Conferences and Seminars – Page 6 – Fondazione Giorgio Cini

Seminar The History of Venetian Civilisation. Italy and the Mediterranean

The history of Venice spans more than a millennium and encapsulates the features of various histories, such as Byzantine history, the history of Italy, and the history of the Mediterranean and of Europe. In this way Venice undoubtedly expressed its own civilisation. Vittore Branca was a firm believer in the notion of the “civilisation of Venice”, often the subject of study and reflection in the early decades of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Indeed, many specific books and an initial major synthesis were devoted to the civilisation of Venice. How important is the subject today? Should the study of Venetian civilisation be relaunched?

This seminar brings together leading experts to reflect on the issue by assessing the state of the art of Venice historiography and charting the distinctive features of a state and a unique political, ideological, economic and cultural system in the Mediterranean and Europe.The seminar provides the opportunity to commemorate Gaetano Cozzi, long-serving director of the Institute for the History of the Venetian State and Society, this year being the centenary of his birth.

Conference The Eranos Experience: Spirituality and the Arts in a Comparative Perspective

This conference has been organised by the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities, the Institute of Music, and the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies (all Fondazione Giorgio Cini) and the Center for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents (HHP) at the University of Amsterdam. Inspired by Rudolf Otto and Carl Gustav Jung, the Eranos Colloquia were organised in Ascona by the Dutch activist, painter and researcher Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn from 1933 onwards.

The meetings brought together some of the most stimulating minds of the day to discuss topics such as spirituality, mysticism, myth and symbolism, with the aim of opposing what was perceived as an inexorable secularisation. The focus of the conference will be on the legacy of Eranos in the social sciences, humanities and the performing and figurative arts (music, dance, theatre and painting). The event will be enriched by a concert of the mdi ensemble that will play music by Renato de Grandis, Ernesto Rubin de Cervin and Giacinto Scelsi at the Auditorium “Lo Squero”.

Download the programme of the conference The Eranos Experience

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Seminar Computer-Assisted Composition: Perspectives on Human-Machine Interaction

Dedicated to the memory of Gottfried Michael Koenig, this seminar has been organised by Giacomo Albert and Laura Zattra, coordinators of the RISME digital research group of the Italian Society of Musicology. The term “computer-assisted composition” took hold in the 1980s to designate a set of experiences whose roots went back a further three decades to the dawn of digital applications in music. Originally related to algorithmic composition and computational modelling of musical structures, this approach has continued to develop and now indicates a wide and varied set of digital tools applied at different stages in the compositional process.

Although there are many technically-oriented publications on computer-assisted music, musicological essays have so far been limited to specific studies without offering a comprehensive view. The Venice seminar is intended as a first step to fill this gap. Computer-assisted composition will be studied from the perspective of human-computer interaction: the research group will explore the ways in which composers use digital instruments and formulate hypotheses on the repercussions of digital architecture for writing music and its structures.

The seminar consists of three sessions: in the first, three musicologists will discuss the technology-writing relationship in specific case studies; in the second, the focus will be on the overall human-machine interaction and the philosophical roots of “assisted composition”; and lastly, in the third session, three composers and music assistants will reflect on their experience in the light of the previous discussions.

Participants: Joshua Banks Mailman, Marc Battier, Agostino Di Scipio, Carl Faia, Jonathan Impett, Sanne Krogh Groth, Marco Stroppa, Martin Supper and Elena Ungeheuer.

Download the programme

International Conference Architecture and Stage Design for Minor Theatres, 1750-1850

The Institute of Theatre and Opera, in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences in Bern and Lausanne, is holding an international conference on the themes of architecture and stage space and design for minor theatres in Italy and Europe between 1750 and 1850. The event is part of Raphael Bortolotti’s PhD project: “Italian Stage Design in the 19th Century” and is the second conference, following one held in October 2021 in Feltre, entitled “Practices of Provincial Theatres in the Risorgimento: Management, Stage, Music, Audience and Repertoire”.

During the transdisciplinary conference, scholars from various fields will explore not only theatrical space and stage design in minor and provincial theatres but also treatises in this architectural field, which at the time was so important that it generated a conspicuous production of essays, scholarly treatises and theoretical projects, as well as numerous competitions related to the theme and the built results.

