920,745 research outputs found
Reflections on the Ballet des Porcelaines: Between intention and impact
No full textThis article reflects the intention and impact of the dance research project Le Ballet des Porcelaines or The Teapot Prince, co-created by Professor Meredith Martin with the choreographer and activitst Phil Chan and assisted by Dr Elisa Cazzato as wardrobe supervisor and tour manager in the Italian venues. Written by the comte de Caylus, with music by Nicolas-Racot de Grandval, and based on a fairy tale, this ballet tells the story of an Asian sorcerer who rules a ‘blue island’ and transforms trespassers into porcelain. A prince gets stranded on the island and is turned into a teapot, and a princess has to rescue her lover by seducing the sorcerer, stealing his wand, and breaking the spell. On the one hand a standard Orientalist fable, the ballet can also be read as also an allegory for the intense European desire to know and possess the secrets of making porcelain, a quasi-magical substance that China had been producing for centuries. Though it would inspire later ballets featuring sleeping beauties and porcelain princesses, the Ballet des Porcelaines is virtually unknown and—until recently—had not been performed for nearly three hundred years. This paper discusses our experiences in creating and presenting our new version of the ballet from 2021-22 at venues throughout the U.S. and Europe, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Princeton University, Waddesdon Manor and Brighton Royal Pavilion in the UK, and the Museo di Capodimonte and Palazzo Grassi in Italy
Reflections on the Ballet des Porcelaines: Between intention and impact
No full textThis article reflects the intention and impact of the dance research project Le Ballet des Porcelaines or The Teapot Prince, co-created by Professor Meredith Martin with the choreographer and activitst Phil Chan and assisted by Dr Elisa Cazzato as wardrobe supervisor and tour manager in the Italian venues. Written by the comte de Caylus, with music by Nicolas-Racot de Grandval, and based on a fairy tale, this ballet tells the story of an Asian sorcerer who rules a ‘blue island’ and transforms trespassers into porcelain. A prince gets stranded on the island and is turned into a teapot, and a princess has to rescue her lover by seducing the sorcerer, stealing his wand, and breaking the spell. On the one hand a standard Orientalist fable, the ballet can also be read as also an allegory for the intense European desire to know and possess the secrets of making porcelain, a quasi-magical substance that China had been producing for centuries. Though it would inspire later ballets featuring sleeping beauties and porcelain princesses, the Ballet des Porcelaines is virtually unknown and—until recently—had not been performed for nearly three hundred years. This paper discusses our experiences in creating and presenting our new version of the ballet from 2021-22 at venues throughout the U.S. and Europe, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Princeton University, Waddesdon Manor and Brighton Royal Pavilion in the UK, and the Museo di Capodimonte and Palazzo Grassi in Italy
Dis/fare l'archivio islamofobico delle relazioni anglo-meridionali. Smurare il Mediterraneo
No full textThis essay is an excavation into what I call the “Anglo-Southern Relations” archive.” Specifically, it is a critical reading of some English
travelogues, whose authors visited the Mezzogiorno during the second half of the 20th century. I will
examine this archive in search of the meridionist gaze (Pfister, Cazzato) that has informed the
relations between England and Italy since the 18th century. It is through this archive that modern
Europe has constructed itself against the Mediterranean Other (European and non European).
A propos of Orientalism and Islam, Spivak argues that “Orientalism equals racial profiling equals the
demonization of Islam.” In the Italian context, the equation can be translated in this way: “Meridionism
equals racial profiling equals the demonization of Southern Europeans as inner Arabs or Africans.”
