Conferences and Seminars Archives - Page 8 of 13

International conference FontanaArte. House of Glass

In close correlation with the exhibition FontanaArte. House of Glass, this conference will explore the unique creative process bound up with the production and market success of the Milanese company by examining the policies and management of its artistic directors. The participants will analyse the trends and the most important figures who shaped the evolution of design in the various production sectors. Initially founded as manufacturers specialised in glass sheets for building purposes, the company then moved on to the production of unique pieces for glass furnishings. The undisputed qualitative growth of FontanaArte was reflected on the national and international scene with a multifaceted range of solutions and continuously developing areas of research. From 1932 onwards, under the direction of Gio Ponti, one of the most renowned architects and designers of the time, the FontanaArte brand was synonymous with creativity and avant-garde experimentation. Despite the fact that the limited production of the 1950s grew into mass production, the products never lost their uniqueness, so much so that a good number of models continue to be bestsellers for the company. The conference will focus therefore on the specific characteristics of FontanaArte throughout the crucial decades of production. The in-depth studies will primarily concentrate on the excellent glass processing with particularly significant examples (among the most celebrated names is architect Gae Aulenti), but also on the functional strategies concerning light in space and the interaction between user and designed environment. In such cases, lighting was often conceived to be adapted in an original way to personal needs by taking into account diversity of contexts.

Download the program

You must register to participate

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Conference Comics and the Invisible: Intertwining Academic and Artistic perspectives

The theme of the invisible in spiritual, social and geographical terms as developed in the context of graphic book illustration and comics was the focus of the Invisible Lines travelling project, cofunded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and created by the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities of Giorgio Cini Foundation in collaboration with Hamelin Associazione Culturale (Italy), Baobab Books (Czech Republic) and Central Vapeur (France). Three workshops for twelve selected young artists were organised for 2021 (Venice, Tabor and Strasbourg). They are now being followed up in 2022 by three publications and three exhibitions (Bologna, Tabor and Strasbourg). The conference, the last stage of this intense long journey, returns to the concept of invisibility to ask if, and how, the ninth art can represent the invisible. To be attended by artists and academics, the conference will end with a “drawing concert” directed by ingenious artists Stefano Ricci and Manuele Fior.

Download the Program Comics and the Invisible

Admission is free upon registration on the registration form.

Non-Belief and Non-Believers: evolution and challenges of contemporary irreligiousness

This Conference, organised by the Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics (UAAR) with the collaboration of the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilizations and Spiritualties and of the University of Piemonte Orientale, aims to investigate the heterogeneous phenomenon of contemporary unbelief from a multifaceted perspective which includes the juridical and socio-anthropological point of view.

This field of investigation, little explored at a scientific level, will be analyzed under the multiple aspects of individual and collective phenomenology, without neglecting the confrontation with the challenges of secularization and post-secularization, not least the tension between freedom of expression and protection of sacred, particularly evident in matters of blasphemy laws. The prismatic identities of irreligiousness will be compared on an international level, in a dialogue that also involves the increasingly emerging parodic religions, with the aim of drawing common lines in an approach that is not identitarian but rather the exercise of religious freedom.

Programme 15:00 – 19:00

15:00 Welcome Greetings:

Roberto Grendene (The Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics, Italy)
Francesco Piraino (Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities, Giorgio Cini Foundation)
Roberto Mazzola (Ecclesiastical Law and Intercultural Law, University of Piemonte Orientale)

15:30 Speeches:

Non religious belief landscape of Europe
Andrew Copson (President of Humanists International)

Freedom of speach and Blasphemy laws
Marco Croce (University of Florence)

17:10 Coffee break

17:30 Round Table:

Moderator: Francesco Alicino (LUM University)

The diversity and recent evolution of non-religion in Europe

Anne-Laure Zwilling (CNRS, Strasbourg)

Secularizations and their posts: crisis of the secularization theory and emergence of a post secular paradigm
Debora Spini (New York University in Florence and Syracuse University in Florence)

Why religion is different?
Victor Javier Vazquez Alonso (University of Sevilla)

The conference is in English with simultaneous translation into Italian

For more information:
non-belief.conference@cini.it

Reservation required

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Early-Music Seminars 2021 | Death in Venice. Johann Adolf Hasse’s last Venetian works 1773-1783

Death in Venice

Johann Adolf Hasse’s last Venetian works 1773-1783

Director: Pedro Memelsdorff

Master classes by Vivica Genaux

Venice, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, 25-29 October 2021

Seminar organized in collaboration with:

Johann Adolf Hasse Stiftung (Hamburg), Fondation Concordance, Irma Merk and L. + Th. La Roche Stiftung (Basel).

