.

Day 1

Monday, March 11, 2019
10:00am–5:00pm
Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte
Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana, 22, Rome

Day 2

Tuesday, March 12, 2019
10:00am–5:00pm
American Academy in Rome
AAR Lecture Room, via Angelo Masina, 5, Rome

Presentations will be held in English and Italian. The conference and the discussion are open to the public. No registration required. You can watch the event live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

Concept and organization: Carmen Belmonte, 2019 Italian Fellow, American Academy in Rome.

The project is made possible in part by the Fellows’ Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

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Vicky Chow Plays Music by American Academy Fellows

Fellows Project Fund
Performance
Vicky Chow plays music by American Academy Fellows

The American pianist Vicky Chow will perform a concert featuring a new work in progress by Christopher Cerrone, Samuel Barber Rome Prize Fellow in Musical Compostion at the American Academy in Rome, that was inspired by Potenza’s Ponte Musmeci. Cerrone’s new work is inspired by both the interlocking curves of the bridge’s design as well as its brutalist use of concrete—which Cerrone translates musically into repetitive layers of icy rhythms that intersect and swell in a series of serpentine lines and whose overall architure mirrors the shape of the bridge.

In addition to this new work, Chow will perform Cerrone’s Hoyt-Schermerhorn (2001) for piano and electronics, as well as Vick(i/y) (2010), a work for prepared piano by Andy Akiho, a 2015 Fellow.

The evening will begin with a talk between Alexander Robinson, Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize Fellow in Landscape Architecture, Cerrone, and Chow about the relationship between music, architecture, and landscape.

This project is made possible by the Fellows Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

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Tesseræ

Fellows Project Fund
Fondazione Isabella Scelsi
Via di S. Teodoro, 8
Rome, Italy
Performance
Concert - Tesseræ

Program

Giacinto Scelsi, L'Âme Ailée / L'Âme Ouverte - for solo violin (1973)
Christopher Trapani, Tesseræ - for viola d’amore and live electronics (2017), world premiere
Pierluigi Billone, Equilibrio. Cerchio - for solo violin (2014), Italian premiere

Marco Fusi, violin

Tesseræ (2017) by Christopher Trapani is a work for viola d’amore and electronics that draws inspiration from the lyra and kemençe music of Crete and Istanbul. Grounded in a modal tradition, small fragments of microtonal scales are used to assemble long expressive lines with a nearly vocal quality. Alongsisde the live instrument, the electronics provide virtual resonances (mimicking the viola d’amore’s sympathetic strings) and canonic echoes that transform the sounds into a multifaceted acoustic space.

Tesseræ has benefitted from a rare close collaboration between performer and composer, studying the minutiae of ornamentation and the gestures of traditional players, as well as the use of sympathetic strings. This collaborative process was made possible by the Fellows Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome, where Trapani is currently in residence as winner of the 2016–17 Luciano Berio Rome Prize in musical composition. The Italian Academy at Columbia University in New York will present the US premiere of this piece on April 26, 2017.

Equilibrio. Cerchio, which receives is first Italian performance in this program, is a work for solo violin by Pierluigi Billone, composed in 2014. The rituality embedded in the score loosely connects with the choral singing of the traditional Tibetan music; the violin takes charge as well of the percussive punctuation of the vocal strophes, echoing the traditional cymbals and drums often used in those rituals.

The diptych L’Âme Ailée / L’Âme Ouverte (1973) is one of the most icastic works by Giacinto Scelsi, where the composer explores the sound “inside of the note,” navigating through micro intervals and beating in order to connect the listeners with the true essence of sound, as if it were perceived one step before it becomes music.

“Le note, le note non sono che dei rivestimenti, degli abiti […]. Bisogna arrivare al cuore del suono: solo aloora si è musicisti, altrimenti si è solo artigiani.”

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Voicing Michelangelo’s Poetry

Fellows Project Fund
AAR Lecture Room
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Performance
Voicing Michelangelo’s Poetry

Scene from Suzanne Farrin’s La Dolce Morte performed on the Patio from the Castle of Vélez Blanco in Spain the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017 (photograph by Doug Fitch)

In Renaissance Rome, audiences could encounter the poetry of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) through music. In 1533, for example, the Sistine Chapel choir member Costanzo Festa (1480–1545) debuted his setting of a madrigal by Michelangelo. Nearly five centuries later, this event presents an analysis of the historic vocalization of Michelangelo’s poetry in conjunction with selections of Suzanne Farrin’s opera based on his verses, dolce la morte.

