A century of Visual Writing in Italy: Luigi Ballerini in Conversation

 

April 04, 2024, 6:00 PM

General Admission: $15, Members & Students: FREE

RESERVE YOUR TICKETS HERE!

This conversation with leading Italian scholar and poet Luigi Ballerini is a unique opportunity to learn about the evolution, significance, and impact of visual writing in Italy as part of a global artistic movement. From the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century to the neo-avant-garde experimental practices in postwar Italy, Professor Ballerini will discuss the continuities and differences among these artistic expressions and the cross-pollination between visual arts and literature. The conversation between Prof. Ballerini and CIMA fellows Anna Szirmai and Francesca Zambon will explore the vast intercultural experiences that shaped the Italian art scene during and after the Years of Lead.

 

Luigi Ballerini (UCLA, Emeritus) is an Italian writer, poet, translator, and literary critic. Born in Milan, Professor Ballerini studied in Milan, London and Bologna. Before joining the Italian Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, he taught at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as well as at New York University, where he became the director of Italian Studies in 1976. He now lives between New York and Milan.

In New York, Prof. Ballerini has collaborated with both visual artists and poets. In 1973, he organized the exhibition Italian Visual Poetry from 1912 to 1972 at the Finch College Museum. In 1991, he organized the meeting of Italian and American poets The Disappearing Pheasant. His publications include: literary criticism (La piramide capovolta, 4 per Pagliarani); translations (of, among others, Gertrude Stein, Lionel Abel, Leslie Fielder, Herman Melville, Benjamin Franklin, James Baldwin, Henry James, Charles Olson, LeRoy Jones); poetry collections, such as Il terzo gode (1994), Che figurato muore (1988), Shakespeherian rugs (1996), Uno monta la luna (2001), Cefalonia ’43 (reissued in 2005 and awarded with the Brancati and Lorenzo Montano prize); the plaquette Uscita senza strada ovvero come sbrinare una bandiera rossa (2000) and the plaquette Se il tempo è matto (2010).

Ballerini edited various works, including Marinetti’s Gli indomabili and Mafarka il futurista, and Melville’s Benito Cereno. He published the anthologies La linea longobarda (1996), Shearsmen of Sorts: Italian Poetry 1975-1993 (1992), and The Promised Land (1999), Those Who Look Like Flies from Afar (2013). His 1991 volume Che oror l’orient, a collection of bilingual poems in Italian and Milanese dialect, was awarded the Feronia Prize for poetry.

After collaborating with American publishing houses, in 2000 he founded Agincourt Press, which publishes experimental poetry, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature. He is also known as a culinary historian, and is the founder of the library Chiesa Rossa, where he organizes the annual meeting Latte e Linguaggio (Milk and Language). He is Founder and General Editor of the Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library, a series published by the University of Toronto Press.

Light refreshments will be offered

TwitterFacebookEmail

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion: A Film Screening at CIMA

 

April 11, 2024, 7:00 PM

General Admission: $15, Members & Students: FREE

In Italian with English subtitles (1 hr and 55 min)

RESERVE YOUR TICKETS HERE!

In conjunction with CIMA’s current exhibition Nanni Balestrini: Art as Political Action – One Thousand and One Voices, we are hosting an in-person screening of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), the Oscar-winning film directed by Elio Petri, starring Gian Maria Volonté and Florinda Bolkan, with music by Ennio Morricone.

A suspense melodrama with the moral concerns of angry satire […] — The New York Times

Synopsis (via Wikipedia): A recently promoted police inspector kills his mistress, and then covers up his involvement in the crime. He insinuates himself into the investigation, planting clues to steer his subordinate officers toward a series of other suspects, including the woman’s gay husband and a student leftist radical. He then exonerates the other suspects and leads the investigators toward himself to prove that he is “above suspicion” and can get away with anything, even while being investigated.

 

The film will be introduced by Giancarlo Lombardi, Professor of Comparative Literature at CUNY Graduate Center. Prof. Lombardi came to the United States in 1990, and obtained a Ph.D. in Romance Studies at Cornell University, where he pursued his interests in 19th and 20th century Italian, French, English, and American literature, literary theory, film studies, and cultural studies.

TwitterFacebookEmail

Multipli Forti: Italian Literary Fiction Festival (3rd edition)

 

April 12, 2024, 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM

General admission: Free

RESERVE YOUR FREE TICKETS HERE!

CIMA is proud to host the morning of the last day of the third annual Italian Literary Fiction Festival.

