Palazzo Bernardini

Via Santa Croce, 41
55100 Lucca
 

Lucca is one of the most beautiful cities of Tuscany, a treasure of beauty, culture and history, preserving exquisitely the signs of past kingdoms and dominions, the beauty of nature and the works of many renown architects and artists. Dante spent a part of his exile in Lucca. Located between Florence and Pisa, Lucca is the home town of Giacomo Puccini and Luigi Boccherini. Is a town where each of the streets has a story to tell. The city walls are the best preserved Renaissance walls in the world, offering the opportunity of a relaxing and enchanting ‘passeggiata’ (promenade) or a bike ride with amazing views over the surroundings. Piazza Napoleone -one of the main squares – was built in the time of Napoleonic conquest when the city was led by Napoleon’s sister Elisa Bonaparte. It is rivaled in beauty by Piazza del Amfiteatro, built to maintain the shape of the Roman Amphitheater built during the I and II centuries that could accommodate over 10,000 spectators. A city of 100 churches, Lucca is a labyrinth of small streets that hide secrets to be discovered.

Lucca is very easy to reach both by bus as well as train from both Pisa and Florence, making it perfect for anyone getting around solely on public transportation. The train station is right outside the southern walls, with an entrance below the balcony of San Colombano that brings you right behind Lucca’s cathedral and into the heart of the small walled town.

When arranging your travel by plane, book a flight to Florence (Petrola) or Pisa (Galileo Galilei) airports. The easiest way to reach Lucca is from Pisa airport that requires a 25 minutes public bus or train travel right from the airport. From Florence the travel by bus or train takes about 50 minutes. Make sure that your flight arrives earlier during the day as after 22.00 buses or trains to Lucca are no longer available. Taxis are available in Pisa airport and will cost around 50 Euro until your destination in Lucca. If your flight arrives later in the night, book a room for the night in either Florence or Pisa, and start your travel to Lucca in the morning since buses and trains are available from 5.30.

 
 
See an interactive map:

HERE

Conference participants are fully responsible for arranging the accommodation and travel to Lucca.

Conference Program

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

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

Politics of Cultural Heritage: Memory, Identities and Memorialization – Monuments, Urban Images and Institutional Strategies

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  Stefania Scarsini, Architect, London, UK
  European Cities and New Inhabitants: A Heritage Contribution by Migrants A heritage exchange is important for the European cities to be able to make the new citizens part of an existing community. Understanding each other and learning from each other is key for success. It is very important that the European cities are a community not a series of ghettos where the newcomers settle and live in isolation. Are we prepared for this exchange?

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  Karolina Golinowska, University of Kazimierz Wielki, Bydgoszcz, Poland
  Institutionalised Identity This article analyses the recent trend in cultural politics in Poland oriented towards various commemorations of the past, which form a clear strategy of politics of memory. The key elements described are as follows: ministerial programmes, the phenomenon of the Warsaw Rising and its institutional representation, and the narrative of the “Cursed Soldiers” and its application in official and non-official structures.

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  Anna Bernardi, Institute for the History and Theory of Art and Architecture (ISA), Università della Svizzera Italiana - Accademia di Architettura, Mendrisio, Switzerland
  The Politics Behind Unbuilt Memory: Memorial to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs, New York /“Topography of Terror” Documentation Center, Berlin Among the most significant unbuilt architectural projects commemorating the victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust are the unrealized Memorial for the Six Million Jews Martyrs in New York City, designed by American architect Louis I. Kahn (1967-1973), and the planned “Topography of Terror” Documentation Center in Berlin, blueprinted by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor (1993-2004). This paper will examine the impact on the formation and preservation of collective identity in the United States and Germany exercised by the two above-mentioned unbuilt masterworks.

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  Ekaterina Bagreeva, Russian Economic University of G. V. Plekhanov
  Creative Industries in Norway: A Question of Cultural Heritage and Identity The Heritage Cycle (Simon Thurley, 2005) helps analyzing these elements, and describes how the past can become a part of the future through understanding, valuing, caring and enjoying the cultural heritage. In this context, it could be seen as a resource influencing the awareness and content of a national and/or regional identity. Furthermore, these aspects may be used in linking levels of value creation towards both heritage and identity.

