Cultural Centre Don Orione Artigianelli

Dorsoduro 909/a – 30123 Venezia – Italia
tel. 0039 041 5224077
fax 0039 041 5286214
[email protected]
 

Cultural Centre Don Orione Artigianelli was established in 1423 as a Jesuits’ monastery, lay brothers who dedicate themselves to look after the sick. At the end of the fifteenth century they also began the construction of the church of St. Mary of the Visitation. In 1669, the convent and church were purchased by the Dominican Fathers, who erected the new church of Santa Maria del Rosario and began the extension of the monastery under the direction of the architect Giorgio Massari. In 1810 Napoleon issued a decree for the dissolution of the religious order and confiscated the goods. From 1815 to 1850 the building was managed by the Municipality of Venice as an orphanage which, from 1851 to 1866, was entrusted to the Somaschi Fathers from San Girolamo but their congregation retired in 1866. The orphanage was purchased in 1867 by the Congregation of Charity, a lay organization with an educational purpose which decided to sell the property in 1923. On the 4th of August 1923 Don Orione purchased the entire property, thus continuing its work of helping orphans and children with hard family conditions. For decades, the boarding school with its professional schools and laboratories of mechanics, carpentry and typography was concerned with the education of hundreds of young people whose skills, once they graduated, were very appreciated in the world of business, hence the name “Artigianelli Institute”. In the early Eighties’, the mission of the centre changed from child care to support to young University students, in order to face different tendencies and several requests to provide accommodations to students who, every day came from various, even far, places to attend the numerous University departments of the city.

 
See map & directions

HERE

Conference participants are responsible for arranging the accommodation and travel to/in Venice.

Conference Program

The Conference Agenda is available in the right sidebar of this page.

The extensive conference program with abstracts and available draft papers is accessible below by clicking on the panel number tabs and links of individual presentations.

Keynote Workshop

James Block (DePaul University, Chicago, USA)

Why the “Big Questions”: Exchanging Perspectives

 
This session will involve a collaborative conversation among conference participants, a chance to discuss the interests and concerns that brought us to the meeting and to suggest what we hope to gain. Engaging with the “big questions,” the Conference Call for Papers emphasizes, has been pushed to the margins of contemporary discourse in the public, cultural, and academic arenas. Is this the experience of most of us attending this Conference?
 
To the extent we have encountered this complacent ratification of business as usual, and have decided by our presence that we are unwilling to join in taking refuge from engaged interrogation and change
 

• What has led each of us to question the power and viability of the boundaries demanded by this retreat from engagement?
• What are the costs to ourselves and to our communities of this retreat – and what feels most acutely “wrong” to you about what is happening?
• What do we believe can be gained from keeping the “big questions” alive? [Is it possible that we are in part anxious of the power and possibility of what we want?]
• What are some of the fears, anxieties, and confusions we and others face in addressing “big questions” – troubling issues about our lives and societies that we might need to confront, the changes in ourselves and our community and world – that have prevented a more searching investigation to proceed?
• Is it enough to ask questions, even good ones, be critical, examine closely – or are there next steps, that we are called to think through together?
• Is there a form of thinking, even kinds of questions, that open up more than critique in the way of reframing new potentialities for actualization and communal well-being, that bring into focus initiatives beyond the boundaries and contentions of present discourses? Examples!?
• How might posing these latter questions enlarge or transform our own role in shaping our lives and priorities and reshaping the world?
• Where do we now or might we, one – you! – start or carry on, say tomorrow, on a next step? Please say more about what and why…
• What might be one thing you would hope to take away from here?

 
James E. Block is professor of Political Science at DePaul University (Chicago, USA ). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, J.D. from New York University, and M.A., History of Ideas, from the University of Sussex. He also studied at Columbia University in a joint program with Wolfson College, Oxford.
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Philosophy and Critical Thinking: Bridging the Gap between Critical Theory and Social Praxis by Revisiting Turning Points of Reflection from Kant to Marx, Nietzsche and Phenomenology

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  Sandra Eleonore Johst, Hochschule für Philosophie München, Germany
  Enlightenment Reloaded: How to Become Better as Individuals and Humankind? With Kant, who was an academic teacher for more than 40 years and also a philosopher-educator of the enlightenment, my attempt is to show how we can do our best to teach freedom. If you are interested in the question how we as humans can become better, you are invited to re-think Kant’s thoughts on morality and to find helpful equipment for your autonomous thinking to re-ask the big questions in the new contexts of our days.

