Contemporary Italy

Negli anni del boom economico, la nuova realtà produttiva ha trovato nella disciplina del design una delle manifestazioni più evidenti.
Come nel Rinascimento, grazie alle nuove teorie architettoniche che si richiamavano al modello classico (vitruviano), si era formata e aveva conquistato la propria individualità la lingua speciale dell’architettura, così nel pieno Novecento la lingua del design si è specializzata e si è emancipata, facendo proprio il lessico dei settori che la compongono: la progettazione, la produzione, la promozione pubblicitaria.
Negli anni Cinquanta in Italia si è diffusa e si è consolidata la scrittura "del" e "sul" design. Con la definizione di “stile industriale” è comparsa anche una ricca letteratura assieme tecnica e critica, che si caratterizzava per una lingua speciale disposta su più livelli stilistici, corrispondenti alla natura unitamente teorica e pratica della disciplina del design.
La lingua italiana d’uso ha assorbito il linguaggio dell’industrializzazione, i suoi tecnicismi. Numerosi termini tecnici sono entrati nella lingua comune grazie a questa nuova disciplina che congiungeva la produzione in serie e l’arte (e le sue lingue settoriali), rendendo l’espressione artistica parte della quotidianità. E al significato che il fenomeno del design ha assunto nella società italiana degli ultimi decenni, condizionando i bisogni e i gusti, si possono attribuire alcuni nuovi fatti linguistici dell’italiano contemporaneo, visibili nel lessico e in alcune soluzioni sintattiche e testuali, che in parte distinguono la lingua del design da altri linguaggi settoriali.

This book is the outcome of a common need, both theoretical and political, to elaborate a feminist reflection on the intertwining of gender and visuality, starting from the Italian context. The topic of “the image of women” has come to the fore as an emergency in conjunction with the sex scandals that accompanied the decline of Berlusconi-ism, strongly characterized by a renewed visibility of sexist ideas and behavior. Our contribution calls back to radical feminism as the key to interpreting the present, with the prospect of reconnecting it to crucial contemporary questions, starting with gender. Instead of addressing the downgrading of the female gender to eroticized and subjugated images and its more or less direct relationship with women’s condition in Italy, our departure point was a critique of representation as a gendered domain and the answers provided by feminist movements. In fact, our aim was to problematize a series of questions that were raised by Berlusconi’s sex scandals, but which have been constantly deferred to a more opportune moment, removed from the contingency and an emergency that seemed to call for a straightforward, immediate, compact and shared answer.

The visual field is a crucial area for feminist reflection, starting with a problematization of questions that involve a multiplicity of subjects who do not necessarily identify with the category of “woman.” The image and the forms of subjugation inflicted on women are, in fact, indivisible from the many articulations through which difference is created. The female image as a screen of power has a double weight: on the one hand, it hides power dynamics through processes of naturalization and legitimation; on the other, it also represents a political field of negotiation and conflict, both a product and a place of production.

In rendering increasingly evident the impossibility of distinguishing between political and private, Italian and global political events have proven feminism right. If “the time is now,” we don’t need redemption in order to make room for an image of women that is complete and dignified; rather, it must be re-invented. The critique of processes of naturalization of alterity, of the crystallization of identity, of the co-optation of every form of diversity, of the criminalization and marginalization of conflict and of the racialization of society is central to feminist politics. Topics regarding the feminization of labor – the extension of the characteristics which have historically been attributed to female labor, i.e. care-giving and reproduction – to the entire work sphere, the intertwining of identities, politics and the demands of situated positions and the structural violence of a productive system have become central junctions representing starting points for rethinking possible common politics.

FOR THE FORMATTED VERSION WITH KENTRIDGE'S DRAWINGS GO TO: https://eternaltiber.net/triumphs-and-laments-research/

This is a guide to the iconography of William Kentridge’s Triumphs & Laments, the 500-meter-long frieze of colossal figures traced into the black accretions on the Tiber Embankments between Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini in Rome in early Spring 2016:  http://www.tevereterno.it/arts/triumphs-and-laments/. The guide was compiled at the request of Kristin Jones, artistic director of the project, and was initially part of a Guidebook cell phone app, which has since been discontinued.

Prior to compiling the guide texts, with generous help from dozens of colleagues and students, I had the immense pleasure of serving as Curator of Historical Research for Triumphs & Laments, overseeing the research group at John Cabot University which formulated the chronological database ('timeline') of images from the history of art, cinema, and journalism provided to William Kentridge to inspire his drawings for the frieze. Our research continued and augmented that of Andrea Biagioni and Sara Spizzichino of Tevereterno.

Please share these texts with friends, colleagues, and students. Writing the guide was our labor of love for Rome, for William Kentridge and his work, and for the joy of collective creativity that made Triumphs & Laments a reality.

NOTE: In the pdf version available online before May 20, 2017, the hyperlinks were inoperative. In the current Word document, they work.

Is there such a thing as a design language? The rapid growth of design in Italy beginning in the earliest decades of the past century, witnessed the concurrent rise of a specific language that appeared in the writings of the authors of industrial design (artists and craftsmen), as well as those of its theorists (designers and ideologists) or even critics (art critic authors).
This paper is meant to appraise design literature from a historical perspective, through the linguistic analysis of texts by its most important exponents (Ponti to Rosselli, to Sottsass jr. and Mendini). The goal is to discern the main linguistic features of one of the most representative productive fields in twentieth-century Italian civil life.
The expected goal is twofold: to begin, as is the case with other disciplines, a study of the linguistic and expressive forms that arose from theoretical changes in the field of design, and to gather into a Glossary the terms that become typical of the design language.
Thanks to the description of the distinctive features of linguistic expression in writings on and about design, we wish to contribute to the definition of the individuality of the design discipline, which reflects the syncretism of the specific activities involved in it: from the different phases of industrial production, to design theory, which has always relied on artistic and aesthetic approaches of its time.
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Esiste una lingua del design? Il rapido affermarsi della disciplina del design in Italia fin dai primi decenni del secolo scorso vede emergere in contemporanea una lingua speciale, che si manifesta negli scritti degli artefici del disegno industriale (artisti e artigiani), così come nella scrittura dei suoi teorici (progettisti e ideologi della disciplina) e dei suoi critici.
Il contributo si pone come obiettivo la valutazione della letteratura del design nella sua prospettiva storica attraverso l’analisi linguistica dei testi di alcuni dei suoi massimi rappresentanti (da Gio Ponti a Alberto Rosselli a Alessandro Mendini), per cogliere gli aspetti salienti di uno dei settori produttivi di grande rilievo nella vita civile italiana del Novecento.
Il risultato ricercato è duplice: iniziare, come già avviene in altre discipline, uno studio delle forme linguistico-espressive frutto dei cambiamenti teorici nell’ambito del design e la raccolta in un Glossario dei termini che diventano tipici della lingua del design.
Grazie alla descrizione dei tratti salienti dell’espressività linguistica di chi scrive del e sul design si intende dare un contributo alla definizione dell’individualità della disciplina, che riflette il sincretismo delle attività settoriali che la compongono (dalla produzione industriale in tutte le sua fasi alla teorizzazione, che da sempre si avvale delle teorie artistiche ed estetiche coeve) .