Archiving the Present
Artists’ Point of View
Lorenzo Madaro The archive is one of the themes most urgently posed to the preliminary reconstruction of a new history of artists and art. This latter relies on a necessarily systematic work of surveying of data, traces, testimonies, documents (even apparently marginal ones), artworks, and all that can be done in re-elaborating more or less […]
Touchstones
The Model of Teatro e Storia
Mirella Schino What I am about to tell you is a story about theatre and its studies, but also an interesting one per se, which concerns the foundations of memory: the relationship – very different from the one we are used to –, that several years ago developed between a group of scholars and some […]
Writing Art History Today
Notes on an Open Discourse
Raffaella Perna Last year, within the framework of the Consulta Universitaria Nazionale per la Storia dell’Arte (Cunsta), a discussion began on the perspectives and methodologies related to writing contemporary art history,[1] a complex issue that has been at the centre of important reflections on a national and international level over the last three decades. Today […]
Twenty Years of Italian Art
Nicolas Ballario
Fortunes of the Archive
From the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century to Today
Angel Moya Garcia One of the trends that dominated the art scene in Italy, but also the foreign one, at the end of the 1990s, was the use of the archive as a poetic device. The wave was almost totalising at the time, later it weakened, leaving only works and lines of research capable of […]
Archaeology of an Unwritten History The Artwork as an Artefact of the Future
Alessandra Troncone In fairly recent years, a debate has begun in Italy on the possible confluences between contemporary art and archaeology. This debate has been stimulated by moments of encounter between artists and the archaeological inheritance, both in the phases of research and production, and upon the occasion of exhibitions. In the contribution L’artista come […]
Monuments and Shared Values Towards a New Relationship with History
Francesca Guerisoli, Marco Trulli Post-Monument, Performative Monuments In recent decades, the function and form of the monument have been the subject of a far-reaching international discussion – and Italy has not been left lagging behind. In 2010, the crisis of the traditional monument and its role in society was the focus of the 14th Biennale […]
History of an Italian
The Light of Clarifications to Dispel the Shadow of Revenge Igiaba Scego The story is well-known: Indro Montanelli was one of the many volunteers in the war of aggression that Italy launched against free Ethiopia in the 1930s. The role of the then very young Montanelli was – for a short time, to tell the […]
Journey to the End of History
Moving beyond language to recount a civilisation’s destiny Gian Maria Tosatti In the portrait that Emanuele Coccia sketches along the lines of the essay Les épis de la Histoire, written for Anselm Kiefer’s solo exhibition at Paris’s Grand Palais in 2021, the artist takes on the titanic/romantic profile of a painter who confronts History in […]
On the Interregnum, or the New Prehistory Perspectives for a Civilisation Born in Auschwitz
Nicolas Martino When, the two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, World War II came to an end – but so, too, did the History that had deluded and bewitched part of humanity for several centuries. The grand récitwhich began with Bernard of Chartres, among others, […]