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  Facundo Rodriguez, London School of Economics, UK
  Ideology and Creation in Marx´s Historical Materialism: A Problem of Justification I consider three interpretations of Marx´s claim that the materialist answer to the question of Creation will be clear under communism, but argue that all fail because Marx does not give any independent reasons for believing that people´s beliefs under communism enjoy any epistemic superiority to the ones that are held now. I finally conclude, in line with Daniel Brudney, that Marx´s failure to provide such a justification could be indicative of Marx´s general incapacity to provide abstract justification due to his rejection of philosophy.

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  Junfu Wong, University of Cambridge, UK
  Recurring of Enlightened Dark Ages: Rethinking the Discourse of Democracy through the Nietzschean Framework of the Death of God This paper aspires to argue that democracy gradually becomes an alienated kind of religious belief that serves as the absolute truth of the postmodern age for those political protesters. Following these premises, this paper aims at rethinking the discourse of democracy through contextualizing it under the prism of the death of god. It argues that democracy actually takes up the former position of the theist god, becoming a sophistic kind of truth that forms the belief of postmodernism.

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  Veronica Iubei, Faculty of Philosophy, Heidelberg University, Germany
  The New Phenomenology: Re-discovering Emotions through Atmospheres In the modern age, among all the cultural and societal conquers, we are all spectators as well as victims of a deep solipsistic isolation and a sort of "disembodiment", i.e., the dissolution of the own body as the sounding board of emotions in collective contexts. The present talk wants to propose again the phenomenological lesson on the lived body, conceived as "the real core of subjectivity" , both from Merleau-Ponty's works and the New Phenomenology, which is a totally new project in philosophy aiming at exploring the atmospheric, pre-cognitive dimension of existence, against all the technological self-alienation.

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Art as Cultural Diplomacy and Legacy: Critical Assessments of Politicized Representations, Cultural Influence, Performative Memorialization, Heritage and Identity Making through Arts

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  Viktor Kempf, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
  Cultural Diplomacy “of Great Propagandistic Value”: The First Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin 1922 The First Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin in 1922 was by then certainly the major event of official Soviet cultural diplomacy in Germany. It was a materialization of the Treaty of Rapallo, signed between Soviet Russia and Germany in April 1922, that marked the beginning of a German-Soviet special relationship within the cultural sphere. In my paper I intend to contextualize the exhibition within the development of Soviet cultural diplomacy in Germany and to give an insight into the institutional possibilities and restraints for Soviet artists that varied within the 1920s.

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  Marta Michalska, Faculty of History, University of Warsaw, Poland
  From Barbaric Noise to Beloved Melodies – An Organ Grinder and Sonic Identity of the City in Nineteenth-Century Soundscape of Warsaw Since my research project is about Warsaw at the turn of nineteenth and twentieth century, I will draw examples from this particular soundscape.Not surprisingly, the distinction of how the inhabitants would approach an organ grinder is of a class. One more aspect is worth examining, which makes a Warsaw organ grinder different from, say, the London one: in the context of the city without autonomy under the Russian authority, an organ grinder – unintentionally, I guess – turned at times into a national hero, when playing religious songs and church antiphons.

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  Verity Adriana, Leeds Trinity University, UK
  Legacy of Culture: The Spectacle as ‘Placemaker’ This paper uses official and own field research to analyse the impact of the City of Culture programme on the reinvention of Hull and questions the ambitious remit of the programme against such engrained systemic issues. European City of Culture 2008, Liverpool, provides a longer legacy with which to consider the lessons of cultural programmes in UK cities with similarly depressed identities. These insights make salient how Hull’s transformation may further develop, and offer insight for how future title winners, such as Coventry, could provide a more meaningful legacy.