This staged conversation and audio-visual presentation is the culmination of a transmedial collaboration between three current Rome Prize Fellows in different disciplines, Raymond Carlson (Renaissance and early modern), Suzanne Farrin (musical compoistion), and Jessica Peritz (modern Italian studies). It will address fundamental questions about the relationship of Italian lyric poetry to the voice. How is authorial agency preserved or lost when a writer’s lyric poems are subsequently set to music by a composer? What resonances do the musical settings of Michelangelo’s poems have with his artistic and architectural endeavors in Rome? Recalling that Michelangelo switched gendered pronouns in certain verses, are there broader notions that govern our connection to the voice and gender, and what does that mean for contemporary music making? The event will be followed by a brief question and answer session, as well as a reception.

The event will be held in English.

This project is made possible by the Fellows’ Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

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LETTO

Fellows Project Fund
Cortile
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Performance
Black and white photograph of a man crouched face down on a bed with blankets and pillows, placed on top of an enlarged version of that same image

The American Academy in Rome is delighted to present the latest performance by Autumn Knight, the 2022 Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize Fellow in visual arts. LETTO, directed by Knight and performed by Michelangelo Miccolis and Nick Kleist, is a durational live performance and sound installation exploring sweetness, nothingness, and rehearsing loss. The work is inspired by a 1994 interview between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Félix González-Torres. Tina Tallon (2022 Fellow) is a collaborator in sound design.

LETTO was made possible through the support of the American Academy in Rome Fellows’ Project Fund.

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Backpacks and luggage with dimensions larger than 40 x 35 x 15 cm (16 x 14 x 6 in.) are not permitted on the property. There are no locker facilities available.

Space in the Cortile is limited, and admission is available on a first-come, first-served basis. If you plan to attend an event with a group of over six guests or students, please inform events@aarome.org with at least 48 hours prior notice so that special arrangements can be made.

Guests will be asked to comply with Covid-19 safety protocols for events:

Access to the Academy requires the presentation of a valid photo ID and a Super Green Pass

FFP2 masks are required when indoors, and temperature will be checked before entry

Visitor contact information may be shared for contact tracing

Please contact events@aarome.org with any questions.

Event does not include video

CAA Annual Conference – Multiple Cosmologies: Celestial Imagery in the Medieval and Early Modern World

Fellows Project Fund
New York Hilton Midtown
1335 Sixth Avenue
New York, NY
United States
Conference/Symposium
CAA Conference Session - Multiple Cosmologies

Detail of folio 30R of Georgius Zothorus Zaparus Fendulus’s Liber astrologicae (ca. 1401–1500) in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (artwork in the public domain)

CAA Annual Conference
New York Hilton Midtown
2nd Floor, Bryant Suite

“What does it mean to orient oneself in space?” Aby Warburg sought to answer this question through images of the stars, planets, and cosmos. For Warburg, these images were spaces that mediated between individuals and a complex set of relationships, allowing viewers to place themselves psychologically in relation to multiple geographies, temporalities, and genealogies. Images of the cosmos did not reduce complexity, but dialectically negotiated pluralities.

Recent scholarship has enriched our understanding of the sociocultural and intellectual spheres in which medieval and early modern celestial imagery was produced. Yet, it often reduces the complexity of these images. For instance, in the persistent narrative of East/West knowledge “transfer,” images are read as embodiments of abstract ideas, while specific geographical and chronological points are selected to construct a Eurocentric narrative of scientific renaissance. Instead, we must acknowledge the image’s multiplicity: images as material objects, not essential ideas, produced for and by active agents, circulated along networks and part of complex power dynamics. Images of the celestial spheres emerge as dynamic spaces, through which viewers, patrons, and producers negotiated multiple sociocultural landscapes.

Among the topics this panel will consider include: images in motion; negotiating intercultural exchange in political and intellectual spheres; images constructing relations across multiple identities in a single place; images and their texts in translation, as well as the renegotiations that accompany such movement; rethinking narratives of image/knowledge “transfer.” Cosmic imagery offers new insights when considered as part of a complex constellation that is earthly as well as celestial.

