Preserving Memories of War Captivity: Legacy, Museums and Repositories
April 23, 2024, 2:00 PM - 9:00 PM
First day, in person and on Zoom at CIMA
Second day, in person and on Zoom at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò – NYU
This event is free and open to the public.
RSVP HERE ON ZOOM AND IN PERSON FOR APRIL 23
The event consists of a two-day international conference where archivists, historians, and museum experts will converge to explore their research endeavors. Delving into the intricate tapestry of WWII Italian captivity across Italy, the United Kingdom, the US, and Australia, the event promises illuminating discussions on preservation, storytelling, and cataloging efforts.
Three hybrid panels will seamlessly blend in-person presentations with virtual participation via Zoom. Experts will unveil their curated collections, pioneering projects, and share insights into the meticulous curation of special collections, museums, and institutions intertwined with the cultural and material legacies of Italian POWs.
This event is part of a series on “Memory, Memories, and Memorialization of WWII Italian Captivity”, organized by Elena Bellina (New York University) and Giorgia Alù (The University of Sydney), and co-sponsored by NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, The University of Sydney, The John D. Calandra Institute for Italian American Studies (CUNY), and the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA). The series aims to investigate how WWII Italian POWs have narrated their long captivity experiences, as well as how these narratives have been recollected and memorialized in Italy, America, Australia, Asia, and Africa.
PROGRAM
ROUNDTABLE 1 – 2:00-4:00pm (EST-NYC)
Preserving Memories of Captivity and Their Legacy: Museums and Archives – Part One
MODERATOR: Nicola Lucchi, Executive Director, Center for Italian Modern Art
SPEAKERS:
Alan R. Perry, Professor of Italian, Gettysburg College, Letterkenny’s Italian POW Trench Art: The Chapel and Bell Tower
with Steve Mancini, Professor of Computer and Information Systems, Robert Morris University, On Filming Letterkenny
Summer O’Brian, Curator, Eden Camp Modern History Museum, UK, Collecting Material History of WW2 Captivity in the UK
Emanuele Di Muro, Archivist Archivio dell’Ufficio Storico dello Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito/ Italian Army Historical Office; University of Molise, Italy, Italian POWs in the Italian Army Military Records: The Case of General Guglielmo Nasi
Natalia Cangi, Director, National Diary Archive, Pieve Santo Stefano, Italy, Saverio Tutino’s Project on Collecting War Memories
Emilio Coccia, President, Zonderwater Block Ex POW Association, South Africa, The Italian POWs Legacy in South Africa: the Zonderwater Museum
ROUNTABLE 2 – 4:30-6:00pm (EST-NYC)
Preserving Memories of Captivity and Their Legacy: Digital Humanities Projects
MODERATOR: Yemane Demissié, Professor of Cinema, NYU
SPEAKERS:
Giovanni Pietro Vitali, Associate Professor in Digital Humanities, Université de Versailles Saint Quentin; Associated Researcher, University of Oxford,
Ultime Lettere / Last Letters from the World Wars: Forming Italian Language, Identity and Memory in Texts of Conflict. https://www.ultimelettere.it/LastLetters/people/giovanni-pietro-vitali
Daniel Hutchinson, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department of Belmont Abbey College (NC), German POW Newspaper Archive
http://dhl.bac.edu/pow-newspapers
Stuart Lee, Reader in e-Learning and Digital Libraries; Faculty of English, University of Oxford, Their Finest Hour: Digital Crowdsourcing of WW2 Material
https://theirfinesthour.english.ox.ac.uk/
Adrian Vickers, Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, The University of Sydney
Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia: OMAA
https://omaa-arts.sydney.edu.au/
Light refreshments will be provided
ROUNDTABLE 3 – 7:00-9:00pm (EST-NYC)
Preserving Memories of Captivity and Their Legacy: Museums and Archives – Part Two
MODERATOR: tbc
SPEAKERS:
Stephanie Longo, Writer of Italian American Regional History, US, Letterkenny, Memories and Community
Alan Perry, Professor of Italian, Gettysburg College, US, Hereford’s Italian POW Material Culture: A Texan Capitello and St. Mary’s Beautification
Warren Stricker, Director of the Research Center, The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, US, Captivity and Community on the Texas Plains
Elizabeth Triarico, Archivist, Italian Historical Society, Co.As.It, Melbourne, Australia, Preserving and Sharing Stories of Italian Captivity in Australia
https://www.coasit.com.au/italian-historical-society
Joanne Tapiolas, Founder of Footprints of Italian Prisoners of War, Australia, A Community History Project
https://italianprisonersofwar.com/
Elisa Longarato, Founder of Zonderwater Online Project, Italy, On the Zonderwater Block ex-POW Association
http://www.zonderwater.com/en/
Sciara – Prima c’agghiorna; a theater performance at CIMA
May 01, 2024, 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
by Luana Rondinelli
Directed by Giovanni Carta
With Luana Rondinelli and I Musicanti (Gregorio Caimi – chitarra, Enzo Toscano – violoncello, Debora Messina – singer)
Production I Musicanti
Running Time 73 min
The compelling human and judicial story of Francesca Serio, the first woman to denounce the mafia and mother of Salvatore Carnevale, the trade unionist barbarously killed by the mafia on May 16 1955.