The Italian Cultural Institute in New York

in collaboration with

FUIS (Italian Unitary Writers’ Federation)THE BRIDGE Book Award  – Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò New York University – CUNY Hunter College – (CIMA) The Center for Italian Modern Art) —  RIZZOLI Bookstore

presents

MULTIPLI FORTI

Voices from Contemporary Italian Literature

ITALIAN LITERARY FICTION FESTIVAL – 3rd EDITION

NEW YORK CITY
10 – 11 – 12 April, 2024

ITALIAN CULTURAL INSTITUTECUNY Hunter College — CASA ITALIANA ZERILLI MARIMÒ NYU — CIMA — RIZZOLI Bookstore

This is the third edition of an initiative to promote Italian literature aimed at the reading public and the international publishing world.

The Festival is promoted by the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, directed by Fabio Finotti, with the collaboration of the United Federation of Italian Writers (FUIS), and is organized by Maria Ida Gaeta.

Multipli Forti is a transatlantic window on major literary trends of Italian fiction, told by the authors who have written and are writing it. After the first edition in 2022, which was born with the hope that it could become an annual occasion to build a literary bridge between Italy and the United States out of any cultural stereotype, the event has been consolidated with an important second edition in 2023 and is on its way to its third edition in April 2024.

The third edition in 2024 will feature:
Francesca Archibugi, Annalena Benini, Matteo B. Bianchi, Giulia Calenda, Giulia Caminito, Giancarlo De Cataldo, Viola Di Grado, Alain Elkann, Emily Greenhouse, Isabella Hammad, Rea Hederman, Lorenza Honorati, Daniele Mencarelli, Andrea Molesini, Carmen Pellegrino, Saif Raja, Loretta Santini per Ada D’Adamo, Nadeesha Uyangoda, Alice Urciolo, Marina Valensise, Massimo Vallerani.

We asked the guest authors – in conversation with each other and with American scholars, translators, editors and specialists – to reflect on six major themes of current literature. Each Multipli Forti event, at various places and times over the three days, will open with unpublished texts they have written as a response to these themes: the first is individual and collective destinies, along a line that connects Dante to contemporary attempts to write in the first person and, at the same time, still write about the whole world; we then move to “Italianness” itself, and how Italian literature is informed by foreign, alien and estranging, vital influences; to the encounter with reality, which connects the chivalric concept of inchiesta to the current political engagement and literary reportage; and to myth, as either a fellow or an enemy to history, as two reservoirs of images which blur the boundaries between shared notions of fantasy and reality and build communities. Then, we have the issue of bodies, to which we associate that of power (as an invitation to think about how power relations attempt to discipline our bodies in relation to political, literary, and psychological institutions); and, finally, the theme of Genius loci, the spirit of places, of vernacular and dialectal traditions in a land of proudly different territories, of the thin line separating the familiar from the unknown.

In addition to these six topics of discussion, this third edition will also deal with an issue that is at the core of our contemporary literature, namely the interaction and interweaving of fiction with audiovisual languages.

Please click on the link to the individual hosting institutions (above) to view the respective programs.

PROGRAM at CIMA on Friday, APRIL 12

10:00 am — Doors Open

Visit to CIMA’s current exhibition Nanni Balestrini: Art as Political Action – One Thousand and One Voices, curated by Marco Scotini

10:30 am – 12:30 pm

Tommaso Pincio – Carmen Pellegrino – Matteo B. Bianchi – Michael Moore

Chairs: Isabella Livorni – Alessia Valfredini

General admission: Free

RESERVE YOUR FREE TICKETS HERE!

TwitterFacebookEmail

Italian Futurism and Bay Area Dada in the 1970s

 

April 18, 2024, 6:00 PM

General Admission: $15, Members & Students: FREE

RESERVE YOUR TICKETS HERE!

This presentation will discuss the revival and interest in Italian Futurism by a group of important but lesser-known performance and correspondence artists based in San Francisco known as the Bay Area Dadaists. A loose coalition of figures who often went by assumed names—Monte Cazazza, Bill Gaglione (Daddaland), Irene Dogmatic, etc.—their engagement with the historical avant-garde was vectored, in poignant and prescient ways, against both conceptualism and pop art, critiquing artistic commodification and authorship. Although separate, their interest in Futurism and engagement with collage paralleled that of Nanni Balestrini and the Italian Neoavanguardia, while it prefigured and influenced the development of Bay Area punk rock.

 

Branden W. Joseph is Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Columbia University. He is the author of five books and nearly 100 articles on contemporary art, music, and film. He is co-curator of the exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines on view at the Brooklyn Museum until March 31, 2024.

Light refreshments will be offered

TwitterFacebookEmail