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

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

Conference Program

The Conference Agenda is available in the right sidebar.

The full conference program with abstracts and available draft papers is available below by clicking on the respective panel number tab.

Keynote Presentation

Keynote Speaker:

Gérard Bouchard (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi)

Europe in Search of Europeans: The Road of Identity and Myths

Gérard Bouchard is a Canadian intellectual and scholar. Historian and sociologist, Gérard Bouchard is Professor at the Humanities Department of Université du Québec à Chicoutimi and the holder of the Canadian Research Chair on Collective Imaginaries. He is a prolific contributor to the study of identities, social myths, inter-cultural societies and ethno-cultural diversity with a substantive record of publications and academic presentations all over the world. He also authored fictional writing publishing until now 3 novels.

Gérard Bouchard Gérard Bouchard was appointed to the French Legion of Honor in October 2002 and became a member of the Académie des Lettres du Québec in November 2003. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the 2000 Literary Award of the Governor General of Canada for his book, Genèse des nations et cultures du Nouveau Monde: Essai d’histoire comparée, the 2001 Gérard-Parizeau Prize for Québec History, and Honoris Causa doctorates from McGill, New Brunswick, Guelph University, Laval University and Sherbrooke University. His novel, Uashat, was chosen as one of the ten finalists for the Readers Prize (Montréal Book Fair, November 2009). His book, The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World, was selected as one of the five best Québec essays of the last decade (2000-2009). He was also the winner of the best lecture for The Next Big Question contest, organized by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in Montreal (May 2010).

In 2007, Gérard Bouchard was named, together with Charles Taylor, as Co-President of Quebec’s Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles (CCPARDC) and together with Charles Taylor wrote the landmark 2008 Bouchard-Taylor report about reasonable accommodation of Quebec’s ethnic and religious minorities.

In 2008-2009, Gérard Bouchard held the William Lyon Mackenzie King Research Chair of Canadian Studies (Weatherhead Center for International Affairs) at Harvard University. He was also visiting professor at Harvard University (Sociology) in 2008-2009.

Europe in Search of Europeans: The Road of Identity and Myths

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  Gérard Bouchard, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Canada
  Europe in Search of Europeans: The Road of Identity and Myths I contend that a particularly unfortunate cultural choice made by the EU was to distrust and sidestep the nations (as configurations of culture, not to be confused with the states), and to opt for a top-down process of governance. In order to break this pattern, I suggest that the EU will have to find a way to mend fences with the nations in order to i) put an end to a long-standing detrimental tension, ii) harness rather than stifle the nations’ still substantial symbolic resources and energy, and iii) secure a platform to build new European myths.

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History Reading, Identity Making and Narratives of Cultural Belonging: Collective Identities, Ethnicity and Politics of Representation through Difference

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  Kristin M. Barry, Ball State University, USA
  Progenies of Priam:The Trojan War and the Propaganda of Identity and Belonging Told through visual culture and artifacts scattered throughout the world, this paper explores the quest for legitimacy and belonging in nation-building and propaganda as related to the Trojan War and its participants, and how the myth-historical event continues to resonate with a modern artists and leaders.

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  Jennifer E. Michaels, Grinnell College, USA
  Transcending Borders: Sheila Mysorekar’s Reflections on Transnational Identities The Indian-German essayist, poet, and journalist Sheila Mysorekar is a strong voice in debates about racism, multiculturalism and transnational identities in Germany. She consistently addresses human rights and minority concerns in her writing and uses satire as an effective strategy to underscore her arguments. For her identities are political.

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  Haneen Omari, Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, The Netherlands
  Defamiliarizing the Familiar and Moving the Immovable: Exile, Return, and the Journey in Ḥussein Barghoutī’s The Blue Light, and I Will Be Among the Almond Trees This paper aims to show how the modern Palestinian author, Ḥussein Barghoutī, provides new definitions of the notions of exile, return, and journey that go beyond their traditional definitions in the Palestinian literary context.

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  Lars Tore Flåten, University of Oslo, Norway
  Constructing Hindu Identity in Textbook Narratives: The Concept of Decontextualization This paper takes as its point of departure the main priority of the BJP within the field of education: the decision to publish new history textbooks. I examine these textbooks as integral to BJP’s identity political agenda, and ask in what ways they defined and invoked Hindu identity.