IN ITALIAN WITH ENGLISH SUPERTITLES
General Admission: Free
RESERVE YOUR FREE TICKET HERE!
English translation and English supertitles have been provided by Alice Amodeo and Alessandro Barbera (translation), Teresa Cassi and Valentina Somaschini (supertitles), students of Civica Scuola Interpreti e Traduttori Altiero Spinelli – Milano as part of a tutored educational program led by In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY.
About the performers:
Luana Rondinelli is an actress, playwright and director. Born in Rome and raised in Marsala, she graduated from the theater school of the Municipality of Marsala, directed by maestro Michele Perriera. She continues her training at “Ribalte”, the acting school led by Enzo Garinei and participates in multiple laboratories. In 2011 she founded the Accura Teatro company and is an author-actress and director of Taddrarite: a play against violence against women, winner of the critics’ prize at the international contest Etica in Atto 2013, and of the Rome Fringe Festival 2014 for best show and dramaturgy. The show was then performed in the USA at the San Diego International Fringe Festival 2016, and at “In Scena! Italian Theater Festival” 2015 in New York. She obtained other awards for Giacominazza, a text she wrote and acted, awarded as best original writing at the national theater festival Riflessi di Catania, and for which she was later awarded best character actor and best dramaturgy at the City of Leonforte Award; and for A Testa Sutta written for actor Giovanni Carta, obtaining the Fersen Prize for dramaturgy in the same year in which she was part of the jury of the Mario Fratti Prize of New York. These successes anticipate the long work carried out on the writing and creation of Penelope – The Odyssey Is Female, which was awarded the 2018 Anima Mundi Prize for dramaturgy female, assigned to Rondinelli at the Piccolo Teatro Grassi in Milan, before her summer debut on the stage of the Dionysiaca of the Calatafimi Segesta Festival. In the summer of 2019, the Teatro Stabile of Catania commissioned her to write a text for 350th anniversary since the largest eruption of Etna: ETerNA a’ vucca l’amma directed by Nicola Alberto Orofino. In January 2020, she directed three renowned actresses Donatella Finocchiaro, Claudia Potenza and Antonia Truppo, in the new version of Taddrarite for which she was awarded a special mention for theater at the Prize Aphrodite. She also directed Jerico Innocenza Rosa starring actress Valeria Solarino. Luana Rondinelli is also the author of and performer in the show Sciara prima c’agghiorna inspired by Franco Blandi’s book Francesca Serio, the mother with I Musicanti directed by Giovanni Carta, produced by Gregorio Caimi.
The group I Musicanti was started by Gregorio Caimi, a Sicilian guitarist born in Marsala, on the western tip of Sicily. Land of wind and salt which geographically belongs to the Euro-continent, but which is just over a hundred kilometers from the North African coasts. The Arab influence can be read in the very name of Marsala, which derives from: marsa “port” and āliyy “large”, a legacy of the Islamic period. This African, Arab and Mediterranean proximity in a broader sense means that Marsala has been a “port” in which different people, cultures, religions and traditions have continuously mixed and amalgamated. The essence of this flavorful mix, this embrace of flavors and stories, of melodies and stories, of movements and visions find fulfillment in the art of “I Musicanti”. In 2002, Gregorio brought together a group of Sicilian musicians with different training, musical culture and characteristics, once again mixing sensitivity and stories that gave life to “I Musicanti”. Their music expertly mixes the Sicilian musical tradition with those coming from different countries of the Mediterranean and Africa, giving life to an intense and rich style, capable of speaking to the depths of the human soul, to involve and excite, especially when performed live. “I Musicanti” represent an example of a mix of musical styles, modern sounds and instruments, archaic musical minds. Having performed for over twenty years, they have accomplished an artistic maturation that from ethno folk has reached, thanks also to the artistic partnership with the composer and arranger Alfredo Giammanco, the modern and global sounds of world music. This is precisely the field of research of “I Musicanti”: making the Mediterranean tradition one’s own and at the same time bringing together the different experiences (jazz, rock, folk, etc.) of the musicians who are part of it, aiming for universality of the message, without ever losing sight of the identity. That of “I Musicanti” is therefore a project of folk music projected into the contemporary world.