In addition, again in an interdisciplinary approach, the history of individual theatres will be analysed through in-depth studies and their socio-historical role in the 18th and 19th centuries reassessed. The advisory committee is composed of Maria Ida Biggi (Fondazione Giorgio Cini Institute of Theatre and Opera; Ca’ Foscari University, Venice), Raphael Bortolotti and Annette Kappeler (University of Applied Sciences, Bern).

Download the program

Presentation The Conati Archive: Safeguarding and Using Marcello Conati’s Recordings Held by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini

The archive to be created in this Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies project consists of an important collection of mainly previously unreleased tape recordings of traditional popular songs from the provinces of Verona, Parma and Reggio Emilia, recorded in the field in the early 1970s by the musician and musicologist Marcello Conati. The Veneto recordings in the collection amount to 35 tapes, mostly made in the areas of Fumane, Zevio, Ferrara di Monte Baldo, Lazise, Sant’Anna d’Alfaedo, San Bonifacio, Negrar and Marano di Valpolicella. The musical content of the collection is of great importance because it provides invaluable examples of oral-tradition music and popular culture in the Veneto, including some songs or music which have now died out.

Thanks to the renewed contribution of the Veneto Region and its collaboration with the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, begun in 2021, the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies has now been able to launch the project to safeguard, enhance and promote knowledge of this music collection through its digitisation, archiving and publication in a digital catalogue, edited by Costantino Vecchi.

The public presentation will be an opportunity to illustrate the results of the project and discuss the potential for further study and possible restoration and development projects to be agreed upon with the researchers.

Presentation will start at h. 4 pm

Program:

Renata Codello
Segretario Generale, Fondazione Giorgio Cini

Arianna Bernardi
Direttore, U.O. Attività Culturali e Spettacolo, Regione del Veneto

Francesca Scatto
Consigliere Regionale, Presidente della Sesta commissione consiliare permanente

Teresa Camellini

Istituto Memoria & Durata

Giovanni Giuriati

Direttore IISMC, Fondazione Giorgio Cini

Costantino Vecchi

Archivio IISMC, Fondazione Giorgio Cini

Round Table: Musical Theatre Today. Voices, Actions and Technologies

Organised by Gianmario Borio and Vincenzina Ottomano in collaboration with the Venice Music Biennale and Ca’ Foscari University, this round table will engage in a series of reflections on trends and experimentation in musical theatre in the 21st century, also in the light of themes that have emerged in the Music Biennale 2022 programme. The discussion will focus on key issues of contemporary creativity: new dramaturgical concepts, the choice and assembly of texts, the different ways of understanding plot and characters, the treatment of voices, and the incorporation of technologies in the overall artistic design. By comparing the experiences of recent decades within and beyond conventional stage spaces, the aim is to outline the current perspectives of the production system as a whole. Participants: Robert Adlington, Koen Bollen, Giordano Ferrari, Dorothea Hartman and Susanne Kogler.

Download the program Music Theatre Today

Study Day Gianfranco Folena at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini

With this event the Fondazione Giorgio Cini secretary general and the Institute of Theatre and Opera wish to commemorate Gianfranco Folena, director of the Institute of Literature Music and Theatre from 1959 to 1992, on the thirtieth anniversary of his death. Organised in conjunction with the Gianfranco Folena National Committee, the study day will revisit the many innovative proposals put forward by Folena during his long directorship, when he made the Institute a cultural hothouse for research and discussion among the leading intellectuals of the day. The aim of the event is to highlight Folena’s wide-ranging cultural production, which, with its innovative and pioneering proposals on the Italian cultural scene, contributed to creating new areas of research in fields such as musicology, where he promoted libretto studies. Moreover, the creation of new content and the dissemination of the results led to innovative areas of research that later provided the guidelines for the Institute’s academic inquiries.

The participants include Daniela Goldin Folena (University of Padua), Gianfranco’s son Pietro Folena, Piero Del Negro (University of Padua), and Maria Ida Biggi (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice and director of the Institute of Theatre and Opera).

