Jacopo Galimberti

In what can be called the peripheral West, there existed institutional showcases and forums for discussion that have been ignored by mainstream art history. The San Marino Biennale and the Convegno internazionale artisti, critici e studiosi d’arte – which took place in conjunction with the San Marino Biennale and echoed its critical debates – are valuable examples of institutions which not only played a key role in shaping Western European art criticism in the early 1960s, but also challenged the assumptions and power relations inherent in the predominant North American and Western European art scenes. Under the direction of Italian critic and art historian Giulio Carlo Argan, both acted as a crossroads where important artistic and intellectual exchanges took place, presenting a polycentric image of modern art.
Our joint paper will examine and contextualise the specifics of these institutions, illuminating their manifold contacts with Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe. We will then focus on the 1963 editions of the Biennale and the Convegno. This will provide a paradigmatic case study highlighting the way in which these institutions provincialised Northern Europe and the US, foregrounding narratives, critical notions and art objects that were discrepant from those discussed by the New York and Parisian art milieux.

Nella tumultuosa primavera del 1977, su Lotta Continua e sulle fanzine dell’area creativa Pablo Echaurren inizia a rappresentare la gioventù ribelle che agita le piazze e le università. Dal suo lavoro di quei mesi scaturisce una «teratologia politica» che registra la radicalità del movimento del 1977, ma segnala, al contempo, la crisi di un’idea di militanza. -- Jacopo Galimberti (nato a Pavia nel 1981 – vive a Berlino) è storico dell’arte. Ha pubblicato su numerose riviste accademiche, come The Art Bulletin e L’Uomo Nero, ed è l’autore di Individuals against Individualism: Art Collectives in Western Europe (1956-1969). Per Verso Books sta preparando una monografia dal titolo Images of Class. Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988).

Come confrontarsi con una tradizione illustre, la propria, se si appartiene a una nazione che si scopre bruscamente periferica? E come ripristinare dialoghi cosmopoliti dopo decenni di isolamento?

La storia postbellica dell’arte italiana è profondamente segnata dagli equilibri geopolitici e culturali della guerra fredda, e da quello che potremmo chiamare il marketing delle identità culturali. Con gli strumenti della filologia visiva e un’attenta critica delle fonti diviene possibile avviare un proficuo dialogo tra la storia dell’arte e la storia politica e sociale tout court sui temi dell’identità nazionale e del “nation-building”. La difficile ricerca di nuove e plausibili definizioni identitarie all’indomani della guerra, il dibattito sui modelli di sviluppo negli anni della ricostruzione, le differenti opzioni ideologiche e i conflitti di idee nel decennio del boom e della contestazione pervadono il discorso secondario, aleggiano attorno alle opere e contribuiscono a modellarne tecniche e retoriche in una misura sinora non sempre registrata.

La storiografia angloamericana si è interessata all’arte italiana postbellica in anni recenti, e con pieno merito, sollevando problemi, invocando nuove prospettive storiografiche, dispiegando confronti. E’ tuttavia inevitabile che la ricostruzione mostri rigidità ideologiche e angolature su cui è utile riflettere, anche per la mancanza della traduzione delle fonti in lingua inglese, che rischia sovente di sbilanciare o appiattire il discorso sui pochi testi disponibili.

Lungi dall’attestarsi sulla schematicità di posizioni ideologiche riassunte nella contrapposizione “fascismo|antifascismo”, l’arte italiana degli anni Sessanta-Settanta cerca, spesso con successo, di definire una propria collocazione nel contesto internazionale, ripristinare un dialogo in parte interrotto con le avanguardie storiche e i Maestri entre-deux-guerres e innovare sul piano specificamente formale.

Si tratta adesso, esauritasi per ovvie ragioni cronologiche la stagione della critica militante e venuti a maturità gli studi delle fonti documentarie, di sperimentare una posizione critica terza, mirata ad avvicinare le opere sul duplice presupposto di una loro autonoma (benché certo non irrelata) capacità di dichiarazione; e a procurare all’arte italiana postbellica una connoisseurship specifica, tale da spingere la ricerca, ove necessario, oltre la fedeltà all’egodocumento in direzione di un’indagine compiutamente storiografica.

Il progetto del numero monografico di Predella si propone come seminario di riflessione aperto a contributi internazionali. Ci auguriamo che possano trovarvi spazio stimolanti prospettive di indagine per lo studio dell’arte e la critica d’arte italiana dal dopoguerra a oggi; e che una nuova generazione di studi abbia qui un suo momento di cristallizzazione.

This project aims to open up an innovative field of research on resistance movements since the Second World War, the intersection of cultural history and visual culture. It is divided into two areas of analysis: 1) A transnational study of the visual productions of partisan movements (visual arts, graphic production, poster, photography, film and video) and their contribution to the configuration of new practices, the construction of visual identities and the collective awareness that formed between the SGM and the fall of the Berlin Wall. 2) A study of the implications these visual imagination still have on current visual culture, on contemporary artistic practices, as well as on the configuration of the political imagination.

From a methodological point of view, it first proposes a shift from the traditional object of the history of resistance (based mainly on the literary domain and the document) to visual culture, as well as an expansion of chronologies including antifascist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements within a genealogy that includes continuities and ruptures. In this perspective, we will seek to discuss the role that images and audiovisual productions have had in shaping these struggles and demands for civil rights as well as in networks of resistance and solidarity, considering the image as an instrument for building visual knowledge and a transnational vector for creating dissident collective behaviour and consciousness. It is therefore not a question of making an illustrated history, but rather a history of visual productions that highlights their semantic specificities, their uses and materialities, their ability to elaborate transnational codes, their recurrence, their modelling function as well as their “fragility” and ambiguities.

Our project, developed by an international team, is rooted in an approach that transcends national frameworks and links movements, ideologies and practices between the southern and northern hemispheres. For, despite differences in contexts, these visual productions can be seen as part of a culture of resistance shared by Western, Eastern European and Third World geographies. Favouring a transnational and transversal analysis, partisan legacies will be discussed from and through the cultural sphere of concrete enclaves and through the prism of case studies (in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Yugoslavia, Mexico, Argentina or Cuba), with a particular emphasis on the processes of transfers and exchanges and their relations with socio-political dynamics. Working on networks and the circulation of images, people (artists, directors, photographers) and ideologies, the project aims to show how these networks and visual identities have been formed, transferred, adapted to local contexts and led to the creation of transnational communities and proto-global mapping.

By combining critical analysis and geospatial visualization with historical parameters, we hope not only to evaluate complex processes, but also to make understandable the ways in which visual culture, as well as artistic exchanges, have helped to shape transnational resistance movements, which have themselves helped to shape the multicultural and global society in which we live today.

Ré.part proposes four axes of analysis: 1. Violence and representation: synchronic approaches and present challenges (which aims to study the role of violence and the challenges of its representation); 2. Transnational visual codes and identities: reappropriation, uses and resemantisations (which focuses on how partisan culture has set up visibility regimes, what have been their materialities and reactivations in local contexts); 3. Networks and displacements: circulation of struggles, images and creators (which seeks to analyze models of collaboration and circulation of images and artists); 4. The figure and representation of the partisan: an imaginary in transformation (how the image of the partisan since the Second World War has changed).