Chair

Anna Theresa Majeski, American Academy in Rome and Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Papers

Eric Ramírez-Weaver, University of Virginia
A Bohemian Vision of al-Sufi’s Astronomical Tradition: Clusters of Islamic Influence North and South of the Alps

Mari Y. Hara, Cooper Union and Columbia University (2014 Fellow)
Astronomy as Middle Ground: Jesuit Celestial Maps and Cross-Cultural Trust in Late Ming China

Anna Theresa Majeski, American Academy in Rome and Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
From Cethyn to Sicily: The Worlds of Georgius Fendulus’s “Liber astrologicae”

Response

Benjamin Anderson, Cornell University
Multiple Cosmologies: Comparison Beyond Culture

This panel is made possible in part by the Fellows Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

Event does not include video

The Last Exile of History: Rethinking Colonialism and Migration in Italy

Fellows Project Fund
AAR Lecture Room and Cortile
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Conference/Symposium
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Last Exile of History: Rethinking Colonialism and Migration in Italy

Italian colonialism’s past history seems buried in dusty archives and rarely addressed in political and public arenas. In spite of efforts to keep these issues in the collective consciousness, colonialism and its legacies are systematically removed from the public eye. By bringing together leading scholars, artists, and migrants dealing with Italian colonial and postcolonial society, we hope to promote awareness of the heritage of a colonial past and its links with the present through recuperation of stories and sounds. Combining scholarship and art, we hope to explore the consequences of collective memory loss and to raise consciousness of contemporary issues of migration and national identity.

3:00pm – Introduction to and screening of the film La quarta via by Kaha Mohammed Aden

4:00pm – Presentations

  • Milena Belloni, “Migration/Diaspora: The Italian Exception: Contemporary Migration from Eritrea through Italy”
  • Sabrina Marchetti, “The Girls From Asmara: Domestic Labour and Postcoloniality in the Narratives of Eritrean Women in Italy”
  • Alessandro Triulzi, “African Immigration and the Resurfacing of the Colonial Question in Italy”

5:30pm – Concert
Traditional music from Kurdistan by the master musician Abdurrahman Ozel, “Mamosta” from the Ararat Cultural Center and by Dunia

For the full program, please consult https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~brg/aar.

The event is organized in collaboration with the Archivio Memorie Migranti. It is made possible by the Fellows Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

Temenos

Cinque Mostre
Fellows Project Fund
Tempietto del Bramante
Via di San Pietro in Montorio
Rome, Italy
Performance
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Cinque Mostre 2016: Temenos

Temenos by Nina C. Young

In conjunction with the exhibition Cinque Mostre 2016 – Across the Board: Parts of a Whole, which remains on view through April 3, the American Academy in Rome presents the first of two appointments exploring the themes engaged by the exhibition. On March 3 the exhibition will be open exceptionally from 5:00 to 8:00pm.

The composer Nina C. Young, currently the Frederic A. Juilliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, will present Temenos, a performance made in collaboration with the choreographer Miro Magloire that involves dancers Elizabeth Brown Hudec and Daniela Gianuzzi and the photographer Simone Ghera. The piece for two dancers and a violin, specifically developed in relationship to the Tempietto di S. Pietro in Montorio, addresses the union of sound and movement in relationship to architecture. The project seeks to create a “vocabulary” database of simple gestalt sound–movement couplings that will then be codified into a syntax that can be used in increasing complex compositional and improvisational environments.

Temenos will take place outdoors at the Tempietto del Bramante, Via di S. Pietro in Montorio. Performances are at 6:00, 6:45, and 7:30pm and last approximately twenty minutes each.

Cinque Mostre 2016 is made possible by the Adele Chatfield-Taylor and John Guare Fund for the Arts and by the Fellows Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

The event is organized in collaboration with Real Academia de Espana en Roma.

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Corpo Estraneo

Fellows Project Fund
Piazza del Campidoglio
Rome, Italy
Performance
Exhibition
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Corpo Estraneo

Performances at 7:30pm, 8pm, 8:30pm

As part of the ongoing exhibition Studio Systems, this collaborative project between artist/architect Bryony Roberts, current Academy Fellow, and dancer/choreographer Melissa Lohman, transforms the civic space of the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome. The center of civic authority in Rome for centuries, the Piazza del Campidoglio has taken shape as a political space through multiple architectural and urban renovations. Responding to the patterned ground of the Piazza—designed by Michelangelo but implemented by Mussolini—the project emphasizes and redirects its orchestration of public movement. Five female dancers orbit the piazza with two-meter long white rods, measuring, extending, and disrupting the lines of the pattern in a moving architectural drawing. Their movements play with and against the underlying order of the space, positioning female bodies in roles of drawing and ordering.