Photography Masterclass with Sabiha Çimen and Jason Eskenazi

Magnum Photos and the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities at Fondazione Giorgio Cini are inviting applications for the third workshop organized on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, offering participants the opportunity to work on their projects in an immersive and intimate group setting.

Join Magnum photographer Sabiha Çimen for a three-day workshop where you will participate in discussions about documentary photography and how to develop personal long-term projects. During the course, Sabiha accompanied by the guest course tutor, Jason Eskenazi – photographer and founder of Red Hook Books, will talk at large about their work and give you critical feedback about your practice.

Organized into intensive sessions of lectures, editing and sequencing exercises, and group portfolio reviews, this workshop will help you to develop strategies and set individual project objectives. Whether you want to keep shooting, publish your project in a book or exhibit it, through a round table discussion on the contemporary editorial environment, this workshop will contextualize and shape the vision of each involved photographer.

This workshop is open for 15 participants and suitable for photographers with a large body of work who are looking for guidance in the final stage of their projects or photographers starting a new project and are at a research stage. Each participant will have an opportunity to gain a better understanding of the editing process of long-term projects and on choosing the right format for displaying them.

For more info:

www.magnumphotos.com

47th International Advanced Culture Course RESOURCES OF THE ESSENTIAL

The words describing the world are taking on new connotations: the terms “globalisation” or “internationalisation” have assumed negative overtones. Often pronounced with resigned passivity, they evoke images of individual impotence, driving people to defensive localism, giving rise to the illusion of “controllable identities”. The war in Europe is an alarming cultural regression for humanity. It also calls for a survey to establish and safeguard the primary values of a free existence: from energy to bread. This means working in various disciplines and social spheres towards defining the “essential”. Not only in the sense of what is indispensable but more importantly of what enables us to reach the essence or the core of a problem, an attitude or a value. Both logical and ethical, this process involving economics and ecology, thought and action, and describing and living may lead to more incisive modes of shared rationality.

Lectio magistralis di:

Marco Alverà, autore di Hydrogen Revolution, imprenditore nell’energia, fondatore zhero.net

Luigino Bruni, Università di Roma, LUMSA

Paola Cattani, Università di Roma Tre

Francesco Dal Co, Professore emerito IUAV

Gabriele Lolli, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa

Carlo Ossola, Collège de France, Parigi, Direttore del Corso

Lucrezia Reichlin, London Business School

Rob Riemen, Nexus Instituut, Amsterdam

Jean-Marie Tarascon, Collège de France, Parigi

Olivier-Thomas Vénard, École Biblique et Archéologique française de Jérusalem

Return to Monselice

In 1979, over forty works of art were stolen from Monselice Castle, a residence where Vittorio Cini used to enjoy leisure activities and house part of his historic art collection. Thanks to investigations by the Venice Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection Unit, three of these works were fortunately recovered and, between 2001 and 2015, returned to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, which owned the castle at the time of the theft. The works are: a Po Valley artist (Cremona ?) from the last quarter of the 16th century Adoration of the Shepherds, a 17th-century St Luke the Evangelist attributed to Pietro Bellotti, both oil on panel, and a late 15th-century Lombard School polychrome wood bas-relief with the Adoration of the Child. Thanks to an agreement between the Veneto Region, which now owns Monselice Castle, and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, the works recovered by the Carabinieri will be returned to the splendid setting chosen for them by Vittorio Cini.

The three works will be handed over at an official ceremony with the following speakers:

Francesco Calzavara

Councillor for Planning, Programme Implementation, Relations with the Regional Council, Budget and Heritage, General Affairs, Local Agencies, Veneto Region

Francesca Scatto

Chairman of the Sixth Standing Council Committee (Education, Training and Labour Policies; Research Policies; Culture, Tourism and Sports Policies), Veneto Regional Council

Cristiano Corazzari

Councillor for Territory, Culture, Security, Migratory Flows, Hunting and Fishing, Veneto Region

Giorgia Bedin

Mayor of Monselice

Aldo Rozzi Marin

Sole Director, Marco Polo Ltd.

Renata Codello

General Secretary, Fondazione Giorgio Cini

Christian Costantini

Commander, Venice Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection Unit

Luca Massimo Barbero

Director, Fondazione Giorgio Cini Institute of Art History