Therefore, my aim is to see how one of the main categories of the meridionist repertoire –
islamophobia – is at work and whether the Mediterranean epistemology of crossroads (Braudel, Cassano,
Chambers) may be a way out of the clash of fundamentalisms. Also, this sort of wall-archive
could be evaded through the postcolonial (Young) and decolonial epistemology (Quijano, Mignolo),
which may play a crucial role for the present migratory question and the deconstruction of “Fortress
Europe,” whose cultural walls are being built by meridionist “bricklayers” at any latitude
FRACTURED MEDITERRANEAN AND IMPERIAL DIFFERENCE: MEDITERRANEANISM, MERIDIONISM, AND JOHN RUSKIN
No full textThe history of the modern Mediterranean is a history of fracturing. Since the middle of the seventeenth century, when the primitive accumulation of Atlantic capitalism and the Protestant Reformation occurred, this sea has lived and breathed with — as Ferdand Braudel would have it it — different rhythms. This essay attempts to tackle this issue by connecting the fall of the Mediterranean with the rise modern Europe through a decolonial perspective (Quijano). The essay refers to Europe’s Northern shores, which, from being saved from the space of ‘colonial difference’, somehow collapsed into one of ‘imperial difference’ (Mignolo), considering throughout those dynamics through which all shores of the Mediterranean suffered — albeit to different degrees — from the same colonial matrix of power.
The Mediterranean’s Northern shores are European. Their Europeanness, though, is a quasi-Calibanesque one, at once dangerously near to African and Eastern shores, and far enough from the ‘perfect’ core of a ‘real’ Europe. Therefore, if Orientalism and Mediterraneanism were born as cultural tools for the implementation of European colonialism, another discursive formation, which we may call ‘Meridionism’ (Pfister and Cazzato), was born as a cultural tool for the foundation of modern European identity, whose centre was set far from the shores of the Mediterranean. Having laid out this discursive-political context, the essay moves to investigate a specific scenario — John Ruskin’s ambivalent cult of the ‘savage but righteous’ Gothic on Italian soil. Such a reading is both useful and relevant to any comprehension of the deep historical and epistemological processes that accompanied the fracturing of the modern Mediterranean
A New Frontier of Human-Machine Interaction: Simultaneous Interpreting in Virtual Reality
No full textIn recent years, the interest in the Metaverse and the use of Virtual Reality (VR) for training purposes has notably increased. These immersive environments represent a new frontier of human-interpreter interaction, where interpreters immerse themselves in new worlds and interact using their avatars and VR headsets. This contribution aims to shed light on the dynamics of the interpreter-VR interaction and to present the results of a case study conducted at IULM University during interpreters’ training in VR. In these sessions, MA students in Conference Interpreting had the opportunity to take part in experimental classes focused on practising activities such as sight translation, shadowing and simultaneous interpreting within simulated realistic working environments, including a conference hall equipped with interpreting booths, all within the immersive setting of the Metaverse
Travelling South: Charles Lister, Henry Vollan Morton, Patience Gray between Late Meridionism and Anti-Progressism
No full textThis chapter aims to examine the north-south European relationship through contemporary travel writing, especially that which depicts the Italian South. Italy and the Mediterranean have ‘always’ been the objective of Northern travellers. In the past, the European South was a sort of inner Orient, against which Northern European identity could perceive itself as a modern and, therefore superior world. Terms like “change”, “innovation”, “progress” on one hand, and “immobility”, “tradition” and “backwardness” on the other, have effortlessly been attributed to the two geo-cultural spaces. However, I would employ the term Meridionism (M. Pfister, L. Cazzato) rather than Orientalism (E. Said). If Orientalism was born as a cultural tool for the implementation of European colonialism, Meridionism was born as a cultural tool for the foundation of modern European identity.