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  Yvonne Siemann, University of Lucerne, Switzerland
  Contested Identities among Japanese-Bolivians Pre-War and Post-War Descendants How is Bolivian Nikkei identity defined by whom, how and why? What are the discourses of inclusion and exclusion, where are intersections with class identification and what does that mean for the creation of a Bolivian Nikkei community?

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Politics and Identity: Political Factors Impacting Identitarian Claims

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  Ani Harutyunyan, LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance at KU Leuven, Belgium
  National Identity and Public Goods Provision The paper proposes theories examining the interplay between national identity and public goods provision, then shows empirically that the most nationalistic countries excel" in poor provision of public goods. It challenges the conventional wisdom on the role of national identity, suggesting that most of the cases it is used as a tool to divert the attention of citizens from most pressing issues such as provision of elementary public goods.

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  Aleksandar Savanović, Faculty of Political Science, University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina
  The Role of Secession in the Theory of Anarchy: Deconstruction of Collective Identities In this paper I will analyze the concept of secession in the contemporary theory of political anarchy, as suggested by Murray Rothbard and his followers, as a concept of deconstruction of wider collective identities. Secessionist movements have a fundamental support from the anarchistic theory, because any case and situation of secession leads to reduction of the state sovereignty as a consequence.

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  Georg Löfflmann, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, UK
  The ‘Indispensable Nation’ in a Post-American World: American Exceptionalism and President Obama’s Post-American Vision of Hegemony This paper explores the discursive performance and political significance of American exceptionalism under the Obama presidency, and its consequences for US foreign and security policy. It examines how American exceptionalism represents a key identity construct that is intertextually constituted and reconstituted between the language of political decision-making, the intellectual expertise in America’s strategic community of think tanks and policy experts, and reflections in popular media.

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  Silvia-Lucretia Nicola, University of Potsdam, Germany
  How to Be or Not to Be an Iraqi Kurd? Processes of Identity Consolidation beyond National and Ethnic Rhetoric in the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan in Northern Iraq This paper aims at presenting the ways both main actors (regional and federal government in Iraq) have nurtured various discourses on identity and on the different types of identities for political purposes and the enforcement of the collective’s own interests.

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  Catherine MacMillan, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey
  Turkish National Identity and the EU under the AKP: A Discursive Approach In a broadly constructivist context, the article uses Foreign Policy Discourse Analysis, a form of analysis based on Foucault's conception of discourse, in order to examine the discourse of the ruling AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi - Justice and Home Affairs Party) on the Turkish accession process to the EU in the context of broader discourses on state and nation and on discourses of self and other vis a vis Europe.

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Identities and the Cities: Transformation, Transition and Change in Urban Image Construction

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  Elke Katharina Wittich, Hochschule Fresenius, Hamburg, Germany
  Embattled Towns – Images of the Balkans in Descriptions and Travelogues of the 17th and Beginning 18th Centuries Towns in the Balkans were located at the travel routes from Vienna to Constantinople, and were therefore addressed in travelogues as well as in reports on topographical and geographical, historical and political issues.

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  José Manuel Fernandes, University of Lisbon, Portugal
  Nova Oeiras Neighbourhood Unit to UNESCO Heritage List: A Strong Case of Civic Identity and Intervention BRNO´s universal value, as a landscape, architectural and urban paramount, must be emphasized – at the same time, explaining as this site is sustained in an overall manner by the support and adhesion of its living community, showing a strong sense of local participation and initiative.

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  Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
  Californian Exopolis: Hector Tobar’s and Tim Z. Hernandez’s Literary Interventions In my presentation I focus on the literary representations of California´s underrepresented communities and their habitats. I interpret these places as zones of disruption of the historical and cultural discourses.

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  Lora Sariaslan, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  A Strategic Modernity on the Shores of the Bosphorus: Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Istanbul Modern is a win-win collaboration between the private promoters of the museum and the political actors in the context of identity and image making, liberalization, urban planning, and the once-desired Turkish membership into the EU.

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  Stefan Kunath, Viadrina European University Frankfurt
  Does Growing Nationalism Trigger Transnational Cooperation Among Cosmopolitans? The Case of the German-Polish Border Towns Frankfurt (Oder) & Słubice This paper will elaborate at the micro level by assessing transborder conflict dynamics between cosmopolitan and nationalist local deputies from the German-Polish border towns Frankfurt (Oder) and Słubice.

