Percorsi di gender performance: fotografia tra arte e moda dagli anni Novanta ad oggi

My project explores and compares different forms of gender performance in contemporary art and visual culture according to a perspective centered on photography. Thanks to its attesting power this medium can work as a ready-made. In fact during the 20th century it played a key role in the cultural emancipation of the body which (using a Michel Foucault’s expression) has now become «the zero point of the world». Through performance the body proves to be a living material of expression and communication while photography ensures the recording of any ephemeral event that happens in time and space. My questioning approach considers the gender constructed imagery from the 1990s to the present in order to investigate how photography’s strong aura of realism promotes and allows fantasies of transformation. The contemporary fascination with gender (especially for art and fashion) represents a crucial issue in the global context of postmodernity and is manifested in a variety of visual media, from photography to video and film. Moreover the internet along with its digital transmission of images has deeply affected our world (from culture to everyday life) leading to a postmodern preference for performativity over the more traditional and linear forms of narrativity. As a consequence individual borders get redefined by the skin itself which (dissected through instant vision) turns into a ductile material of mutation and hybridation in the service of identity. My critical assumptions are taken from the most relevant changes occurred in philosophy during the last two decades as a result of the contributions by Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze who developed a cross-disciplinary and comparative approach to interpret the crisis of modernity. They have profoundly influenced feminist studies so that the category of gender has been reassessed in contrast with sex (as a biological connotation) and in relation to history, culture, society. The ideal starting point of my research is the year 1990. I chose it as the approximate historical moment when the intersection of race, class and gender were placed at the forefront of international artistic production concerned with identity, diversity and globalization. Such issues had been explored throughout the 1970s but it was only from the mid-1980s onward that they began to be articulated more consistently. Published in 1990, the book "Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity" by Judith Butler marked an important breakthrough by linking gender to performance as well as investigating the intricate connections between theory and practice, embodiment and representation. It inspired subsequent research in a variety of disciplines, art history included. In the same year Teresa de Lauretis launched the definition of queer theory to challenge the academic perspective in gay and lesbian studies. In the meantime the rise of Third Wave Feminism in the US introduced a racially and sexually inclusive vision over the global situation in order to reflect on subjectivity, new technologies and popular culture in connection with gender representation. These conceptual tools have enabled prolific readings of contemporary cultural production whether fine arts or mass media. After discussing the appropriate framework of my project and taking into account the postmodern globalization of the visual, I have turned to photography to map gender representation both in art and in fashion. Therefore I have been creating an archive of images around specific topics. I decided to include fashion photography because in the 1990s this genre moved away from the paradigm of an idealized and classical beauty toward a new vernacular allied with lifestyles, art practices, pop and youth culture; as one might expect the dominant narrative modes in fashion photography are now mainly influenced by cinema and snapshot. These strategies originate story lines and interrupted narratives using models’ performance to convey a particular imagery where identity issues emerge as an essential part of fashion spectacle. Focusing on the intersections of gender identities with socially and culturally produced identities, my approach intends to underline how the fashion world has turned to current trends in art photography and in some case turned to the artists themselves. The growing fluidity of the categories that distinguish art from fashion photography represents a particularly fruitful moment of visual exchange. Varying over time the dialogue between these two fields has always been vital; nowadays it can be studied as a result of this close relationship between contemporary art world and consumer culture. Due to the saturation of postmodern imagery the feedback between art and fashion has become much more immediate and then increasingly significant for anyone who wants to investigate the construction of gender identity through performance. In addition to that a lot of magazines founded in the 1990s bridged the worlds of art and fashion because some of their designers and even editors were art-school graduates encouraging innovation. The inclusion of art within such magazines aimed at validating them as a form of art in themselves supporting a dynamic intersection for music, fashion, design and youth culture: an intersection that also contributed to create and spread different gender stereotypes. This general interest in fashion produced many exhibitions of and about fashion itself at major international venues such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since then this celebrated success of fashion has been regarded as a typical element of postmodern culture. Owing to that I have also based my analysis on some important exhibitions dealing with gender performance like "Féminin-Masculin" at the Centre Pompidou of Paris (1995), "Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose. Gender performance in photography" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York (1997), "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum (2007), "Female Trouble" at the Pinakothek der Moderne in München together with the workshops dedicated to "Performance: gender and identity" in June 2005 at the Tate Modern of London. Since 2003 in Italy we have had Gender Bender - an international festival held annually in Bologna - to explore the gender imagery stemming from contemporary culture. In few days this festival offers a series of events ranging from visual arts, performance, cinema, literature to conferences and music. Being aware that any method of research is neither race nor gender neutral I have traced these critical paths to question gender identity in a multicultural perspective taking account of the political implications too. In fact, if visibility may be equated with exposure, we can also read these images as points of intersection of visibility with social power. Since gender assignations rely so heavily on the visual, the postmodern dismantling of gender certainty through performance has wide-ranging effects that need to be analyzed. In some sense this practice can even contest the dominance of visual within postmodernism. My visual map in contemporary art and fashion photography includes artists like Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Hellen van Meene, Rineke Dijkstra, Ed Templeton, Ryan McGinley, Anne Daems, Miwa Yanagi, Tracey Moffat, Catherine Opie, Tomoko Sawada, Vanessa Beecroft, Yasumasa Morimura, Collier Schorr among others.

