SEMINARIO | FORTINIANA
A Seminar in Three Acts
9,16, 23 febbraio 2022
a cura di Daniele Balicco
"I don't know who I am but I try to know who I have been, that is, which history and society I have been part of: the corner of the earth which is called Italy; the relations between people, the illiterates, the studied, the cultured people, the left bourgeois, the bourgeois left, the new real unreachable privileged, the man-eaters I meet –so to say - every day, to whom I smile affably and whom I hope like my work... yes, I try to understand all this as much I can"
Franco Fortini, Ultimo dell’anno in Un giorno o l’altro,
Quodlibet, Macerata 2006, pp. 513-514
Franco Fortiniwas a poet, translator, political essayist, journalist, advertiser, novelist, painter. Radical Marxist, anti-Stalinist and heretical socialist, his intellectual itinerary remains, even after decades, one of the most insightful lenses to investigate the political contradictions that shaped Italy during the Cold War and that still shape our present time.
Fortiniana ‘22 is a three-act seminar, conceived as a general introduction to the political thought, poetry and art of one of the most lucid and implacable masters of the second half of the twentieth century in Italy.
Programme
February 9 17:30 - 19:00
Memories for the Day after Tomorrow
With Lorenzo Pallini
Screening of the documentary by Lorenzo Pallini Franco
Fortini – Memorie per dopo domani (2021) and discussion
Songs by Franco Fortini. Ludovica del Castillo, voice ; Attilio Foresta Martin, acoustic guitar. Attilio Foresta Martin
February 16 17:30 - 19: 00
On the Political Nature of Form
Art and politics today, starting from Franco Fortini.
with Luca Bertolo and Andrea D’Ammando
February 23 17:30 - 19:00
Battles and Ideas
Reading and discussion of selected pag
es by Franco Fortini.
with Andrea D’Ammando and the voice of Ludovica del
Castillo
Seats are limited, in order to book please send an email to info@iunoiuno.it specifying the day or days in which you wish to participate.
Image
Luca Bertolo, L’ospite ingrato, 2020
Oil and acrylic on canvas, 250 x 200 cm
Franco Fortini (Franco Lattes) was born in Florence on 10 September, 1917.
1917. Dopo la guerra e l’esperienza partigiana nella Repubblica liberata di Valdossola, si trasferisce a Milano dove inizia a lavorare come consulente per
l’Olivetti e per la casa editrice Einaudi. Sarà dal 1945 al 1947 una delle firme del Politecnico by Vittorini and, throughout the 1950s, of the newspaperAvanti! After leaving the PSI in 1957, and the brief experience of Officina, a magazine directed in Bologna by Pier Paolo
Pasolini, Francesco Leonetti and Roberto Roversi, he will be part of Quaderni Rossi and Quaderni piacentini, two of the most important magazines of the new Italian left. Fired at the same time by Olivetti and Einaudi in the early 1960s, Fortini began working as a high school teacher until 1971, when he joined as lecturer the University of Siena. In his last years he collaborated, among others, with Il Manifesto, sul Corriere della Sera, sull’Espresso. From June 1992, his collaboration with the Sunday supplement of the Sole 24 ore raised quite a few controversies to which Fortini answered: one can write in the cultural insert of the
Confindustria newspaper only if he writes against the Italian ruling class. He died in Milan on November 28, 1994.
Daniele Balicco is researcher in Theory of Literature at the
l’Università di Roma Tre. Il suo campo di ricerca si colloca a cavallo fra teoria critica (estetica, psicoanalisi e marxismo), letteratura e arte moderna.
Fra le sue pubblicazioni: Non parlo a tutti. Franco Fortini
intellettuale politico (Manifestolibri, 2006); Made in Italy e cultura. Indagine sull’identità italiana contemporanea (Palumbo 2016); Nietzsche a Wall Street. Letteratura, teoria e capitalismo (Quodlibet2018). Umanesimo e tecnologia. Il laboratorio Olivetti (Quodlibet
2021), Battles and Ideas. Franco Fortini’s Cold War Italy (Brill, London, in corso di pubblicazione). He is part of the scientific committee of the Centro Studi Franco Fortini in Siena. He collaborates
with the newspaper
Il manifesto and with the blog «le parole e le cose».
Lorenzo Pallini is a videographer, photographer, and editor. He has worked for years in the documentary field, and also as a curator of reviews. From 2011 to 2018, he was resident videographer for the "FuoriCampo" contemporary art gallery in Siena, taking care of documenting exhibitions and video art installations. From 2009 to 2016, he was part of the production company "Humans Artis", with which he created the participatory video project REACTION ROMA and edited the documentary "A Theoretical Life". Together with journalist Elisabetta Galgani, he founded the cultural association "Marmorata169" in 2014, which aims to investigate urban transformations through various arts, starting from a condominium in the Testaccio district of Rome. Today, he carries out various collaborative projects with companies, associations, and NGOs, responsible for photographic and video communication.
Luca Bertolo (1968, Milan, IT) studied Information Science from 1987 to 1992 at the Università Statale di Milano where he began writing a thesis on mathematical logic. At the same time, he attended courses on art and illustration. After a stay in London, he returned to Italy in 1998 and graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. That year he also moved to Berlin, where he resided until 2005. He now lives and works in a small village in Tuscany.
Tra le mostre personali segnialiamo: CHI CI SALVA, Barriera, Torino (IT), Why Write? Why Paint?, SpazioA, Pistoia, (IT); Luca Bertolo, MART, Rovereto, (IT); Se non qui dove (If not Here, Where?), organizzata da MAN, Gavoi, Ex Caserma, Nuoro, (IT); Everybody is always right, Arcade, London, (UK); If Anything, Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles, (USA); A Painting Cycle, a cura di Cecilia Canziani e Ilaria Gianni, Nomas Foundation, Roma, (IT). Tra le mostre collettive segnaliamo: Le realtà ordinarie, a cura di Davide Ferri, Palazzo de’ Toschi, Bologna (IT); Recto Verso, Fondazione Prada, Milano, (IT); Souvenir, a cura di Lucie Fontaine, Galerie Perrotin, Paris, (FR); Fig. 2: Natura Morta, a cura di Cecilia Canziani e Ilaria Gianni, GNAM, Roma, (IT); The Library of Babel / In and Out of Place, a cura di Anna-Catharina Gebbers, 176 / Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK.