Cristina Baldacci
Cristina Baldacci is an art historian specialized in contemporary art and visual studies. She is Senior Researcher at the Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, and affiliated to the ICI Berlin, where she was a 2016-18 Fellow. Her research interests focus on the archive and atlas as artistic gestures and visual forms of knowledge; appropriation and montage as artistic strategies; “re”-practices in contemporary art; image theory and visual culture; contemporary sculpture and installation art; new media art. She is one of the convenors of the “Re” Interdisciplinary Network of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge; and part of the research group Global Art Archive (GAA) of the Departemento de Historia del Arte, Universitat de Barcelona. She has written for various magazines and essay collections, and co-edited, among others, the volumes: "Quando è scultura" (with Clarissa Ricci, 2010), "Montages: Assembling as a Form and Symptom in Contemporary Arts" (with Marco Bertozzi, 2018), "Abstraction Matters: Contemporary Sculptors in Their Own Words" (with Michele Bertolini, Stefano Esengrini, and Andrea Pinotti, 2019), and "Over and Over and Over Again: Re-Enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory" (with Clio Nicastro and Arianna Sforzini, forthcoming). She is the author of "Archivi impossibili. Un’ossessione dell’arte contemporanea" (2016), a monograph on archiving as artistic practice.
less
InterestsView All (20)
Uploads
Papers
6 February 2019, 14:00 - 17:00
Seminar Room SG2, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road NB longer session
Description
Professor Richard Coyne (Architecture, Edinburgh)
"Mindless Repetition: Re-running the Territorial Imperative"
3.30pm -5.00pm Respondents:
Dr Cristina Baldacci (Università Ca' Foscari, Venice/ICI Berlin)
"The Re-turn in contemporary art"
Dr Francesco Giusti (ICI Berlin)
"Lyric Time and the Trans-historical"
Richard Coyne researches and teaches in digital technologies and design. His most recent books are Mood and Mobility, Navigating the Emotional Spaces of Digital Social Networks with MIT Press, and Network Nature: The Place of Nature in the Digital Age with Bloomsbury Academic. He is interested in sound and space, the persistence of romanticism in digital cultures, and philosophical pragmatism, and will soon release a book on C.S. Peirce. His blog 'Reflections on Technology, Media and Culture' is at https://richardcoyne.com/. The title of his lecture refers to Ardrey, R. (1967) The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations, London, Collins) and its applicability to video gaming and other more recent pursuits.
Cristina Baldacci is Senior Researcher at the Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, and still affiliated to the ICI Berlin, where she was a 2016-18 fellow. Her research interests focus on the archive and atlas as artistic gestures and visual forms of knowledge; appropriation and montage as artistic strategies; “re”-practices in contemporary art; image theory and visual culture; contemporary sculpture and installation art; new media art. She has written for various magazines and essay collections, and co-edited, among others, the volumes: Quando è scultura (2010), Montages: Assembling as a Form and Symptom in Contemporary Arts (2018), Abstraction Matters: Contemporary Sculptors in Their Own Words (forthcoming), and Over and Over and Over Again: Re-Enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory (forthcoming). She is the author of Archivi impossibili. Un’ossessione dell’arte contemporanea (2016), a monograph on archiving as artistic practice.
Francesco Giusti is currently affiliated to the ICI Berlin, where he was a 2016-2018 fellow. After his PhD in Comparative literature at the Italian Institute of Human Sciences and Sapienza University of Rome, he pursued his research on the history and theory of the lyric at the University of York and the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. He is a member of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis Après-coup (University of L’Aquila) and the author of two books devoted respectively to the ethics of mourning and to creative desire in lyric poetry: Canzonieri in morte. Per un’etica poetica del lutto (2015) and Il desiderio della lirica. Poesia, creazione, conoscenza (2016). With Christine Ott and Damiano Frasca, he co-edited the volume Poesia e nuovi media (2018).
Cristina and Francesco were both Fellows of the ICI Berlin 2016-18 research project ERRANS, in time and will also share insights from this recent project in discussion e.g. https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/re-workshop/
15-16 January 2019
"The Gentle Art of Fake"
A conference on copies, fakes and appropriations in contemporary arts
Curated by Tommaso Casini and Laura Lombardi
The Milanese symposium – realized by the Università IULM and Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera for the first time collaborating – intends to investigate the persistence and the growing tangled declinations of the theme of artwork replicas in the era of the so-called post-truths, up to the increasingly ambiguous concept of “fake”.
