The Arts and the Concept of Space

Intersections/Intersezioni 2018 is dedicated to the interrelation between the arts and space. Throughout the centuries, art has developed its systems of representation, interpretation, and reception by entering, occupying, and defining space geographically, metaphorically, and symbolically. Since the creation of space invoked by the ancient Greeks through their temples and amphitheaters, to Augustus’ vision of imperial Rome, from the more modern experimentation with space in the figurative and plastic arts, to the elaboration of space in modernism, from the celebratory architecture of fascism to contemporary explorations in the literary, cinematic, and musical production, the translation, production and representation of space has become an inescapable dimension of the aesthetic process, in fact one of the very foundations of art’s cultural and philosophical value. 

The interrelationship between the arts and space, in all its forms of representation, calls us to examine cultural and societal transformations, the trasgression of racial, gender, or class boundaries, changes in political and intellectual discourse, thus contributing to produce, as Henry Lefebvre states, “more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs” (39 1991). With this year’s CFP, we would like to invite contributors to explore these new signs in the literary, cinematic, photographic, architectural, and musical production of Italy and beyond. We hope that by shedding light on the interconnection between abstract spaces, linguistic, figurative, geographic, and spatial practices, we can revisit, in a contemporary perspective, both the location of the arts and their realms of signification. Literature, cinema, music, architecture, photography continue to be inspired by the production and representation of space, projecting an aesthetic reality that is precarious, destabilized, and fragmented, narratives that are interrupted, social practices that need to be questioned. Exploring the intersection of space and the arts allows us to illuminate the diverse representations of our world, urging new questions about its social, cultural, and intellectual substructures, enabling us to generate new ways of seeing and to identify original forms of expression.

Artifacts, texts, films, musical scores, photographs, urban spaces conceptualize the principles, ideas, and limits of a particular vision of reality, record crises, turning points, revolutions, opening new perspectives on the context that has produced them. The critical intersection of space with the multiple ways in which art has affirmed its “being there” destabilizes our gaze, inviting us to continually change our perspective, offering the possibility of different readings, and opening the way to a critical rethinking of our role as intellectuals, thinkers, and critics.

The intersection of space and the arts invites philosophical explorations, but varied are the approaches that it elicits and that we welcome. The anthropological approach examines the space and functions art is given in a particular period or society. The stylistic one, considers the work of art’s expressive dimension and its social, cultural, or political message. The sociological one investigates the relations established between art and space through the lens of society’s structure, its rapport with the artist, with the patrons of the art, with the art market, the critics (those who Bourdieu called the “value producers”), and the community at large. Critics have a dominant role in the interpretation, classification and evaluation of a work of art. They identify the breaking points, the fissures, the transition to new expressive modes, the decline, emergence, or confusion of genres, the intersecting of normative borders. They interrogate the material, the object, the text, the image, while also interrogating the limits, the value, the significance of the artistic expression.

Intersections/Intersezioni 2018 aims at exploring literature, art, music, cinema, photography, architecture in their intersection with national and transnational trends, movements, and projects. In that framework, our objective is to invite the examination of unconventional contacts, exchanges, and relations which have led to an implosion of the limits of the arts, allowing the creative process to ultimately expand the horizon of the known and the knowable.

Comparative and interdisciplinary analyses pertinent to Cultural Studies, Film Studies and the Arts are welcome and may encompass Literature, History, Art History, Philosophy, Anthropology, Music, Political Science, Religion, Gender Studies, Urban Studies and any other relevant discipline. 

Possible topics may include but are not limited to the following: 

*MUSIC and its Intersection with space and with other expressive forms, including melodrama, theater, and cinema.

*LITERATURE: Italian Studies, Post-Modernity, Feminist Theory, Post-Colonial Studies and their Intersection with Cinema, Music, the Arts but also with Politics, cultural practices, and socio-economic phenomena. In addition, theoretical Intersections can be drawn from the debate on issues involving Globalization, Global/Local/Glocal.  

*ART: Contemporary trends in Art (arte povera, post-structuralism,-post-modernism) and their Intersection with Music, Literature, Cinema, Architecture, and Urban Studies, ecocriticism.  

*CINEMA and its Intersection with Literature, Art, Music and Urban Studies, and ecocriticism .    

*PHOTOGRAPHY and its Intersection with Urban Studies, Cinema, Literature, and ecocriticism.

Please send an abstract (1-2 paragraphs) to: intersections.intersezioni@gmail.com

Att.: Organizing Committee

THE DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS IS: February 1st, 2018