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  Eirene Campagna, International University of Languages and Media, Milan, Italy
  “YOLOCAUST: You Only Live Once.” Holocaust and New Form of Representation Since the Nineties Berlin has become the public space for several monuments and memorials to commemorate the extermination of the Jews. In this paper, starting from Yolocaust, I intend to analyse the relationship between Holocaust and new forms of representation. At the same time, through this analyse I’d like to observe the perception of the Holocaust in the society, especially in the post-memory era.

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Performing Identities and Feminist Epistemologies: Performativity of the Body, Gender, and Sexuality and the Relationship between Identity and Performance in Cultural Movements, Art History, Literature, and Film

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  Kathryn Cutler-MacKenzie, The University of Edinburgh, UK
  The Monstrous Woman Goes Grey: Film, Performance and Feminism The older woman has been “shut off”, to quote lacy (2010, 154), from cinematic, and thus socio-cultural, representation. Filmmakers such as Agnes Varda and Chantal Akerman, who reasserted the presence of the female gaze in cinema, have engendered an increasing shift towards inclusive on-screen representation over the last fifty years. However, it is necessary to examine, building upon the writings of Laura Mulvey, to what extent cinematic language can be used to challenge patriarchal, humanist notions of the subject, time and transition.

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  Sehar Khwaja, University of Delhi, India
  Who I Call a Mother: A Historical Reading of a Narrative versus Performative Construction of the Identity of a Mother and Motherhood in the Mughal Culture The paper aims to provide the modern readers with a historical perspective to understand that the meaning of a mother and motherhood could be quite different from its narrative representation; and that mother or motherhood are not a given and naturalised state or trait but a performative relation, constituted continually and interactively yet circumscribed historically and socially.

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  Mirela Tanta, Art Department, Millikin University, USA
  Contemporary Artistic Practices and Women’s Reproductive Rights in Romania In a country with a history of state-controlled natality, how are present-day artists and curators responding to recent initiatives to restrict women’s reproductive rights? In order to determine this my research proposes not just a documentation of artists and art organizations concerned with gender inequalities and reproductive rights, although the visibility of such practices is critical, but also a bridge between such art practices and social and personal narratives. My interest in auto-ethnography in art history seeks to connect the personal story to the official history.

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  Virginia Niri, University of Genoa, Italy
  “The Revolution Will Be Feminist or It Will Be Nothing”: Consciousness Raising and Sexual Liberation in the Sixties and Seventies The main instrument of this liberation is consciousness raising, a practice of active and proactive resistance in contrast with the Marxist-workerist dialectic: a meeting between women, a reconquest of physical and intellectual spaces that opens the possibility of a political comparison – even intimate. The focus of many small groups of consciousness raising on sexuality, with sometimes even physical investigation of female pleasure, leads women to a form of proactive resistance to the sexual revolution: not the refusal nor the passive acceptance of male desires, but a liberation of feelings, a claim of the sexual gender specificity.

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Identity and the City: Urban Transformations, Transition and Change in Urban Image Construction

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  Horacio Torrent Schneider, Pontificia Universidad Católica De Chile, Santiago, Chile
  Identity and Urban Image between Developmentalism and Neoliberal Policies The paper aims to show the mutations of the urban image and identity between the consolidation of cities during the ideas of the developmentalism of the fifties and sixties, and the subsequent transformations arising from the neoliberal policies applied since the eighties. It is inquired about how the transformations of the urban image proposed new forms of identity for the city as a whole and for its inhabitants. Arica, in the north of Chile, in the middle of the desert, between the high plateaus of the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, is an exceptional study case to show the ways how urban expansion fostered by development according to a diffuse city, changed the image and the identity of the city.

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  Davi Lemos, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

  Alice DeMattos, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
  Museu do Amanhã: The Emergent Cultural Industry in Brazil The main aim of this study is to explore the emergent state of the cultural-creative industry in Brazil, using Rio de Janeiro’s Museu do Amanhã as a case study. The Museu do Amanhã, as a pillar of social interaction, knowledge, and sustainability, stylised as an urbanistic and cultural project, needs to fully engage with the understanding of how to completely integrate itself into the city and its socioeconomic reality.