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

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  Olindo Caso, Department of Architecture / Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology
  The Culture-Led Construction of the Urban Image: New Public Libraries in the Netherlands This paper deals with the role of culture and in particular of the cultural institution of the public library in the (re)construction of the urban identity in a context of an evolving postmodern cultural economy. Paralleling a cultural-turn in post-industrial socio-economics, the production of ‘signs’ of aesthetic contents supports logics of urban branding able to create desire and induce attractiveness through social and spatial identity. Accordingly culture becomes a local asset.

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  Ana Varas Ibarra, University of Essex, UK
  Art Production, Consumption and the Effects of Gentrification: Cultural Capital as Utility for Gentrification This paper aims to contextualise the emergence and development of socially engaged art through the urban phenomenon of gentrification. Gentrification creates a matrix of accumulation and consumption of cultural expression and social control that changes the nature of the city. Additionally, the rising value of art enhances the value of related factors: the urban forms that grow up around it, the activity of doing it, and the status of consuming it .

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  Anna Mascorella, Department of Architecture, Cornell University, USA
  Mediating the Periphery: Borgata Gordiani from Interwar to Postwar Rome This presentation examines the trajectory of Borgata Gordiani's development, inhabitation, and degradation through its depiction in photography, oral testimony, and film to reveal how these different types of representation construct a conflicting urban image of peripheral Rome and its transformations.

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  Gian Carla Agbisit, University of Santo Tomas, Philippines
  The City as a Spectacular Monster and the Hysterical Baudrillardian Flâneur Propelled by the new kind of capitalism, and aided by a scientific and technological progress that culminates in virtual perfection, the city has now become both the producer and the consumer of spectacle. In fact, the city has become, in itself, a grand spectacle that uses the reification of categories as a differential device that helps perpetuate the spectacle.

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  Michal Grabowski, Silesia University / The Historical Museum of Krakow, Poland
  Urban Space in Museum Exhibitons The intention of this article is to undertake an interdisciplinary route by combining a multitude of tools and methods from the humanities for the holistic treatment of the narratives on the legacy of the past and the present of selected European cities in particular representations of spaces and urban exhibitions.

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Performing Identities: Gender, Sexuality, Power and the Relationship between Identity and Performance in Literature, Performing Arts and the Sequential Arts

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  Elisavet Pakis, Independent Scholar, Manchester, UK
  (Im)Possible Subjects: The Appearance and Disappearance of Greek Woman Writer Dora Rosetti Performing Forbidden Lesbian Desire and Identity in “Her Lover” and in “My Friend Mrs Dora Rosetti” In this paper I explore Dora Rosetti’s (1908-1989) appearance and disappearance as a writer, her inscriptions of lesbian desire and subjectivity, and her remaining fragments of writing and performing a queer self. I draw on Judith Butler’s ‘exclusionary matrix’ of gender, compulsory heterosexuality, identity, bodies and desires to make sense of Rosetti’s disappearing subjectivity.

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  Vivian Kuang Sheng, Department of History of Art, University of York, UK
  Nikki Lee’s Transgender Performance: The Projects of Drag Queens, Lesbians and Strip Dancers With a specific focus on Lee’s Projects in association with the formation of gender identity, this paper reconsiders Judith Butler’s conception of 'drag', and examines in what way this mode of drag performativity is practiced in Lee’s playful performance of 'gender trouble', raising questions about the construction and representation of both individual and collective identities in contemporary society.

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  Tahseen Salman Choudhury, Research and Publication Officer, Bangladesh Employers’ Federation Bangladesh

  Arzoo Ismail, University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh
  From Ms. Marvel to Ms. Shabash: Sex and Power Distribution in Bangladeshi and Western Cultures This paper aimed to identify and analyze the representation of cultures across a sample of Bangladeshi and western comics that were published during the last five years in order to determine the role of gender in the respective societies on the basis of Social Dominance Theory (SDT). While looking into societies via comics, Bangladesh remained the primary focus.