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  Jutta Teuwsen, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany
  Maintaining a Japanese Cultural Identity Abroad: ‘Old Japan’ at the Japanese Department Store ‘Shirokiya’ in Honolulu The existence of the department store ‘Shirokiya’ finds its reasons. Especially for the elderly Japanese Americans, the children and grandchildren of those immigrants, the department store constitutes a crucial role for dealing with their Japanese identity throughout various spheres.

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Intellectual History Readings: Society, Memory, Politics and Identity Making Practices

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  Yannis Karagiannis, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals, Spain
  Intellectuals, Ethnicity, and Nationalism: Evidence from Catalonia How do intellectuals think about nationalism when that becomes a seriously divisive issue? Do they all converge towards the same view, or is there a polarization of expert opinion? If, as it seems to be the case, there is polarization, what factors explain each individual intellectual’s choice? Our results show that, far from seeking to appease passions, intellectuals are more polarized than the wider public. More worryingly, we find that intellectuals are, like the general public, largely motivated by ethnic considerations.

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  Gloria Frisone, École Des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris
  Forward an Anthropological Perspective of Alzheimer’s Disease: The Symbolic Meanings of Memory Loss in a Commemoration Society I would like to demonstrate that the commemoration practice in not really based on the historical objectivity of the past event but rather on a political performance promoting the mythisation of it, in order to reinforce the social cohesion around a dominant system of values at the bottom of collective identity.

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  Dana Dolghin, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  ’Wounded Attachments’ and Memory Making in Eastern Europe Much of the official narratives proposed in these cases employ an 'emphatic unsettlement' that rejects both straightforward linear narratives of recovery and integral systems of truth and reconciliation. The analysis tracks how such instances of public memory engage with politicized identities. How do the double occupation paradigm and anti-communism then work with different intensities of nationalism?

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  Ioana Virginia Brezeanu, Université Lumière Lyon 2, France
  Romanian Dacianism and the Production of a “Vernacular Modernity” in the Context of the Europeanization Process It is exactly within the effort of integration in the European Union, in the context of the Europeanization process, that a new myth of nation is created by nationalists and it has the role to define a “new national identity”, based on Dacian roots.

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  Gale Richardson, Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, Maine, USA
  Necrological Discourse: Necrological Identity This paper explores the Lévinasian theory of identities enclosed within their own portraits. In struggling to draw the portrait of an adversary who abandons face-to-face discourse for a necrological discourse devoid of interlocutors, society finds itself perplexed and, perhaps, unable to calculate various factors that require inclusion within the portrait itself. Within the Hegelian and Lévinasian insights of this paper, I expose elements that lead a person to the trace of history, which absences history itself and presences necrological identities.

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  Monika Jaeckel, Independent Artist Researcher, Berlin
  Performing Identity or the Performativity of Situatedness Considering institutions as cultural agreements my position takes its point of departure in acknowledging that materiality and culture - both including the ones of the body - are active and work on each other.

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  Mariana Gomes Paulse, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
  Between East and West: The Insertion of Yasumasa Morimura’s Self-Portraits in Art History From the series Art History (1980s - present day), this paper discusses how the appropriation of iconic western art works by the Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura (Osaka, 1951) deals with important aspects of the construction of identity in contemporary art.

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  Kristine Nielsen, Illinois Wesleyan University, USA
  Performing the Sami Experience This paper asks what it means to portray and speak on behalf of an historically colonized subject. Olofsson re-formulates identity processes, and re-contextualizes a historical subject to address contemporary concerns as well.

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  Alice Hoad, University of Bristol, UK
  Franko B and the Agitation of the Flesh: An Investigation into the Aesthetic, Cultural and Symbolic Significance of Franko B’s Open, Fragmented and Bleeding Body This paper aims to understand the cultural significance of the open, fragmented and bleeding body, drawing in particular on the history of Christian theology, iconography and ritual bloodletting, and examining the work of Italian-born performance artist Franko B

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  Ana Lucia Beck, King’s College London, UK / Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
  What Is the Shape of this Problem? How do Leonilson and Bourgeois relate to stone, paper, words, colours, cloths of fabrics, drawing and stitching, taking actions that address their personal history and yet configure poetic operations and poetic identity?