The autumn 2021 Early Music Seminar of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini will focus on the work of a German composer who chose Venice as his last hometown: Johann Adolf Hasse
(Bergedorf, 25 March 1699 – Venice, 23 December 1783). After a stunning musical career in Italy, Poland, England, Germany and Austria, in 1773 Hasse returned to his favourite city, Venice, and settled down in the Cannaregio neighbourhood. At his death, he was buried in the San Marcuola church next to the late Faustina Bordoni, celebrated coloratura singer whom he had married in 1730.

Hasse’s last compositions – including a Te Deum and a Requiem planned for his own funeral – count among the most moving ones of his entire production. The seminar will compare them with some of Hasse’s last reworkings of his own early works, such as the great Miserere settings composed in Dresden in the 1730s.

Main teacher will be Vivica Genaux, the most renowned specialist in the field, awarded by the Johann Adolf Hasse Foundation in Hamburg in 2019.

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Concert

28th October 2021, h. 6 pm, Auditorium “Lo Squero”

Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice

Death in Venice.

Johann Adolf Hasse, youthful compositions and Miserere in Do minor

Program

Farò ben io fra poco (da Ruggiero, 1777, atto I)

Vo disperato a morte (da Tito Vespasiano, 1738/59, atto III)

Il nocchier (da Ezio, 1755, atto I)

D’aspri legato (da I Pellegrini al Sepolcro di Nostro Signore¸ 1742)

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Miserere, Libera me, Sicut erat in principio (dal Miserere in Do minore, Ms Dresden, SLUB, 2477.D.31c, e Bonn, ULB, Ec 82.5)

Singers
Camilo Delgado, tenore; Annelise Ellars, soprano; Arnaud Gluck, controtenore; Mayan Goldenfeld, soprano;
Dalma Krajnyak, contralto; Breno Quinderé, baritono; Mats Roolvink, baritono; Angelo Testori, tenore

Musicians
Ignacio Ramal Viejo, violin; Andrew Wong, violin; Hyngun Cho Choi, cello; Jean-Christophe Dijoux, harpsichord

Teacher: Vivica Genaux

Assistant: Raffaele Mellace

Seminars Director: Pedro Memelsdorff

46th International Advanced Culture Course Dimore della distanza / Habiter la distance / Distant closeness

The International Advanced Culture Course will start up again from 16-19 November 2021. Renewing this legacy means pursuing the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s twofold vocation of helping keep alive and fecund the roots of Venetian humanism in its Mediterranean context and of studying trends in the contemporary world and contributing to them for the future.

Although the difficulties introduced by the pandemic in public and private life throughout the world have brought to the surface latent tensions and have made contradictions explicit, they have also suggested the possibility of lasting solutions. The topics to be discussed on the course are intended to reflect this idea: not just point out limits but seek new ways forward. To this background, “Distant closeness” is a theme rich in implications and possibilities: the distance imposed on us is not only prophylactic distancing, absence of conviviality, loss of dialogue and isolation but also a convergence towards new forms of interpersonal exchanges, respect for the “aura” in the careful, accurate use of words and listening. This may also involve re-gauging the distances between the typical world of the individual and the infinities that surround us.

The participants on the course will be:

Benjamin Arbel, Tel Aviv University;

Ricciarda Belgiojoso, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca;

Mario Botta, architect, Accademia di Architettura, USI;

Alberto Manguel, writer, Centro de Estudos da História da Leitura, Lisbon;

Amina Mettouchi, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris;

Carlo Ossola, Collège de France, Paris (Course Director);

Giulia Rodighiero, Università degli Studi di Padova;

Victor Stoichita, Université de Fribourg;

Alain Supiot, Collège de France, Paris;

Gabriele Veneziano, Collège de France, Paris and CERN, Ginevra.