Roberts is a designer, artist and scholar. She combines strategies from architecture, visual art, and performance to produce transformations of existing buildings. She earned her BA from Yale University and her MArch from Princeton University, and started her own research and design practice in 2011. Her work has received a Graham Foundation Individual Grant and was featured in the Chicago Architecture Biennial of 2015, in addition to group and solo exhibitions in Rome, Berlin, Los Angeles, Houston, and New York. She has published her research in the journals Future Anterior, Log, and Architectural Record, coedited the volume Log 31: New Ancients, and recently edited a book titled Tabula Plena: Forms of Urban Preservation published by Lars Müller Publishers. She has taught at the Rice School of Architecture, SCI-Arc, and the Oslo School of Architecture and was awarded the Booth Family Rome Prize in History Preservation and Conservation to develop her work at the American Academy in Rome for the 2015–16 academic year.

Lohman is a performer and dancer from New York. She earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2000. She is trained in contemporary dance, ballet, Simonson technique, Afro-Caribbean dance, yoga, Noguchi taiso, and butoh dance. In 1995, she began performing as a performance artist, dancer and musician in New York City at venues such as the Knitting Factory, the Living Theater, UCB Theater, CBGB’s and Webster Hall. In 2004, she began training in butoh with Minako Seki and continued her training with Ko Murobushi, Yoshito Ohno, Tadashi Endo and Katsura Kan. From 2008 to 2010, she danced for and collaborated with Katsura Kan in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. She currently lives in Rome, Italy. Since 2010, she has brought her work as a solo performer to Teatro Furio Camillo, Teatro dell’Orologio and Teatroinscatola, Rome, Espace Culturel Bertin Poiree, Paris and La Lupa, Tuscania. In 2013 she co-founded the Rome based company Arcalòh with Flavio Arcangeli, with the support of poet/performer Marcello Sambati (Dark Camera). In 2014–15, the company was in residence at Rialto Sant’Ambrogio, Rome. Arcalòh created a site-specific performance for the festival "Apparizioni nei Giardini di Castel Sant'Angelo," Estate Romana, 2015.

This project is made possible by the Fellows’ Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

The exhibition Studio Systems is open Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 4pm to 7pm until 3 July 2016.

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Digital Humanities for Academic and Curatorial Practice

Fellows Project Fund
Biblioteca Angelica
Piazza S. Agostino, 8
Rome, Italy
Conference/Symposium
-

Wednesday, May 23–Thursday, May 24, 2018

Digital Humanities for Academic and Curatorial Practice

The digital humanities have challenged all disciplines of art history to engage with new interdisciplinary methodologies, learn new tools, and reevaluate their roles within academia. As a consequence, art historians occupy a new position in relation to the object of study. Museums have been equally transformed. The possibility of creating virtual realities for lost or inaccessible monuments poses a new relationship between viewer and object in gallery spaces. Digital-humanities interventions in museums even allow us to preserve the memory of endangered global-heritage sites which cease to exist or are inaccessible (such as the lost Great Arch of Palmyra, reconstructed at monumental scale with a 3D printer).

Digital Humanities for Academic and Curatorial Practice is a public conference presented by the Rome Art History Network that will take place May 23–24, 2018, at the Biblioteca Angelica di Roma and the American Academy in Rome. The conference aims to investigate the role of digital humanities by promoting a dialogue about the protection of cultural-heritage sites, museology, the history of art, and the digitalization of Big Data. In particular, the speakers will consider whether the role of digital humanities is to “reveal” evidence through empirical display or to “reconstruct” the original experience of the object to engage viewers? Can we propose a reconciliation between these two “poles”?

Keynote speakers will include Caroline Bruzelius (Professor of Art History, Duke University), Valeria Vitale (Research Fellow, University of London), Bissera Pentcheva (Professor of Medieval Art, Stanford University, and 2018 Rome Prize Fellow), and Allison Levy (Digital Scholarship Editor, Brown University).

The conference is organized by Angelica Federici (University of Cambridge and RAHN) and Joseph Williams (Duke University and 2018 Rome Prize Fellow) and coordinated by Matteo Piccioni (Sapienza - Università di Roma and RAHN).

23 May 2018
2:00–6:00pm
Biblioteca Angelica
Piazza S. Agostino, 8
Rome

24 May 2018
2:00–6:00pm
American Academy in Rome
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome

The event will be held in English and Italian. On May 24, you can watch it live at livestream.com/aarome.

This conference is made possible in part by the Fellows’ Project Fund of the American Academy in Rome.

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