Il ruolo di Giorgio Castelfranco nella salvaguardia e tutela del patrimonio artistico italiano. La questione delle esportazioni illecite e delle spoliazioni di opere d'arte attuate dai nazisti in Italia negli anni precedenti e durante la Seconda Guerra mondiale.

La presente ricerca affronta il tema delle esportazioni illecite e delle spoliazioni di opere d’arte attuate dai nazisti in Italia negli anni precedenti e durante la Seconda guerra mondiale. In particolare, all’interno di tale vasta questione, si è voluto far emergere il ruolo di Giorgio Castelfranco nella salvaguardia e tutela del patrimonio artistico italiano. Giorgio Castelfranco, funzionario di soprintendenza storico dell’arte, ha apportato il proprio contributo nella tutela del patrimonio grazie a diverse azioni da lui compiute durante la propria carriera. Contributo che si può far iniziare con i primi interventi di tutela, diremmo oggi, preventiva, come la compilazione del catalogo degli oggetti d’arte e degli elenchi dei monumenti, ma anche la salvaguardia delle bellezze naturali, compiuti negli anni Venti e Trenta del Novecento, presso le Soprintendenze della Puglia, dell’Umbria e della Toscana. Con l’emergenza della Guerra poi Castelfranco fu impegnato in una vera e propria opera di recupero e ricostruzione. Quest'ultima intesa non del solo patrimonio storico-artistico e monumentale, ma anche dell’amministrazione delle Belle Arti, a cui Castelfranco ha attivamente contribuito durante la reggenza della Direzione Generale sotto il Governo Badoglio. Inoltre, in occasione dei sopralluoghi ai depositi di opere d’arte toscani e durante la Missione per il recupero delle opere d’arte in Germania del 1946-1947, Castelfranco, grazie alle proprie competenze e all’esperienza maturata in decenni di attività professionale, ebbe l’occasione di dare il proprio fondamentale contributo all’individuazione e al recupero delle opere d’arte esportate illecitamente e trafugate dai nazisti.

Insegnare l'italiano L2 per fini di studio: una proposta di letture graduate per gli studenti cinesi

Dati i problemi di comprensione linguistica riscontrati dagli studenti cinesi nel contesto accademico e la crescente necessità della didattica dell’italiano L2 per fini di studio, il presente lavoro ha come obiettivo finale la creazione di letture graduate, proposte come materiali didattici comprensibili e mirati agli studenti cinesi di italiano L2, in modo da agevolare il loro approccio ai testi impegnativi richiesti per gli studi artistico-professionali. In particolare, nei primi due capitoli si discute il ruolo significativo della distanza linguistica tra italiano e cinese nell’acquisizione della L2 da parte degli studenti cinesi e nello sviluppo della loro abilità di lettura in L2. In seguito, per capire come debba essere un input ideale per l’acquisizione linguistica a fini di studio, vengono esaminati vari approcci glottodidattici basati sull’input, e si osservano i tratti delle varietà di italiano presenti nel contesto accademico. Il lavoro procede poi con un’analisi delle specifiche caratteristiche linguistiche riscontrate in manuali universitari di storia dell’arte, utilizzando sia un approccio quantitativo che qualitativo, con l’obiettivo di avere un “panorama” delle complessità linguistiche che uno studente L2 deve affrontare nello studio. Successivamente, verrà presentata una sperimentazione di riscrittura con due gruppi, i quali sono stati sottoposti rispettivamente al testo originale e a quello riscritto secondo i criteri formulati dallo studio teorico sul confronto tipologico. I risultati ottenuti confermano sia le interferenze del cinese nella lettura in italiano, sia l’efficacia degli approcci linguistici individuati nel facilitare la comprensibilità del testo per gli studenti cinesi di livello A2-B1. Di conseguenze, viene proposto un percorso di letture graduate per gli studenti cinesi di belle arti; oltre a essere comprensibili, le letture mirano anche all’acquisizione delle varietà di italiano necessarie per lo studio accademico-professionale. L’ultima parte del lavoro è dedicata alle riflessioni teoriche e didattiche sviluppate nel corso della ricerca.