FUTURISMO: Call for Papers is now CLOSED
Starts Oct 16th 2009 , Ends Oct 17th 2009
The Center for Contemporary Italian Studies in collaboration with Stony Brook University Announce an international conference:
“ Futurismo: Impact and Legacy International Conference “
October, 16 – 17, 2009
Florence, Italy
CALL FOR PAPERS
We would like to join a string of events paying tribute to Futurism on the occasion of the centenary of the publication of the first “Manifesto of Futurism” (1909) by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. In addition to their prolific output of drawings, photographs, films, performances, and paintings and sculptures (examples of which are on view in the fifth-floor Painting and Sculpture galleries), the Futurists (1909–1944) published countless manifestos, leaflets, and art and poetry periodicals.
The “Manifesto” proclaimed the burning desire of the author and his fellow Futurists to abandon the past and embrace the future. Tired of Italy’s reliance on its classical heritage and disdainful of the present, these artists called for a new aesthetic language appropriate for the new modernity and technologically advanced age, based on a love of machine, technology, industry, speed, war, and a loathing of the past.
This conference aims at a better/deeper understanding of Futurism’s significance by focusing on the (relative) innovative qualities of the movement and its lasting cultural and political relevance:
The heritage of Marinetti’s program, which is overwhelmingly present, in the arts as well as in society at large.
New internet applications have abolished boundaries of time and space. WiFi offers the opportunities already advocated in Marinetti’s concept of ‘wireless imagination’.
Emerging young poets all over the globe engage in destroying syntax and introducing mathematical sign language, thus accomplishing on a worldwide scale Marinetti’s Futurist poetics of telegraphic language. After the success of concrete poetry and musiqueconcrète in the 1950s, multimedia, mixed media and inter-mediality presently reign in the arts world.
Ideologically the Futurist legacy has not lost its topicality, nor its highly controversial impact, considering the re-emergence of Futurist ideas on the hygiene of war in the rhetoric on the war on terror.
Futurism’s presence in today’s world calls for reflection, both on the topicality of the futurist legacy during the past century and on its transformations. In mapping Futurism’s development and presence in technological, artistic and political terms, the conference hopes to gain better understanding of the movement’s legacy on other artistic and intellectual movements. Links with Germany’s Expressionist movement will be explored through the works of Marc Chagal, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and August Macke. Linkage with Cubism, Dadaism Constructivism and other form of abstract creative expression will also be examined.
The conference starts in the morning of Friday, October 16, 2009, and ends in the afternoon of Saturday, October 17, 2009. It will be held at Florence University of the Arts, in the historical center of the city of Florence.
HOW TO SUBMIT A PROPOSAL
Proposals (in English) for 20 minute-papers.
Proposals should include: Title and a brief description of the paper (maximum 250 words) must be received by e-mail by June 15, 2009 to: JoFusco@italianstudies.org
Please join our conference mailing list at: info@squolafirenze.it