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Download the Program of the 46th International Advanced Culture Course

Early-Music Seminars 2020 | Cantar Distanti. Ignazio Donati’s theatricalization of early baroque acoustics

Cantar Distanti

Ignazio Donati’s theatricalization of early Baroque acoustics

From 19 to 23 October 2020, the Foundation Giorgio Cini, in collaboration with the Concordance, Irma Merk, and L. + Th. La Roche foundations, will devote an Early Music Seminar to the practice advised by Donati: a selected group of young singers, coached by Marco Mencoboni, the most renowned specialist in the field, will experiment and practice the technique, or rather the art of arranging musicians of late Renaissance or early baroque polyphony in the architectural spaces of the period. Musics by Ignazio Donati and Claudio Monteverdi will be performed in the church and the former refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore, profiting from the extraordinary effects of the Palladian acoustics. In so doing, the Early Music Seminars will pay tribute to Ignazio Donati, but also respond to a historical moment in which, ironically, singers, instrumentalists, and audience are forced to adapt their own behaviour to the social distancing required by the health emergency caused by the coronavirus. That same distance will here work as a catalyst for a new musical and rhetorical amplification – a metaphor, we hope, of the immortal desire for community.

The order you have to follow is this: only the voice who starts singing first has to stand next to the organ. The other voices must stay far from the organ, separated from each other, unseen in the church, in the manner of many choirs. This being said, no one is forbidden to sing these concerts with all the singers near the organ; but it makes a much more beautiful effect if they stay away.

The spatial positioning of voices explained by Ignazio Donati in the “Dichiaratione del cantar lontano”, introductory to his Sacri Concentus unis, binis, ternis, quaternis… (Venice: Giacomo Vincenti, 1612), reveals a special attention to the relationship between music-making and architecture. His singers, disposed in different locations of a church – namely, all but one far from the organ and separated from each other, hidden behind architectural structures or decorations – take advantage of the acoustic effect of amplification due to the scattering of sound sources, as well as the theatrical effect of mystery. Thus, a small group of solo voices inexplicably sounds like a multitude of “many choirs”. Donati’s device was not new: previous models could be found, ranging from interaction in medieval hockets and the imitative techniques of Renaissance counterpoint to the Venetian or Roman polychoral style. But the pursuit of a “more beautiful effect” indicates a new application in the service of the Baroque rhetoric.

Download the announcement Cantar Distanti

PLEASE NOTE that the deadline for the announcebent has been postponed until July 12.

❗️ CANCELLED ❗️ Early-Music Seminars 2020 | Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677). Music and Culture in 17th-Century Venice

2019 saw the 400th anniversary of Barbara Strozzi’s baptism. This seminar thus comes at a fitting time to reflect on the close relationship between the extraordinary singer and composer and academic and musical circles in 17th-century Venice. The event has attracted international specialists from the United States, France, Switzerland and Germany, as well as Italian musicologists, scholars and philologists. The sessions on the first day will be held in the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani, while sessions on the second day will take place in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini.

Bringing the two days to a close, Pedro Memelsdorff will give a paper on some aspects of the work of the painter Evaristo Baschenis (Bergamo, 1617-1677). He will focus in particular on a new research project concerning a series of eight Baschenis paintings with musical subjects, once owned by the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore but dispersed after the Napoleonic plundering in 1806. To end the conference on Thursday 5 March, a trio (soprano with harpsichord and theorbo) will play music by Barbara Strozzi in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini (6.30 pm). The conference and concert are open to the public while seats last.

Early-Music Seminars 2020 | Antonio Caldara in Venice and at Vignanello 1709-1716

The Twinned Labyrinths seminar pays homage to the Venetian composer Antonio Caldara, a singer, violinist and cellist in the Cappella Ducale San Marco and a long-term guest in the residences of Prince Francesco Maria Ruspoli, including Vignanello Castle (Viterbo), where he met some of the most distinguished musicians of the age and composed an immense repertoire of cantatas, serenades and oratorios. Some of these pieces were performed in the courtyards and gardens of the prince, including the famous Vignanello Giardino di verdure, a kind of garden maze built by Ottavia Orsini in 1611.
The seminar will focus on instrumental chamber repertoires and the works composed during the Vignanello period, with a special emphasis on cantatas and serenades. There will be master-classes by Amandine Beyer and lectures for violinists and solo singers, with a final concert on 4 February at the Squero Auditorium. Directed by Pedro Memelsdorff, the seminar has been organised by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini with the contribution and collaboration of the Fondation Concordance and the Irma Merk and L. + Th. La Roche Foundations (Basel, Switzerland).