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  Orsolya Csaszar, University of Guelph, Canada
  We Fail to Know and Understand Rape: An Epistemic Account of Rape Culture In the following paper, I draw upon the work of prominent Canadian feminist epistemologist Lorraine Code in order to argue that (1) we fail to know and understand rape, and, (2) the social imaginary is a fruitful site for transforming rape culture. Appealing to Code, I articulate a set of traditional dominant mainstream epistemological assumptions.

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Art, History and Representations of Identity

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  Mathew Abbott, Federation University Australia, Victoria, Australia
  Two Crises of Beholding: Authenticity and Identity in Michael Fried’s Art History The key claim here is that, by the early 1860s, the problems of beholding French painters had been negotiating became unmanageable, as their anti-theatrical strategies lost their efficacy. Simultaneously acknowledging and disorienting their viewers, works such as 'Olympia' and 'The Luncheon on the Grass' register the coming to a head of a crisis of beholding. Against critiques of Fried’s alleged formalism, this paper seeks to show that theatricality must be understood historically: it emerges out of a field of tensions that develop dialectically, such that what appears authentic at one point in time may begin to seem unbearably contrived at another.

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  Youngmin Kim, Seoul National University, South Korea
  Cultural Identity in the Informal Portraits of the Qing Emperors As I hope to show, the informal portraits of the Qing emperors reveal the cultural identity of Qing China in a way different than in earlier dynasties. To analyze which strategies are used to construct the complex cultural identity visually, this paper focuses on the Qianlong emperor’s informal imperial portrait known as 'One or Two' and an album of fourteen leaves portraying the Yongzheng emperor.

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  Lena Geuer, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany
  ‘Arte Argentino’ in Motion: Moving Through Aesthetic-Political Questions in the Artworks of Luís Felipe Noé and Marta Minujín Based on the art works of Luís Felipe Noé and Marta Minujín which have been created with hybrid materials, forms and techniques from the sixties until now, I want to demonstrate that 'arte argentino' in its narrative and aesthetic appearance requires a thinking of materials and bodies in motion.

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  Ughetta Molin Fop, Institute of Art History, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal
  The Pavilions in the Venice Art Biennale: National Representations in the XXI Century The ultimate goal of this paper is to demonstrate how in recent years the Venetian pavilions, despite the limitations of their format, through specific curatorial and artistic choices have nevertheless tried to offer a more up-to-date representation of the concept of ‘nation’.

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  Heidi Dinkler, New York University, USA
  Noumenism I propose a Noumenist art that seeks a new transcendence through a reconsideration of alternative forms of knowledge. This transcendence would be an encounter with “noumena”—a border concept used by Immanuel Kant to described pre-representational reality. I suggest that Noumenist art allows for self-reflectivity, empathy, and hope, by opening a pathway to experiences of unmediated reality contained outside the self.

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  Sebastian Ramirez, Philosophy Department, Vanderbilt University, USA
  The Biopower of Neoliberalism In the following paper, I draw on Michel Foucault’s genealogies of biopolitics and neoliberalism to explore the links between capitalism and racism in the contemporary United States. The account I develop here illustrates the way in which the biopolitical power to make live and let die is exercised through the employment of liberal and neoliberal economic strategies of government. Specifically, I argue that these strategies of government instrumentalize the population as a mass of potential market-actors and entrepreneurs and, in the process, continually reproduce, manage, and regulate the freedom, security, and endangerment of its members.

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  Sabeen Ahmed, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA
  Juridical Rights, Human Emancipation, and the Revolution: A Marxian Analysis This paper examines Marxian human nature – never fully cleaved from the politico-economic – within Marx’s theories of political and human emancipation, and demonstrates why, for Marx, the former is insufficient for the latter. In doing so, I will analyze not only the moment but also the form that revolution must take for Marx, which may subsequently allow for more theoretical and critical analyses of contemporary revolutionary movements, particularly in the Middle East.

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  Vincent Mennella, Lone Star College, USA
  Spenser’s Lacanian Assault on the Classical Hero The focus of my research is on the role of the Renaissance hero in self-fashioning. As Greenblatt notes, “self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile (9).” The classical hero represents autonomous self-fashioning entirely apart from the influences of church, crown, and family in favor of the hero’s divine origin. For that reason, I argue that it is not those social forces but the classical hero who is continuously under assault in the work of Spenser.

