Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2015: Art, Music, Text

Since the early twentieth century, Italian culture has been dominated by polemics against conventional form and calls for an abolition of boundaries between the arts. Italy's most influential artistic movements favoured multiple, reversible, "open" structures, a trend that can be found throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. Interdisciplinarity has been driven by a desire for transgression and emancipation from obsolete artistic conventions, but also by a belief in the deep-rooted affinity between literature, music and the visual arts. Critics like Bonaddio and Butler have argued that such border-crossings are fundamental to understanding creativity during this period. Yet, so far, no one has attempted to study the developments across the period to assess the complex social makeup of the groups that defied established boundaries, or to explore the implications of their theoretical ideas for the teaching and study of modern Italian culture. Research on interdisciplinarity in the arts in the 21st century is very fragmented and has not been adequately theorised.

In addition to fostering dialogue about interdisciplinarity in the arts, the network will use questions that arise to explore issues relating to the development of the discipline of Languages and Area Studies: what are the implications of border-crossing in 20th and 21st century culture in Italy on the way Italian culture is researched and taught in the academy? How could interdisciplinarity enable Italian Studies to improve its public engagement profile? This project promotes the creation of instruments, such as a database, website, workshops and panel discussion, that will enable easier communication between academics and non-academics. Policy issues arising from our findings will be discussed with the SIS, and more broadly with Language subject bodies for schools and universities (UCML, LLAS, ALL and CILT) and will be introduced to the US Italian Studies associations (AAIS) as our research will have implications there too.

The network will run three workshops in London (UCL), New York (NYU), and Rome (RomaTre), and a panel at the Society for Italian Studies conference in 2013. Each of the workshops is dedicated to a separate period: (1) Modernism, (2) Postmodernism and (3) the Internet age. The steering group (Brook, Mussgnug, Pieri) will create and maintain a website and a searchable database, the first of its kind, of academics, museum curators, members of conservatoires and the media with interests in Italian culture. The group will also disseminate results through journal articles and a website. The steering committee will be supported by an advisory panel of experts from within and outside academia.

This project focuses on the following questions:
1) Causes: Where do the roots of modern and contemporary interdisciplinarity lie? Why has it taken place in Italy during this period and what contributed to these developments? What is the place of technology, artistic milieus, journals, cafés, printing, Internet etc. in the development of cross-fertilisation?
2) Change and development: Can one map developments across the whole period? Does the idea of working between artistic genres and disciplines change over time?
3) Philosophical and ideological underpinnings: How do metaphors of borders enable us to understand interdisciplinarity better? What does interdisciplinarity tell us about concepts of facilitating, policing, transgressing? How does the border crossing relate to fragmentation? How do ideas of emancipation and freedom fit in?
4) Policy Implications: how can interdisciplinarity inspire new patterns of research, teaching, and exhibition organisation in Italian Studies and more broadly in Languages?

These questions will be addressed by a network that brings together academics, doctoral and post-doctoral researchers, museum curators, members of conservatoires, and cultural practitioners currently working in Italy.

1. Educational Policy Makers and Teachers in the UK
This project will provide a forum to enable free, but structured, discussion and thinking anew about policy and curriculum development in Languages, considered by HEFCE 'vulnerable' and 'strategic', in both university departments and secondary schools. There will be discussion of the future of Italian Studies in the UK, the exploration of questions of what it means to be a Language discipline, what the study of a single country entails, how closer links to those working on countries such as Italy in other parts of our universities can be pursued and the benefits and drawbacks of opening out a Language discipline in this way. The project, which was presented to the SIS Executive on Jan 13th 2012, will dialogue openly with this subject body throughout its life. Concepts emerging from the 3 workshops relevant to policy will be integrated into the discussion at a panel at the SIS conference in July 2013 to which representatives of CILT, ALL, UCML and LLAS will be invited. Findings from this panel will then be proposed for discussion at the SIS Executive in July 2013, and outcomes from the conference and Executive meeting will then be presented for discussion at the next relevant meeting of both the LLAS and UCML and also to to CILT and ALL. The aim is to provide new ideas, strategies and advice to policy-makers and curriculum developers in Languages in universities and in schools to make Italian and other Language disciplines as competitive nationally and internationally as possible. The aim is also to free up dialogue between teachers and lecturers in Languages.

2. Museum Curators and Professionals in the UK and North America
Workshop 1 (NYU) and Workshop 2 (UCL) will draw in handpicked curators with interests in modern Italian culture. By exploring both the theoretical underpinning of interdisciplinary practices in Italy and by creating a database of researchers and practitioners, this project has the potential to engage strongly with the museum world. Work on Italian Modernism by North-American scholars and curators in the past 2 decades has shown that better links between academia and the museum world can be mutually beneficial and has the potential to open up new pathways to engage with the wider public. The searchable database will enable museum curators working on Italy to have immediate access, through the database, to academics who can advise them on exhibitions and work with them in other ways. In other words, the database, together with the programme of workshops, will provide a springboard for further collaboration and a virtual networking forum for academics and museum practitioners working in the broad field of Italian studies in the UK. While we cannot guarantee that it will facilitate future wider interdisciplinary partnerships or free up the relations between museums and the academy, the potential for this is in our view considerable.


3. Cultural Practitioners in Italy
Workshop 3 (Roma Tre) will enable academics to test out, and challenge, theories about how interdisciplinarity works, and to network with artists, so providing opportunities to set up interviews and other collaborations in the future, which would provide an opportunity to deepen discussion. It will benefit cultural practitioners by providing them with a forum to reflect on artistic processes, to consider emerging theories behind the current artistic trends of border crossing, to network with those with similar artistic interests, and to consider and reconsider the place (both advantages and pitfalls) of the web-based technologies in the shaping of border-crossing art. Artistic endeavours in Italy like Wu Ming's work, Ibrid@menti and others have been at the forefront of experimentation with the possibilities of new artistic forms and hybrids, and interactions between academics interested in border crossings and artists will, we believe, be very fruitful and exciting for both groups.