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  Francesco Spampinato, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris
  Public Movement: Performing Politics through Conflictual Coreographies Public Movement uses aesthetics as a tool to temporarily reflect on social mechanisms to which we subjugate without questioning.

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  Seher Uysal, Independent Researcher, Istanbul, Turkey
  Visualizing Trauma – Honor Killings, Homophobia and Prejudice: Challenging Social Injustices & Norms in a Conservative Society This study aims to discuss images and artworks, photographs and actions by artists, activists and photographers from Turkey that challenges the conservative nature of society and gives voice to minorities while dealing with issues of gender, sexual orientation and identities.

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  Magali Sperling Beck, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil / Visiting Scholar, Trent University, Canada
  Crossroads and Identities: Contemporary Canadian Women Writing Displacement This paper focuses specifically on Connelly’s literary production as a way to investigate in more detail the kinds of questions posed by women writers engaged in writing displacement. The paper also explores to what extent Connelly’s writing allows the reader or the critic to reconfigure the political implications involved in constructing and reconstructing identities at the crossroads.

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  Fanny Froehlich, Development Planning Unit, University College London, UK
  The Construction of Gender in Gender-Sensitive Work of International NGOs in Ghana  What understanding of ‘women’ do specific (international or European) NGOs conducting development interventions in Ghana display? My underlying assumption is that this understanding of women is often rooted in a European-enlightened context and disregards/neglects or at least treats as subsidiary more traditional views of women.

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  Noemi Basanta Llanes, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
  The Gendered Sense of Self: Performing Identities Within Biographical Narratives I argue that identities are a discursive product that emerges in the intersection between social ideologies and biographical narratives. Telling one´s own life experience constitutes a restrictive identification mechanism because during narratives people not only organize a particular life experience but also show self-perception.

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  Nicholas Chilvers, School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
  Shifting Focus In this paper, I propose a model of identity that is not fixed within the individual, but mobile and fluid, shifting within the slippages between acting and being, the internal and external, between the self and other. It is an empathic exchange between people that both reflects, and is reflected in ourselves, and the world outside us.

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  Sabine Du Crest, University Bordeaux Montaigne, France
  Borders Objects: Dissolution or Exacerbation of Identity The value of context or visual horizon in the making of the meaning of objects and their ambivalent identity are key issues of this survey. In order to discuss the dissolution or exacerbation of identity that such objects embedded in themselves, this paper will address borderline cases of border objects, at times, kitsch, like a Venetian binding and a cabinet.

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  Jong Chul Choi, Miyazaki International College, Japan
  Re-Imagining the Lost Identity: Walid Raad’s Archive Project – The Atlas Group  Creatively playing on the limits of objectivity and authenticity – the very cliché of documentary per se – this ‘post-documentary’ practice offers a new possibility of political art that can compromise between documentary’s ethical validity and aesthetic creativity. A Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad, best known for his one-man project, “the Atlas Group,” provides a useful illustration of this new documentary trend.

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  Margherita Sprio, University of Westminster, UK
  Migrant Memories – Cinema and Diaspora This paper will look at how the family melodramas of the film maker Matarazzo (1909-1966) helped to give first generation Italians a sense of ’belonging’ within the hostilities that marked post war Britain. Memories of the cinematic experience left behind in Italy and brought to their new home went on to gain currency within both the Italian migrant family and within the migrant/diasporic community as a whole.

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  Jan Kubasiewicz, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston

  Ewa Satalecka, Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology, Warsaw, Poland
  The ŁÓDŹ-ORWO Collection: Typographical Identity of Socioeconomic Transition The so-called ŁÓDŹ-ORWO Collection refers to a set of two hundred 35-mm slides that document typography and visual communication in the city of Łódź, Poland, in the late 1970s. The set of slides represents a unique study material into the language of visual communication within urban environment during the decade of transition from communism to capitalism in Poland. This recently rediscovered collection has been already the focus of two photography exhibitions authored by Professor Jan Kubasiewicz and prepared to premiere in the USA and Poland in 2016.

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  Jutta Teuwsen, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany
  Contemporary Japanese Arts: National Identity Making Within the Representations of Nature This paper will analyze and explain, how artists through representations of nature construct the Japanese national identity. Upon that, it will give an outlook about the relevance of reproducing these pictures of a Japanese national identity for marketing Japanese arts nationally and internationally today.

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