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  Kozhevnikov Nikolay, North-Eastern Federal University, Yakutsk, Russia

  Danilova Vera, North-Eastern Federal University, Yakutsk, Russia
  The Ontological and Metaphysical Aspects of the World Coordinate System Based on the Limits of Dynamic Equilibrium This “Being” means that the coordinate system does not just exist, but actively makes itself at every level of the organization of the world. This activity is not the result of the spirit, the mind, the intellect, the will, or life. It is manifested in the fact that "being-essence" and "being-existence" are tuned to the harmonious rhythms of the world and create the cells, which is widespread the presence of the coordinate system at all levels of organization. This bond is the result of self-organization processes and is optimum and sustainable.

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  Mirko Domenico Alagna , Universita di Milano-Bicocca, Italy
  Federalism (in One Person): An Exercise of Institutional Fantasy for Contemporary Europe We need to start over the critical mechanism and shape a radically new form of critical theory, trying to invent unprecedented forms of political institutions. My proposal is a sort of hyper-federalism: a territorial and overlapping federalism - perfectly described by Dardot and Laval -, plus an “internal” and personal federalism, adequate to the foamy (Sloterdijk) contemporary panorama. To save space, I will focus now only on the second kind of federalism.

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  Rachael Dickson Hillyard, School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast
  Diagnosing the European Union’s Present: Chronic Solidarity Disease, Domopolitics and the Migrant Crisis The paper illustrates that the migrant crisis is a symptom of a greater condition affecting the EU. Due to this wider state of unwellbeing, the EU is engaging in a domopolitical governmentality in order to tame and domesticate migration that could intensify the symptoms of a chronic solidarity disease. Thus, the migrant crisis is a turning point, a moment where it can be either cured, or worsened.

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  Martin Glick, University of Göttingen, Germany
  Legal Principles and Refugees  I would like to argue that people don't carry moral, religious, or legal principles with them. Rather, stateless people ought to be seen as in possession of Agency, the humanizing principle according to Honneth and Rorty mention, which allows them to acclimate to a country's legal principles transcending whatever previous cultural allegiances they are bound to. At the heart of the issue is a typical conservative argument against the introduction of refugees into the country on the grounds that they are corrupting forces.

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  Catherine MacMillan, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey
  Self and Other in Podemos Discourse on the EU: A Discourse Historical Approach The paper examines the discourse of the Spanish anti-austerity party Podemos towards the EU in the context of the Eurozone crisis and its aftermath. The method used is the Discourse Historical Approach, which belongs within the broad field of Critical Discourse Analysis, and which especially focuses on constructions of identity and Self and Other.

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  Andrew Ka Pok Tam, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK
  How to Differentiate Cultures from One Anther? A Case Study of Hong Kong Culture I would argue that without our own culture we shall lose our ability of interpretation. When the people in a community shares a similar existential situation (similar history, same geographical location and social-economic interaction), the same language, similar values, similar ways of living and they are linked by a community network, they form a cultural self. Using Hong Kong culture as a case study I am going to demonstrate that the cultural self is emergent when an individual member realises that someone is culturally different from him. The new concept of culture may be applied in not only cultural studies, but also the political theories and social activisms for separatism, nationalism or localism.

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  Slobodan Dan Paich, Artship Foundation, San Francisco, USA
  Models of Continuity and Crisis of Perseverance: Contemporary Issue vis-à-vis Selected European Paradigms and Overlooked Notions The paper addresses the issues of a possible contemporary Crisis of Perseverance, current de-contextualized information and the neuroscience and cognitive research notions of ecology of mind and brain are paired with the historic examples of learning models cited in the paper. It is a proactive starting point for discussion about the contemporary state of mind and learning preparedness and lesser-known European cultural paradigms.

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  Magdalena Kania, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland
  Possessing the Concept of Development: Critical Perception of the Developmental Narratives? The paper examines how the notion of 'underdevelopment' evolved to 'developing' and how the political angle has been replaced by economic determinants. The second part of the paper shows the critical perception of mainstream theories, labelled as post-development narratives.

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