È ancora possibile parlare di scultura quando ci si trova di fronte a un’opera fatta di suono e di luce? E che cos’hanno in comune, a prima vista, una statua di cera, una mensola con oggetti di uso comune e dei Buddha di plastica gonfiabili? La scultura può ancora essere considerata
una disciplina artistica a sé stante? È sufficiente porsi queste domande per rendersi conto di come la scultura stia mutando la propria identità e sia alla ricerca di una nuova autonomia. Un processo di trasformazione che ha percorso tutto il Novecento e che, oggi, è più vivo che mai.
Per tale motivo, i testi qui raccolti, riprendendo un’espressione di Nelson Goodman, si chiedono non “che cosa” sia la scultura, bensì “quando” sia ancora possibile parlare di scultura nella multiforme varietà dell’orizzonte artistico attuale.
Da Richard Serra a Thomas Hirschhorn, da Dan Flavin a Olafur Eliasson, da Claudio Parmiggiani a Kiki Smith, passando attraverso molti altri artisti celebri ed emergenti, questo volume cerca di rispondere alla necessità di un ripensamento, anche terminologico, delle tendenze scultoree contemporanee
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/abstraction-matters
Memory is an operating process that requires perpetual revising to stay up-to-date. For contemporary artists to choose the archive as a medium, reactivating and reenacting both its mnestic and socio-political function, means not only to collect, store and classify, but above all to reconsider trough the act of showing and telling. In her book Cristina Baldacci retraces the long and complex history of the obsessive interest in archival practice by outlining the rich mosaic of different roles and meanings that the archive has taken over time and its relevance as a work of art, namely an atypical and in some ways “impossible” classification system.
(ITALIAN)
La memoria e il ricordo sono sistemi operativi che necessitano di continui aggiornamenti e rielaborazioni per rimanere attuali. Scegliere l’archivio come medium, riattivandone il ruolo mnestico e insieme quello sociopolitico, per gli artisti significa non solo raccogliere, classificare e conservare, ma soprattutto ripensare, mostrare e raccontare. Cristina Baldacci ripercorre in questo volume la lunga e articolata storia dell’interesse per la pratica archivistica ricomponendo il ricco mosaico dei ruoli e dei significati che l’archivio ha assunto nel corso del tempo e la sua rilevanza come opera d’arte, quindi come sistema classificatorio atipico e, per certi versi, impossibile.
http://www.johanandlevi.com/scheda.php?libro=134
The 20th century sculpture in the reflections of its protagonists Study Day organized by Stefano Esengrini and Andrea Pinotti
With: Gwen Allen (San Francisco State University), Bruce Altshuler (New York University), Lorenzo Balbi (MAMbo, Bologna), Stefano Baia Curioni (Università Bocconi), Stephanie Bailey (Ibraaz/Ocula), Suzette and Brendon Bell-Roberts (Art Africa), Cathryn Drake (Freelance Writer/Editor), Jörg Heiser (Universitӓt der Künste Berlin/Frieze), Jens Hoffmann (The Exhibitionist), Jacob Lund (Aahrus University), Moky May (ArtReview), Jean Minguet (Artprice), Gean Moreno (ICA, Miami), Roberto Pinto (Università degli Studi di Bologna), John Rajchman (Columbia University), Antonio Scoccimarro (Mousse), Terry Smith (University of Pittsburgh), Chiara Vecchiarelli (École Normale Supérieure, Paris/Università Iuav di Venezia), Marianne Wagner (LWL-Museum, Münster, Cesare Biasini Selvaggi (Exibart), Roberto Casamonti (Collezione Casamonti), Cristina Casero (Università degli Studi di Parma), Stefano Monti (Partner Monti & Taft), Silvia Simoncelli (NABA), Federica Veratelli (Università degli Studi di Parma)
In recent years, large-scale exhibitions and art fairs have become more alike, although they have been long considered two distinct, and to a certain extent, opposite formats. Establishing the boundaries between what, in the contemporary art world, is a cultural or commercial event presents as many complexities as the value estimation process of artworks and artists.
Production, circulation, and reception of artworks are, in fact, part of an osmotic mechanism, which allows a permeability between what is part of an exhibition and what is brought on the market. With distinctions, today’s scenario resembles that of the late 19th century, when there wasn’t an ethical boundary between culture and market, and institutions such as the Venice Biennale had an ordinary Sales office.