Early-Music Seminars 2019 | Opera and Slavery in the French Caribbean (1760-90)

Closely related to the previous meeting held in November 2018, this seminar is addressed to solo singers of all registers of voices, especially haut-contres (high tenors) and sopranos with very agile coloratura. The scholarship holders will be guided by expert teachers and assisted by specialists of the French late Baroque and style galant repertoire. Directed by Pedro Memelsdorff, this second date with early music will be dedicated to the operatic repertoires of the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, and especially the career of the first coloured singer to play lead roles in French opera, the daughter of a freed slave whose stage name was Minette. After her theatrical debut in February 1781, Minette played lead roles in over forty productions (operas, melodramas and French comedies), thus establishing a sort of legend, but also arousing considerable social controversy, recorded by the local periodicals of the time. Among the repertoires performed by Minette are libretto settings (or their paraphrases) by writers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, whose theme was racial differences and slavery, and therefore inevitably also emancipation. This detail gives the topic a special sociological interest. The highly acclaimed coloured singer was never remunerated for her performances due to her origins as a slave. She defied traditionalist criticism, however, and excited the mixed elite of her audiences who saw in her the desired but feared symbol of racial hybridisation.
Furthermore, singing and acting in comedies such as L’amant statue by Nicolas Dalayrac or Jean Martini L’amoureux de quinze ans and, especially, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion, gave voice to an interracial dialogue that was to greatly impress 18th-century “Haitian” audiences.

The seminar will end with a public concert at the Squero Auditorium on 22 February 2019 at 6.00 pm.
The programme includes arias and opera scenes by composers such as Adolphe Blaise, Johann Paul Aegidius Martini, Egidio Duni and Nicolas Dalayrac. The featured works are not revivals of the versions performed in their Parisian premières from 1770 to 1780, but the versions sung in the theatres of Port-au-Prince, in the French-Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, by Elisabeth Ferrand, better known as Minette, the first coloured soloist in the history of opera. Her dazzling (but subsequently overlooked) career from 1781 to 1789, revolutionized traditions and marked the history of theatre and music in America and Europe.

Contest Winners:
Javier Coronado, haute-contre
Maya Kherani, soprano
Maria Lueiro, soprano
Lila Powell Khazoum, soprano
Héctor dos Santos, bass
Belen Vaquero, mezzo-soprano
Benjamin Gaspon, traverso

Coadiuvants:
Ignacio Ramal & Guadalupe del Moral, violin
Alaia Ferrán, viola
Neven Lesage e Lucile Tessier, oboe
Alejandro Pérez, bassoon
Hyngun Cho, cello
Pablo Kornfeld, harpsichord

Teachers:
Vivica Genaux, mezzo-soprano
Pedro Memelsdorff, director
Lisandro Abadie, assistant

Seminar The Mediterranean Linguistic Atlas: New Developments and Perspectives

As part of the events associated with the digital enhancement project of the Mediterranean Linguistic Atlas, a seminar organised by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini will be held on San Giorgio in collaboration with the Centre for Sicilian Philological and Linguistic Studies, Palermo; the Department of Juridical Sciences, Language, Interpretation and Translation at the University of Trieste; the Department of Asian, African and Mediterranean Studies at L’Orientale University, Naples; and ALEPO (Linguistic and Ethnographic Atlas of Eastern Piedmont) in the Department of Humanities Studies at the University of Turin.
The topics addressed will concern: assigning linguistic areas to area managers (by Giovanni Ruffino, Franco Crevatin, Riccardo Contini, and Tullio Telmon); the presentation of projects for the involvement of the new generations (training seminars and scholarships); defining methods and objectives and the sharing of materials online; describing the so-called “area monographs”; and the presentation of the new bulletin for the Mediterranean Linguistic Atlas (BALM).

In addition to the organisers, so far the following institutions have confirmed they will attend:
Accademia dei Lincei; Istituto dell’Atlante Linguistico Italiano; Department of Human
Sciences, University of Basilicata; Department of Philology and Literary Criticism, University
of Siena; Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, University of Udine; Department
of Humanities Studies, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice; and Department of Humanities and
Social Sciences, University of Sassari.