Notturni Contemporanei | geoliteray walk through Venice nightscapes – 2 Feb 2024
Notturni Contemporanei | geoliteray walk through Venice nightscapes – 2 Feb 2024
Notturni Contemporanei. Un’esplorazione geoletteraria dei nightscapes veneziani is part of the geoliterary walks series CONTESTI organised by the Museum of Geography of the University of Padua. Notturni Contemporanei, as part of the NaMUC seminar series, also contributed to the public engagement activities promoted by the MoHu-based Unit of the PRIN PNRR research project WALC – Walking Landscapes of Urban Cultures.
Fostering the process of attunement to the atmospheres of the local urban night, the open-air seminar, organised by Giada Peterle and Giuseppe Tomasella, engaged participants in a night walk through the winter city, drawing on a selection of works by contemporary authors living in, walking through and writing about Venice. Their literary representations revealed experiences, practices and realities co-producing the nightscapes of those people considering the city as their birthplace, home or safe harbour.
Strolling along the calli, the texts invited non-academic participants (25 attendees of different ages and backgrounds) to steer away from the stereotypes and clichés of Venice’s iconography. The geoliterary exploration of local nightscapes, in fact, offered renewed understandings of the entwined relations connecting the excesses of the tourism phenomenon with the decline of residential communities. The night walk was a chance to disclose the ‘glocal’ features of the rising fears related to the consequences of the climate crisis looming over Venice.
Walking Landscapes of Urban Culture (WALC) PRIN 2022 PNRR project
Walking Landscapes of Urban Culture (WALC) PRIN 2022 PNRR project(2023-)
Research Unit based at the University of Padua
The main objective of the WALC project is the analysis from an interdisciplinary perspective (critical-literary, geographical, sociological) of walking in urban spaces as an intangible cultural heritage of contemporary urban mobility in European cities. The social and humanistic perspective proposed by this project suggests the importance of walking as a cultural practice. The post-pandemic time, the current social changes and climatic crisis ask to rethink cities and urban mobilities, especially the transport means and ways by which we move in space, and suggest re-evaluating the role of urban walking practices.
In European cities, walking in urban space is an often neglected but widely accessible everyday activity: allowing one to reflect on the conformation of the city, perceive and embody the map of the city, and identify new routes for experiencing and exploring everyday environments. Far from being a mere self-reflecting, individual practice, walking represents a common tool for empowering citizens, allowing them to understand the value of urban narratives traced by walking paths as intangible heritage that could be enhanced by new types of open-air, mobile, and public museum activities; to re-imagine interactions between places and stakeholders; to promote dialogues between transgenerational non specialistic-audiences and academic, cultural, and institutional actors (i.e. universities, museums, local administrations and institutions).
The project features two other units, one coordinated by Filippo Milani at the University of Bologna and one coordinated by Luca Daconto the University of Milano Bicocca.
The Research Unit based at the University of Padua, coordinated by Giada Peterle, promotes an art-geography collaboration to explore walking as a mobile and creative method, and to reflect on the ways in which urban cultures can be shaped and resignified through creative and narrative practices. In particular, this Unit contributes to current research in literary geographies; literary urban studies; mobility studies; and geohumanities, and, from a methodological perspective, it works with a geocritical approach to urban mobilities and walking narratives; art-based and creative methods; mobile and auto-ethno-graphic methods.
This Research Unit is sustained by the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and Humanities (MoHu) and the Museum of Geography of the University of Padua.
The WALC project collaborates also with the Espace, Déplacement, Mobilité Network of the Centre de Recherches Pluridisciplinaires Multilingues – CRPM, Université Paris Nanterre
The WALC PRIN project runs the NaMUC (Narrative Mobilities of Urban Cultures) seminar series, which includes seminars hosted at the MoHu Centre, the Museum of Geography, and also on the move across multiple urban spaces
Principal Investigator:
Giada Peterle
Member:
Tania Rossetto
Giuseppe Tomasella
SILKRAA - The Silk Road across the Alps
SILKRAA - The Silk Road across the Alps. Craftsmen Migrations, Commercial Exchanges & Social Relations Between France & Italy in the Early Modern Period
Marie Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Global Individual Fellowship
(Sept 2023-Feb 2027)
The SILKRAA project aims to reconstruct the dynamics of silk weavers’ migration between Italy and France during the early modern age. To achieve this, an interdisciplinary approach will be employed, combining socioeconomic history, migration studies, labor and gender studies, as well as the history of techniques and material culture.