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  Raphaella Serfaty, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
  The Construction of Urban Space in Honoré Daumier’s Caricatures This paper discusses Honoré Daumier’s construction of urban space in his caricatures. Throughout his career Daumier drew hundreds of scenes that took place in the city. I argue that in many of these images, the access to urban space is mediated by the gaze of an observer. I will show that whereas in many cases Daumier depicts the bourgeois urban spectator as struggling to make sense of the city, he presents the comic artist as the one who owns the gaze over the city, who can decipher its meaning, and represent it in image.

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  Anna Marie Fisker, Department of Civil Engineering, Aalborg University, Denmark

  Anna Eva Utke Heilmann, Department of Civil Engineering, Aalborg University, Denmark
  CRAFT – An EU Strategic Partnership that Works with the History, Heritage and Urban Change of Venice In CRAFT we work with a new interdisciplinary educational concept focusing on the cross-examinations of traditions of sitting. The chair embodies as artefact and functional object. The anonymous chair, the Monobloc, has a unique role in the world heritage creating a tie between different cultures. Our paper focuses on how the research on cultural identities of the city, and we question the various transitional processes affecting identities in the urban context in its global-regional-national-local interplay.

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Piety, Fictionality, Identity, Unpredictability and the Self in Literary Narratives and Critical Art History

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  Maji C. Rhee, Waseda University Tokyo, Japan
  Piety in Classical to the Contemporary East Asian Fictions This article analyzes the unique aspects of the Confucian notion of piety and how the value continues to serve as a literary theme. Three classical literary works in Japan, Korea, and China are selected to critically analyze “piety” as a literary archetype. Many studies have focused on the Confucian notion of piety from a comparative philosophical perspective. However, few studies have approached Confucian piety within the literary context. This article is to present a neglected link between Confucian value of “piety,” “benevolence,” and “virtue” reflected in the core classical Asian literature and how the values persist in the post-modern Japanese, Korean, and Chinese fictions.

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  Evy Varsamopoulou, Department of English Studies, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus
  ‘Things Turn Against Us’: The Future as Present, as Project, and as Unpredictable This paper puts forward two theses on thinking the future: 1. the future is now, 2. the future is beyond our control. The first thesis will be defended on the basis of its greatest efficacy for responsible, transformative praxis and through neuroscientific work. The second thesis will be illustrated by reference to literature and philosophy. Specifically, through a reading of the satirical science-fiction novel, 'Cat’s Cradle' (1963), by Kurt Vonnegut, and an early essay by Emmanuel Levinas, 'Is Ontology Fundamental?' (1951).

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  Paul Csillag, Institute for Geschichtswissenschaften und Europäischen Ethnologie, Innsbruck, Austria
  Middle Ages in Cinema: A Paradoxical Flight Movies and films tend to provide a fantasy for its audience, where the realm of thoughtful criticism is replaced with unquestionable social orders and hierarchies. This is especially the case when considering the Historical Film of the 21st Century. The proclaimed time-travel, however, cannot fulfill its promise. Although the public wants to partake in a journey to the past and to the imaginary place “where everything was better and clearer”, they nonetheless import their own ideals and world view into a newly created fantasy. I would like to present the pop-cultural figure of the Knights Templar as an example for this paradoxical state of postmodern society.

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  Arianna Fantuzzi, International University of Languages and Media, Milan, Italy
  Multiple Identities. The Representation of the Self in Postmodern Time Whilst postmodernism theorists discussed contemporary identity, several artists created self-portraits that multiplied, fractured or disguised their image, reflecting on the status of identity in contemporary society. My aim is to investigate the nature of this kind of self-representations by exploring the problematic process of identity making in postmodern time. The focus will be on works such as Spermini (1997) by Maurizio Cattelan, The Book of Food (1985-1993) by Vanessa Beecroft, History Portraits (1988–90) by Cindy Sherman and the Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002) by Matthew Barney.

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Critical Contemporary Politics and Economics: From Critical Discourse Analysis to Experiments in Identity, Inequality and Scenarios on the Future of Political and Economic Projects of Europeanization

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  Jan Květina, The Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic
  Language Gap Between Democratic and Authoritarian Discourses: Critical Discourse Analysis of the Interwar Central European Regimes Although critical discourse analysis has been initially formed to unmask the contemporary injustice and inequalities in the framework of prevailing language structures, its application might come in handy also for the interpretation of the past political discourses. This is especially true for the research of the “fine line” between democratic and non-democratic systems, whose identification and classification have been traditionally burdened with the dominant focus on the objective institutional, economic and social differences.

