Italy by Design: A Professional Journey

Activity: Academic talk or presentation typesInvited talk

Description

Yale Guest Series “Italian Studies — In Theory and in Practice”, 15 April 2022.

ABSTRACT — Italy by Design is a long-term project based at Edinburgh and applying concepts from Decolonial and Intermediality Studies to the material success of the invention of Italy in the last 500 years. In this initiative, we see Italy as one of the most labour-intensive unsustainables of project Europe, and we invite participants — students, scholars, the general public — to rethink this powerful construct and signifier from the combined perspective of material studies and decolonial thought. Following the success of the guest speaker series pilot attached to the project, we are planning to launch the first fully public “Mini MAXXI: Radical Conversation on Material Culture” this autumn. As well as widening the project’s reach, Mini MAXXI 3 will bring together the 28 scholars whose work is being commissioned as part of the book proposal we are making to a North-American Press, our remit both individually and overall being the double perspective that opens up if we accept to have to call Italy both entangled (in its own specific materiality) and hooked (habit-formed, i.e., dependent on a unique form of subalternity). It is this complex dialogue — in progress as much as it is collaborative — that I want to explore further as part of my talk.

Project Contributors: Alessandra Antola Swan; Paolo Bartoloni; Lisa Colletta; Luca Cottini; Roberto Dainotto; Reidar Due; Daniel Finch-Race; Claudio Fogu; Robert Gordon; Emiliano Guaraldo; Stephen Gundle; Sally (Patricia) Hill; Stephanie M. Hom; Stefano Jossa; Medina Lasansky; Giuliana Minghelli; Federico Pacchioni; Matteo Paoletti; Silvana Patriarca; Emanuela Patti; Eugenia Paulicelli; Federica G Pedriali; Giuliana Pieri; Pierluigi Sacco; Massimo Vedovelli; Laura Wittman; Diego Zancani; Gaoheng Zhang.
Period15 Apr 2022
Held atYale University, United States, Connecticut
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • Italian Studies
  • Italian Design
  • Italian History
  • Material Culture
  • Decolonial Thought