Through the integration of macro-historical, micro-historical, and biographical reconstruction, SILKRAA aims to contribute to the revitalization of studies on migratory phenomena in the Early Modern period. Leveraging digital humanities, a comprehensive database will be created, gathering demographic data, biographical information, and visual/material evidence from Italian and French archives and museums.
Essential to the realization of the SILKRAA project is the training in Italian and international historical research methods at the Department of Historical, Geographical, and Ancient World Sciences (DiSSGeA) under the expert guidance of Prof. Andrea Caracausi. This training is complemented by collaborative efforts with Yale University (Prof. Paola Bertucci), the University Lumière Lyon2 (Prof. Manuela Martini), and the Como Silk Museum. Working closely with historians and experts, this collaboration is crucial for achieving the project’s objectives. The obtained results will not only significantly impact academic outcomes but also contribute to a more profound societal understanding.
Follow the project activities here:
Instagram @silkraa_msca
Twitter @silkraa
Postdoctoral researcher:
Mario Grassi
Public Mobility Humanities - 4 Dec 2023
Public Mobility Humanities - 4 Dec 2023
The seminar Chinese Memories. Comics and Maps of a Migratory Journey to the West was organised by MoHu and the Museum of Geography to involve the students of our MA in Mobility Studies, but also extra-academic publics, in a creative dissemination project about mobilities. The seminar is co-organised with the PRIN PNRR project WALC – Walking Landscapes of Urban Cultures as part of the NaMUC – Narrative Mobilities of Urban Cultures seminar series curated by Giada Peterle.
The seminar, in fact, was held to launch the graphic novel “Memories. Notes and Maps of a Journey to the West” co-authored by Ciaj Rocchi, Matteo Demonte and Daniele Brigadoi Cologna (Cleup, 2023). Here, the artists and authors retrace the mobility of people, goods and ideas from the West to early twentieth-century Europe through the combination of comics, maps and archival research.
Through their previous graphic novels, “Primavere e autunni” and “Chinamen” (BeccoGiallo 2015 and 2017), Rocchi and Demonte had already contributed to the re-writing of the history of Chinese migration to Northern Italy and Milan: with their new work, “Memories”, they expand the spatio-temporal frame of their creative and historical research, in collaboration with sinologist Brigadoi Cologna.
As Giada Peterle and Tania Rossetto write in their afterword, this graphic novel is one of the unexpected surprises emerging from the “Variations on Mobility” programme. “Variations on Mobility” was the joint edition of Creative Commissions 2019/2020 hosted by the MoHu and the Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities. The idea at the basis of the Creative Commissions scheme was that collaboration between academic researchers and artists within the same commission is particularly apt to move knowledge outside the academy through the adoption of creative forms of expression. “Memories” represents an extended version of the initial project realised by the team composed of Brigadoi Cologna, Rocchi and Demonte, as part of the path of their creative work initiated during the Creative Commissions.
The Dissgea department and MoHu Centre supported this path and are now happy to launch the result of such art-research collaboration inspired by the mobility humanities frame.
The seminar, thus, brought together not only the mobility of goods, people, and objects, economic history and history of migratory flows, but also a broader reflection on the role of artists and the use of creative languages such as comics in mobility research.
We enjoyed having with us Ciaj Rocchi and Matteo Demonte and deeply appreciated the ways in which they put mobility at the centre of a productive dialogue between creative work, academic knowledge and public engagement!
Open film screening "In the Name of Wild" - 16 NOV 2023
Open film screening "In the Name of Wild" - 16 NOV 2023