About In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY:
In 2013 Kairos Italy Theater, the preeminent Italian theater company in New York City, together with the Italian KIT Italia, created In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY, the first Italian theater festival to take place in all five New York City boroughs and beyond. The festival’s first edition was part of the 2013 Year of Italian Culture in the United States and it was supported by the Embassy of Italy in DC and Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU that, soon after, became one of the organizers. The festival has since become an annual event. www.inscenany.com
Persisting Matters: An Artist Talk Series – Hilary Harkness in conversation with Ksenia Soboleva and Jerry Saltz
May 07, 2024, 6:00 PM
General Admission: FREE
Please join us for a new episode in this series of encounters and conversations with contemporary artists, this time with artist Hilary Harkness, art historian Dr. Ksenia Soboleva and art critic Jerry Saltz.
Persisting Matters is a series of talks that places contemporary artists in conversation with scholars, curators, critics, and the public. The series is developed in the context of CIMA’s 2023-2024 exhibition, Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948 (October 12, 2023 – January 27, 2024), and supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Cagli saw his artistic practice as a tool for anti-rhetorical resistance and critique to power in times of exile, displacement and trauma. Questions of gender, racism, political oppression and resilience through art and community practices were central to his work in the years of his exile from Italy, due to the country’s racial laws. Persisting Matters engages contemporary artists, whose practices explore these pressing subjects in their individual context and prism.
Hilary Harkness (b. 1971) meticulously fuses Old Master tactics with a distinctly contemporary sensibility to explore power dynamics, war, and gender through an intersectional lens. Her work explores interpersonal dynamics through a lens that allows power struggles inherent in sex, race, and class systems to play out on an uncensored stage. Harkness earned her BA from UC Berkeley and her MFA from Yale University. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain; American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Yuz Museum Shanghai; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; and the Seavest Collection, New York, NY; among others. In 2017, she received the Henry Clews Award and participated in the inaugural Master Residency Program at the Château de La Napoule in France. She has lectured widely at leading academic and cultural institutions. In 2014, she co-curated Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and Interiors at The FLAG Art Foundation. Harkness’s first solo exhibition with PPOW Gallery, Prisoners from the Front, was on display in fall 2023.
Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York based writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation on art, AIDS, and lesbian identity in the United States. She is currently working on a book project titled Friendship as a Way of Art: Queer Identity and Visual Citation. Soboleva is a regular contributor to the Brooklyn Rail and BOMB magazine, and her writings have appeared in various exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. She teaches at the New School and NYU.
Jerry Saltz is the senior art critic at New York magazine and its entertainment site Vulture. He is the winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and 2019 National Magazine Award. Before joining New York in 2007, Saltz had been art critic for The Village Voice since 1998 and was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize during his tenure there. He is an author of NYT Best Seller How To Be an Artist among other books. A frequent guest lecturer, he has spoken at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum, and many others, and has appeared at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere.
This series is developed through a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Light refreshments will be provided.
Stile Olivetti: Between Art and Design
May 10, 2024, 4:00 PM - 9:00 PM
General Admission: $15, Members & Students: FREE
Join Olivetti scholars and enthusiasts for an afternoon of study, dedicated to an Italian company that shaped the history of office machines, labor practices, product design and communications, and cultural patronage.
