Pierpaolo Antonello – författare

This book traces how the experience and legacies of terrorism have determined the form and content of Italian cultural production. It helps to understand how political violence was expressed, symbolized and analysed at different rhetorical, philosophical and linguistic levels.

Bruno Munari was one of the most important and eclectic twentieth-century European artists. Dubbed the «Leonardo and Peter Pan» of contemporary art, he pioneered what would later be labelled kinetic art, playing a key role in the constitution and definition of the aesthetic programmes of groups such as Movimento Arte Concreta and Programmed Art. He became an internationally recognized name in the field of industrial design, winning the prestigious «Compasso d’Oro» prize four times, while also being a prominent figure in Italian graphic design, working for magazines such as Tempo and Domus, as well as renowned publishing companies such as Einaudi and Bompiani. He left an indelible mark as an art pedagogue and popularizer with his famous 1970s artistic laboratories for children and was the author of numerous books, ranging from essays on art and design to experimental books.Capturing a resurgent interest in Munari at the international level, the exceptional array of critical voices in this volume constitutes an academic study of Munari of a depth and range that is unprecedented in any language, offering a unique analysis of Munari’s seven-decade-long career. Through original archival research, and illuminating and generative comparisons with other artists and movements both within and outside Italy, the essays gathered here offer novel readings of more familiar aspects of Munari’s career while also addressing those aspects that have received scant or no attention to date.

This book traces how the experience and legacies of terrorism have determined the form and content of Italian cultural production. It helps to understand how political violence was expressed, symbolized and analysed at different rhetorical, philosophical and linguistic levels.

This book challenges widespread and largely negative assumptions about Italian postmodernism and postmodernism in general. It considers contemporary Italian culture as a particularly interesting testing-ground for pluriform struggles of an ethical or political kind, struggles which build upon, whilst rejecting the essentialist assumptions behind, conventional notions of artistic commitment, or impegno.Drawing on a variety of cultural fields and artistic media – from cinema to the literary genres of autobiography, romance and the giallo; from feminism to pensiero debole; from theatrical performance to shared practices of cultural memory – the volume charts instances of ethical commitment and emancipatory social and political intervention in Italian culture within a post-ideological and post-hegemonic framework, siding with a more constructive and less ‘apocalyptic’ analysis of the cultural climate of the past two decades in Italy. This balancing act is described by the contributors as ‘postmodern impegno’. The authors, artists and thinkers discussed in the essays include, among others, Eraldo Affinati, Adriana Cavarero, Marco Tullio Giordana, Carlo Lucarelli, Nanni Moretti, Marco Paolini, Roberto Saviano, Gianni Vattimo and Antonio Tabucchi.Questo libro mette in discussione la diffusa posizione critica che tende a svalutare l’esperienza culturale della postmodernità e del postmodernismo in Italia. Il contesto italiano contemporaneo è di fatto un esempio quanto mai interessante e sintomatico per il definirsi di forme plurali e non monologiche di impegno politico-culturale, che pur rifiutando forme di assolutismo o essenzialismo epistemico o ideologico, mantengono fede a una consolidata tradizione di engagement artistico.Partendo dall’analisi di vari generi e strategie discorsive – cinema, teatro, filosofia, letteratura di genere (romance, giallo, autobiografia) o di denuncia – e di vari autori – Eraldo Affinati, Adriana Cavarero, Marco Tullio Giordana, Carlo Lucarelli, Nanni Moretti, Marco Paolini, Roberto Saviano, Antonio Tabucchi, Gianni Vattimo, e altri – questo volume raccoglie e analizza esempi di impegno etico e di intervento socio-politico all’interno di una prospettiva post-ideologica e post-egemonica, proponendo una visione più costruttiva e meno «apocalittica» del clima culturale generale degli ultimi vent’anni in Italia.

Over the past two decades, national and supranational institutions and the mass media have played a central role in presenting the migrant struggle in a sensational way, spreading an unjustified moral panic and relegating migrants themselves to spaces of invisibility.Building on recent theoretical debates in migration studies around the so-called «autonomy of migration» - which sees people on the move as individuals with self-determination and agency - this book reframes migration in the Mediterranean, and specifically around the island of Lampedusa. In particular, the book explores how activist and art forms have become a platform for subverting the dominant narrative of migration and generating a vital form of political dissent, by revealing the contradictions and paradoxes of the securitarian regime that regulates immigration into Europe. The analysis focuses on works by, among others, Broomberg & Chanarin, Centre for Political Beauty, Forensic Architecture, Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, Isaac Julien, Tamara Kametani, Bouchra Khalili, Kalliopi Lemos, Zakaria Mohamed Ali, Maya Ramsay, Giacomo Sferlazzo, Aida Silvestri, Ai Weiwei, Lucy Woodand Dagmawi Yimer.

Situated at the confluence of history, media and cultural studies, this book reconstructs the often deeply discordant and highly selective memories of the Holocaust in Italy in the postwar era. The author’s core method is one of reception analysis, centred on the public responses to the many films and television programmes that have addressed the Holocaust from the 1940s to the present day. Tied to the heritage of Fascism, antifascism, and the Resistance, public memory of the Holocaust in Italy has changed greatly over the years. Self-acquitting myths of Italian innocence and victimhood, and universalising interpretations grounded in Catholicism and Communism, provided the initial frameworks for understanding the Holocaust. However, the last two decades have seen an increasing centrality of the Holocaust in memory culture but have also witnessed the establishment of a paradigm that relativises other fascist crimes and levels the differences between Fascism and antifascism. Working with the largest corpus yet established of Holocaust film and television in Italy, from the 1948 retelling of the Wandering Jew myth to Roberto Benigni’s controversial Life Is Beautiful, from the American miniseries Holocaust to Perlasca: The Courage of a Just Man, Conflicts of Memory probes Italy’s ongoing, if incomplete, process of coming to terms with this important aspect of its past.

In his brief public career, Piero Gobetti was one of the most outspoken and original voices of early Italian antifascism. Before his sudden death in 1926, he founded and edited three periodicals, including the fiercely antifascist La Rivoluzione Liberale and the literary journal Il Baretti. While much has been written about his antifascism and his theories of ‘liberal revolution’, this book considers him primarily as an ‘organiser of culture’ and situates him both in the context of his lived experience in Turin after the First World War and in a wider European panorama. Although politically marginal by 1918, Turin was one of Italy’s most modern cities, with its futuristic Fiat factories, vocal working class and militant socialist intellectuals such as Antonio Gramsci. The book explores Gobetti’s encounters with Turin – both its history and the modern, urban landscape of Gobetti’s own day – as central to his thinking. Historically and geographically, Turin was also the Italian city closest to France and northern Europe. If Gobetti’s immediate surroundings inspired much of his thinking, his sensibilities were – in true Piedmontese style – more European than Italian, and his ultimate impact far from only local. Finally, Gobetti’s bitter disillusionment with liberal and fascist Italy, as well as his refusal to fit any of the conventional political labels, means that his memory has remained contentious right up to the present day. This groundbreaking new study explores the roots of Gobetti’s thinking, his impact on Italian culture and his controversial legacy.