The present essay first tries to reflect on the relationship between travel writing and cultural identity followed by an examination of some travelogues written in the second half of the 20th century by acclaimed English travel writers; specifically Charles Lister, Henry Vollan Morton and Patience Gray. I will attempt to reconstruct a multi-focalised perspective on ‘reality’, in order to observe the extent to which Meridionism is still working as a discursive tool for the negotiation of present cultural identity within Europe
«Le plus grand théâtre de la République, la première réputation dans l’Europe». Ignazio Degotti (1758-1824) behind the stage of the Paris Opéra
No full textThis article explores the role, the vision, and the artistic expectations of the Italian stage designer Ignazio Degotti (1758-1824). With a few career interruptions, Degotti was the principal stage designer of the Théâtre de l’Opéra from 1795 to 1822. He approached his art as a fine and skilled connoisseur of architecture, perspective, decoration, and botany. Convinced that much of the effect of the opera resided in the visual, Degotti gave himself a special status of an artistic interlocutor among other opera creators. His persona, however, rarely fit the controlling requirements of theatre administration. Frustrating requests urged him to produce grandeur on stage, but under controlled timelines and budgets. Meanwhile, outside the Opéra, Degotti worked with Jacques-Louis David, organising the scenography of the Coronation’s painting; his portrait stands right next to that of Napoleon’s First Painter. It is when Degotti eluded the daily fights and controls of the Opéra and meshed his talents with art-academy relationships that he settled comfortably into his artistic role. Through unpublished archival
material, this paper brings to the foreground the figure of Degotti, promoting his practice as an account very much integrated into the visual and cultural histories of his time
Semiosi e colonialità in Palestina Riflessioni decoloniali sulla guerrilla visuale contro il muro israeliano
No full textThe present essay looks at the Palestinian question within the field ofartistic activism (artivism), which, through a myriad of graffiti (amongwhich Banksy’s, Joy van Erven’s and Blu’s), offers a sort of counter-semiosis within thecoloniality of power (Quijano), in the attempt to symbolically knock down the Israeliwall. This wall-border becomes a herida abierta that bleeds, in the words of GloriaAnzaldúa, the global south’s blood, forced to clash against the global north’swalls, Israel being the product of the latter (Said, Question). This wall-border becomes“global” to the extent that the defence barrier, as it is called by the Israeli, or apartheidwall, as called by the Palestinians, has become a sort of global canvas on which atransnational visual guerrilla is fought. This fight is here interpreted through the lensof decolonial thought and, to put it with Walter Benjamin, from the perspective of thetradition of the oppressed.Il presente saggio prova ad affrontare la questione palestinese sul terrenodell’attivismo artistico (artivismo), che attraverso una miriade di graffiti (fra cui quelli diBanksy, Joy van Erven e Blu), offre una sorta di contro-semiosi dentro la colonialità delpotere (Quijano), nel tentativo di sgretolare simbolicamente il muro israeliano. Questoconfine-muro diventa una herida abierta che sanguina, per dirla con Gloria Anzaldúa,del sangue del sud del mondo costretto a scontrarsi a mani nude contro i muri delnord del mondo, essendo Israele un prodotto di quest’ultimo (Said, Question). Questoconfine-muro diventa “globale” nella misura in cui la defence barrier, come la chiamanogli israeliani, o l’apartheid wall, come lo chiamano gli attivisti internazionali, è diventatauna sorta di tela globale su cui si combatte una guerrilla visuale transnazionale, chequi viene interpretata con le lenti del pensiero decoloniale e dal punto di vista dellatradizione degli oppressi (Walter Benjamin)
Variations on the Author
No full text“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
In the South Seas: Robert L. Stevenson’s Anglo-Southern Relations, or Orientalisms denied
No full textIn the history of British culture, few authors have distanced themselves from the otherising discourse that has informed its imperial master narrative. Thanks to his Polynesian works, he has been appropriately considered a sort of avant-la-lettre postcolonial author. If at that time there was an exoticism reminiscent of colonialism (Pierre Loti, Rudyard Kipling), there also was an exoticism which tried to distance itself from the colonial project and endeavoured to come to terms with alterity rather than identity. The aim of this essay is to survey his In the South Seas and see in what ways he resisted the deculturing British action, as far as sex/gender and race are concerned.Dans l’histoire de la culture anglaise, peu d’auteurs ont pris leurs distances vis-à-vis du discours sur l’autre qui a caractérisé les romans de l’empire britannique. Grâce à ses œuvres polynésiennes, il a été considéré comme une sorte d’auteur postcolonial avant la lettre. Si à cette époque-là existait un exotisme qui rappelait le colonialisme (Pierre Loti, Rudyard Kipling), il y avait aussi un exotisme qui tentait de se distancier du projet colonial et tentait de parvenir à un accord avec l’altérité plutôt qu’avec l’identité. Le but de cet article est d’examiner son In the South Seas et de voir comment il a résisté à l’action britannique en vue de déculturer l’autre en ce qui concerne le sexe/genre et la race
- …
