Speaker: Professor Francesca Billiani (University of Manchester) 
Title: Regimes of Memory: Scenes from a Journey through Italy

Event date and time: Thursday 7 March, 5.00 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
Location: Camelot meeting room (3.30), Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent

Abstract: Public art has often been seen as a topical, participatory form of art used to convey social, cultural and political messages, which are able to circumvent official communication channels. Yet public art can also be read as a site to visualise history in a process of memorialisation of grand and ordinary narratives alike, especially within urban spaces and in monuments. However, in this lecture I will follow a different trail. I will discuss legal and illegal examples of Italian public art, in the shape of street art and old and new murals, spread across Italy and in different cities, urban spaces and historical periods (e.g. Milan, Palermo, Turin). To do so, I will draw on the notions of ‘regimes of the arts’ and of ‘historicity’ as discussed by Rancière and Hartog, and I will apply them to the study of a brand of public art. Due to their aesthetic qualities and within their communities, street art and murals encapsulate the diverse temporalities elicited by what I call ‘the regimes of memory’, thereby fashioning multidimensional memorial recollections which at once, I argue, legitimise and question, preserve and erase our understanding of the historical narratives through which we make sense of a given space.

Bio: Francesca Billiani is Professor of Italian at the University of Manchester, where she teaches contemporary Italian literature and culture. Her research focuses on the Fascist period, literary journals, modernism, the history of publishing, and intellectual history. She is the author of a monograph on the politics of translation in Italy (Culture nazionali e narrazioni straniere, Italia 1903-1943), a co-author of a monograph on architecture and the novel during the Fascist regime (Architecture and the Novel under the Italian Fascist Regime, 2019), editor of a collection of essays on translations and censorship, and a co-editor of a volume on the Italian Gothic and Fantastic and three special issues of scholarly journals. Her new monograph, Fascist Modernism in Italy: Arts and Regimes, is out with I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2021. She is currently writing a short monograph on the geographies and histories of public art in Italy in the twentieth century.