The conference intends to analyze the modalities and reasons that have led to the change taking place within the art system, where the differences between biennials and art fairs seem to disappear, just as when dusk settles, between dog and wolf, “entre chien et loup”. In these two days of meetings with scholars, curators, artists, editors, and gallerists, the discussion will focus on three main themes: exhibition strategies, the role of the media, and the circulation of artworks. To each of these complementary themes, a single panel is reserved.
Fairs and Biennials: A Couple or Sisters?
curated by Clarissa Ricci
Art Magazines: Privileged Observers or Instruments of the Institution?
curated by Camilla Salvaneschi
Impermanence: What Happens When the Artwork is Gone?
curated by Cristina Baldacci
relationship with the forms of knowledge reproduced by geoscientific research and communication. In the visual, media and performing arts, the Anthropocentric paradigm has, at times, activated challenging processes of archival construction, research, and revision, which tackle traditional modes of collecting and classifying. These processes have enabled both a surveying gaze on the geophysical phenomena composing the natural history of the planet and a renewed interest for the complex relationships that entangle the forms of life cohabiting in it.
The extensive deployment of this gaze by artists, activists and art/science practitioners has contributed to build a visual and material inventory of epochal transformations, hyperobjects, extinctions, sedimentations, ecologies and endangered ecosystems. This ongoing inventory (re)presents and re-enacts a univocal planetary nature through the unifying lens of the Anthropocene thesis and, at the same time, highlights the urgency
to rethink taxonomies as open systems of knowledge and understanding.
From this perspective, the Archival/Anthropocenic paradigm has also been challenged and problematized by artists stemming from the global south, as well as belonging to indigenous and racialized communities.
Specifically, critical archival approaches to the Anthropocene thesis have been exposing and denouncing the colonial roots and the problematic genealogies that constitute European natural history and its institutions and discourses. In this context, an understanding of the planet as a pluriverse, or as a ‘world made of many worlds’ has emerged. Such perspectives force a re-configuration of natural history as conflictual and heterogeneous, opposed to the unifying and totalizing view of the geological Anthropocene.
This double issue of Holotipus welcomes contributions on the relationship between contemporary archival processes and the visual, media and performing arts, and between the scientific production of knowledge and aesthetic practices. At the same time, in order to represent the complexity and potential of the debate around these themes, the issue aims to also include critical perspectives within or as response to the aesthetic framework established by the Anthropocene thesis and by Western natural history. Particularly welcomed are contributions from interdisciplinary scholars working the fields of the visual arts, philosophy, and the environmental humanities across media and geographies, as well as from artists and designers engaging with these topics.
Some themes may include:
- Orality and archival processes in the Anthropocene;
- Critiques of anthropocentrism and of the role of technology in constructing different images of the planet;
- Indigenous forms of knowledge in relation to non-human life;
- Marginalized, colonized, and oppressed natural histories;
- Acts of re-worlding and alternative eco-political imaginations;
- Denunciations of ecological and epistemic violence;
- The relationship between scientific visual communication and the visual arts;
- The geological and stratigraphic imagination of the Anthropocene;
- The processes of classification, fossilization, sedimentation;
- Ecofeminist and environmental justice approaches to natural history;
- Alternative taxonomies, toponyms, and nomenclatures;
- Enactment and pre/re-enactment as artistic practices in the context of planetary change and the ecological crises;
- The visuality of scientific disciplines such as paleontology, botany, zoology, systematics within the contemporary arts;
- Earth beings and non-Western ontologies of nature;
- Artistic and curatorial practices for decolonizing natural history and its institutions;
- Methods and practices of ecocritical Art History;
- Queering of archival processes, methods and procedures;
- Speculative zoology and botany;
- The divide between living and non-living matter;
- Pluriversal imagination and artistic practices.
In order to be considered for publication, abstracts of 400 words (in English), together with five key words and a short bio, must be sent, in Word or PDF format, to holotipus@holotipus.it by 30 September 2022. The editors of the issue will contact the contributors to communicate if their proposal has been accepted by 15 October 2022. Once confirmation of acceptance of the abstracts has been received, articles in English of maximum 5000 words (footnotes included) must be sent by 31 December 2022. To see Holotipus editorial norms: https://www.holotipus.it/publication-norms/.
All articles will undergo a double-blind peer review process.