PROGRAM
4:00 PM: Greetings from Gaetano di Tondo, President, Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti
4:10 PM: Beniamino de’ Liguori Carino, Fondazione Adriano Olivetti: The Olivetti Universe
4:30 PM Emanuele Cappelli, Cappelli Identity Design, Olivetti and Design: Typewriters, Typefaces and Brand Communication
5:30PM: Lindsay Caplan, Brown University, Olivetti and the Arts: Computers as Model
5:30 PM-6:30 PM: typewriting workshop with original Olivetti typewriters
6:30 PM-7:00 PM: Light refreshments
7:00 PM: Film screening, Paradigma Olivetti (dir. Davide Maffei, 2020, 88 minutes). In Italian with English subtitles
About the speakers:
Emanuele Cappelli is the Founder and Creative Director of the Cappelli Identity Design studio, with over 25 years of experience in the sector with international clients. Brand & Graphic Design teacher at various institutions and universities in Europe, the United States, Peru, Ecuador, Chile and the Middle East with over 20 years of academic experience. He is a TEDx speaker and disseminator on the themes of the Dynamic brand, also through membership of the World Design Organization. His vision of design became a monograph in 2022 entitled: Dynamic brand. The brand’s new communication methodology, published by Skira and distributed throughout the world. His passion is Olivetti.
Lindsay Caplan is an art historian who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century art. She is Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Brown University and the author of Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy (University of Minnesota, 2022). She has published on the intersections of art, technology, and politics in exhibition catalogues, edited volumes, as well as venues such as Grey Room, ARTMargins, Piano B, The Scholar & Feminist Online, Outland, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and e-flux journal.
In collaboration with:
With the in-kind support of Joseph Tedeschi
Under the patronage of:
Persisting Matters: An Artist Talk Series – Tammie Rubin in conversation with Ellen Tani
May 14, 2024, 6:00 PM
General Admission: FREE
Please join us for a new episode in this series of encounters and conversations with contemporary artists, this time with Tammie Rubin and Ellen Tani.
Persisting Matters is a series of talks that places contemporary artists in conversation with scholars, curators, critics, and the public. The series is developed in the context of CIMA’s 2023-2024 exhibition, Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948 (October 12, 2023 – January 27, 2024), and supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Cagli saw his artistic practice as a tool for anti-rhetorical resistance and critique to power in times of exile, displacement and trauma. Questions of gender, racism, political oppression and resilience through art and community practices were central to his work in the years of his exile from Italy, due to the country’s racial laws. Persisting Matters engages contemporary artists, whose practices explore these pressing subjects in their individual context and prism.
Tammie Rubin is a ceramic sculptor and installation artist whose practice considers the intrinsic power of objects and coded symbols as signifiers, wishful contraptions, and mythic relics. Her artwork weaves together familial, historical, and literary narratives of Black American citizenry, migration, autonomy, and faith. Rubin has received residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Penland School of Craft, and Pottery Northwest. She is the 2022 Tito’s Prize winner and a 2024 USA Fellow in Craft.
Rubin exhibits widely; selections include Project Row Houses, Houston, TX; the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; AGBS Christian-Green Gallery at the University of Texas at Austin, Mulvane Art Museum, KS; George Washington Carver Museum, Austin, TX; Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, IN; The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, TX; Women & Their Work Gallery, Austin, TX; Rivalry Projects, Buffalo, NY; and Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio, TX. Rubin is represented by Galleri Urbane, Dallas, TX., and C24 Gallery, New York, NY.
Rubin’s artwork has received reviews in online and print publications such as Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Oxford American, Art in America, Glasstire, Austin Chronicle, Sightlines, fields, Conflict of Interest, Arts and Culture Texas, and Ceramics: Art & Perception. She is a member of ICOSA Collective, a non-profit cooperative gallery. Born and raised in Chicago, Rubin lives in Austin, Texas, where she is an Associate Professor of Ceramics & Sculpture at St. Edward’s University.
Ellen Tani is an art historian and curator whose research in the history of modern and contemporary art is informed by feminist, critical race, and disability theory. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art History at Rochester Institute of Technology. A collaborator at heart, she co-developed the AREA Code Art Fair in Boston I 2020, and has held curatorial positions at the ICA Boston and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Most recently, she co-curated the exhibition RETROaction in 2024 with Charles Gaines, Kate Fowle, and Homi Bhabha at the New York and Los Angeles locations of Hauser & Wirth Gallery. Her research has been supported by the Clark Research and Academic Program, the Getty Research Institute, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her scholarship has appeared in Art Journal, Panorama, and American Quarterly, and her current book manuscript explores the career of conceptual artist Charles Gaines.
This series is developed through a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Light refreshments will be provided.