Multistable Cityscapes

The workshop Multistable Cityscapes is meant to provide a ground for reciprocal confrontation addressed to all those scholars, theoreticians and artists who are interested in exploring the implications of multistability in relation to cityscapes and urban communities. The workshop aims to promote a reflection on urban spaces around the world bypassing merely historical/historicist approaches, thus endorsing a horizontal, rhizomatous and open perception of cities’ ambivalent relationship with modernity and stressing aspects of confrontation and plurality rather than complaining the loss of any alleged former identity. As multistable figures, cityscapes also take dissimilar, even contradictory and mutually exclusive shapes, which correspond to equally valid or possible descriptions, yet cannot be combined into a single picture – shapes that may have sharp contours but are also liable to transformations and sudden aspect changes.

Programme:

10:00 Welcome: Manuele Gragnolati and Fabio Camilletti

Session I
Chair: Jennifer Burns
10:15 Fabio Camilletti:
Mourning and Melancholia. Rome, Pompeii, Paris

11:00 Filippo Trentin:
Rethinking the Origin. The Quarrel between Ancients
and (post-)Moderns in Contemporary Rome

11:45 Break

Session II
Chair: Manuele Gragnolati

12:00 Jennifer Burns:
Cities and Elsewheres. The Multiple Experience of the Italian City in Works by Migrant Writers

12:45 Silvia Cresti:
On Jews and Cities in Italy.
Outsiders and Insiders intermingled

13:30 Lunch Break

Session III
Chair: Christoph Holzhey

15:00 Sandrine Sanos:
Nostalgia, Elsewheres, and the Future.
Interwar Far-Right Intellectuals’ Fantasies of Paris

15:45 David Kishik: Benjamin in New York

16:30 Bobby Benedicto: ‘Elsewhere’, in Gay Manila

17:15 Break

Session IV
Chair: Fabio Camilletti

17:45 Pauline Julier and Camille Louis:
Reversible Landscapes

18:45 Break

19:00 Simone Brioni:
Screening: Aulò
(ITA, directed by Simone Brioni, Ermanno Guida, Graziano Chiscuzzu, 40′)