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  Joep Lustenhouwer, University of Bamberg, Germany

  Tomasz Makarewicz, University of Bamberg, Germany

  Juan Carlos Peña, University of Bamberg, Germany

  Christian R. Proaño, University of Bamberg, Germany
  Are Some People More Equal than Others? Experimental Evidence on Group Identity and Income Inequality The political debate in the recent decade has shifted towards the issues of income inequality and immigration. It has been argued that both factors contribute to the increasing polarization of politics and rise of extreme parties, but it is difficult to disentangle their individual effects, since they typically appear simultaneously. An important example is Brexit. The polls showed that the immigration was the most important argument for Leavers, but their specific motivation remains unclear: was it a straightforward dislike of the “aliens", or an economic anxiety that these “aliens" will take over jobs and social safety programs?

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  Andrei Radulescu, Transylvania Bank and Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania
  Policy-Mix in Euroland in the New Era of Globalisation and Digital Revolution: Challenges and Priorities for the Current Decade In this paper we apply standard econometric tools and use the Eurostat database (annual data) in order to estimate the contribution of the production factors to the dynamics of the potential GDP in Euroland and to identify the priorities for the regional policy-mix during this decade. The results point out the importance of rebalancing the policy-mix, with a focus on the acceleration of the implementation of the Digital Revolution, the development of the capital markets and the improvement of trade and investments with emerging countries in Asia.

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  Mila Marinova Temnyalova, The George Washington University, Washington, USA
  European (Dis)Union: Revisiting Theory I study whether the phenomenon of European disintegration can be explained within the framework of three theories of integration - neofunctionalism, liberal intergovernmentalism, and multi-level governance. I revisit primary scholarship, analyze each theory’s basic assumptions, and examine the scholars’ original claims to test whether these theories have the capacity to explain the process of disintegration within the EU.

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Politics of Europeanization from Community Making to the Eurozone Crisis: Readings of the Past and Scenarios for the Future

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  Vytautas Sinica, Faculty of Philosophy, Vilnius University, Lithuania
  Thinking about United Europe during the Interwar: Lessons for XXI Century? The European Union is going through one of the most difficult periods of its existence. Ever before it was growing through crises, using them as pretext for a deeper integration. Today EU encounters so many challenges, that it begs into question the previously self-evident premise that European integration is irreversible. This presentation aims to a) examine interwar period`s visions of European unification and their philosophical foundations; b) determine, which elements of those interwar conceptions became parts of later European Community project and which were left unrealized; c) evaluate, in what ways elements of surveyed conceptions could contribute to the solution of the current European crisis.

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  Andrej Rendic, University in Zadar, Croatia
  Sovereignty at Stake? Small States and the European Union: Strategies, Challenges and Opportunities after The Lisbon Treaty The small states are now being compelled to adapt or change their foreign policy strategies in order to exert more influence on the European Union as a whole, all of which is taking place amid the growing migrant crisis, rise of nationalism and common safety policies, as well as the Brexit. This paper first examines different criteria and views on the definition of redefining small states, as well as their foreign policy strategies. It then describes flaws, downsides and limitations the small states face in international relations. Finally, it deals with the issue of sovereignty of the small states within the larger international political associations, such as the European Union.

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  Emanuel Crudu, Euroacademia (Paris, Lucca & Brussels)
  The EU’s Endogenous Identity or the ‘Genetic Soup’ The dense multilateralism as a specific feature of western politics stays at the core of EU formation while the enlargement brings to saliency the question whether there is one Europe or several in embracing Central and Eastern European countries with different inheritances. This presentation looks to interrogate whether recent developments and detachments of politics in CEE toward what is called an 'illiberal trend' are unintended consequences or spillover effects of the western genetic soup or an autochthonous developments based on rational gains calculus of populist politics. In both cases however, dichotomies emerging in European politics need to be addressed.

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