Dr Alvise Sforza Tarabochia from the Department of Italian and Alessandra Diazzi, a PhD student from the University of Cambridge are organising a two half-day workshop entitled ‘The Years of Alienation: Asylum and Factory in Italy 1960s-1970s’, co-funded by the Italian departments of Kent and Cambridge, the School of European Culture and Languages (SECL) and Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KIASH).
For Italy, the 60s and 70s mark an age of radical changes, constituting themselves as the threshold of post-modernity: Italy left behind a modernity that struggled to blossom out of fascism and crushed against the immobilismo of the early First Republic, and welcomed a post-modernity of consumerism and the media-centered governments of the mid-1980s. ‘The years of lead’ is a description for this period of political turmoil. In these years, the notion of ‘alienation’ proves to be central to intellectuals, artists, reformers, and politicians alike, and is itself profoundly revised in the process.
The workshops will scrutinise the centrality of the notion of alienation in Italy in its artistic, intellectual, social, and political incarnations and analyse its heterogeneous but interwoven sides, assuming as access points for such interdisciplinary inquiry the two settings of the asylum and the factory.
The workshops will each put under scrutiny a specific spatial context, offering a double take on alienation: ‘social alienation’ (stemming from labour, modes of production, stratification into classes) and ‘individual alienation’ (treated as mental disease, psychosis, and social estrangement).
The first workshop, hosted at Kent’s Canterbury campus on 15 May 2015, will focus on the theme of the factory in Italian artistic production in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, topics of interest include, but are not limited to: the so-called trend of the ‘literature of factory’, depicting the industrial dimension as a space in which the social and individual side of alienation are inextricably interwoven; the relationship between writers and the industrialist and entrepreneur Adriano Olivetti; Olivetti’s utopian project of the ‘good factory’ itself; and cinematic representations depicting the relationship between factory work and the emergence of psychical accidents. Papers that investigate the theme of factory in Italian music are also welcome.
The second workshop, to be hosted by the University of Cambridge on 22 May 2015, will focus on asylums and mental health in Italy during the late 1960s and 1970s. Papers that discuss the implications of the notion of alienation both from an individual and social perspective in the context of the reform of psychiatric healthcare; the processes of de-institutionalisation (the overcoming and replacement of institutional structures for psychiatric healthcare); the representation of both alienation and the process of de-institutionalisation in literature; cinema; photography; and architecture. Papers investigating the theme of asylum and inmates in Italian music will also be welcome.
The deadline for abstracts submission is 15 February 2015. Please send a 300-word abstract and a brief biography (including affiliation and full contact information) to ad608@cam.ac.uk and A.Sforza-Tarabochia@kent.ac.uk