Literary and Cultural Circulation Between Italy and Brazil

Brazilian and European scholars specializing in Brazilian studies, alongside experts in Latin American studies from Italian institutions will present their researches covering a range of topics. From literature to art history, two key perspectives will be explored: the impact and reception of Italian cultural figures in Brazil, and the influence of Brazilian cultural figures in Italy. The workshop has two main objectives: 1) To introduce the DFG-funded network Brazilian-Italian Cultural Contact (BRICC) and highlight its methodological approach through the concept of "circulation"; 2) To encourage greater attention within Italian academia to these topics by sharing current debates and opening new avenues for future research and initiatives.

Please follow the workshop also online on our Vimeo Channel: https://vimeo.com/event/4646987

PROGRAM

Morning – Part 1

9:00-9:10 - Tristan Weddigen & Fernanda Marinho

Presentation and Introduction.

9:10-9:30 - Janek Scholz.

The Lines and Dots of Italian-Brazilian Anarchism: Oreste Ristori and Gigi Damiani.

9:30-9:50 - Serena Cianciotto

From Italy to Brazil: Italian Emigration from the North-East at the turn of the 20^th century.

9:50-10:10 - Bettina Zellner Grieco.

Aspects of Italian architecture in Rio de Janeiro: the theoretical and practical contributions of Antonio Jannuzzi & Cia.

10:10-10:30 - Mariana Simoni.

Looking for “wide eyes in the walls”: A first draft to Lina Bo Bardi's Italian years.

10:30-10:50 - Q&A

10:50-11:10 - coffee break

Morning – Part 2

11:10-11:30 - Fernanda Marinho

Paradise and wildness. A Brazil projected from Italy.

11:30-11:50 - Laís Botler

Clarice Lispector in Italy: chronicles of a life in Naples.

11:50-12:10 - Luca Bacchini

Fire and Red Pepper: Carmen Miranda in Italy.

12:10-12:30 - Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira

Noigandres: Art History Through the Making of Poetry.

12:30-12:50 - Q&A

13:00-14:00 - Break

Afternoon – Part 3

14:00-14:20 - Jasmin Wrobel

Mapping Haroldo de Campos’s Italy: First Steps.

14:20-14:50 - Lara Demori

Use and misuses of The Open Work: The Reception of Umberto Eco in Brazil(1950s - 1960s).

14:50-15:10 Jobst Welge

Mapping Murilo Mendes in Rome/Italy: Contacts, Circulations.

15:10-15:30 - Luigi Crea

Circulation and Reception of Brazilian Queer Art: José Leonilson at the Venice Biennale.

15:30-15:50 - Q&A

15:50-16:10 - coffee break

Afternoon – Parte 4

16:10-16:30 - Onofrio Pappagallo.

L’archivio storico dell’IILA: nuove fonti negli studi dei rapporti Italia, Europa e America Latina.

16:30-16:50 - Luigi Guarnieri Calo’ Carducci

La latinoamericanistica in Italia: una rassegna degli studi recenti.

16:50-18:10 - Q&A

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Laís Maria Rosal Botler is a Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Duisburg-Essen, with research on women's writings and identity negotiation in Brazilian and Argentinian literature. She has completed a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with a dissertation on “Places and non-places in Clarice Lispector’s writings". She is one of the organizers of the book "Dá-me a tua mão: Clarice Lispector, Memória, Errância e Sensibilidade".

Luca Bacchini is Assistant Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Literature in the Department of European, American, and Intercultural Studies of Sapienza University of Rome. Co-founder and co-director (with Vincent Barletta) of the EcoLogosLab(Sapienza-Stanford); member of the Executive Committee of the Association of European Brazilianists (ABRE); and CNPq Researcher with the “Projeto República: núcleo de pesquisa, documentação e memória” at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Author of more than 50 publications, including the book Nudi come Adamo. L'immaginario biblico nelle cronache dal Nuovo Mondo (Mimesis, 2018); editor of Maestro Soberano. Ensaios sobre Antonio Carlos Jobim (Editora UFMG, 2017) and, with Victoria Saramago, of Literature Beyond the Human. Post-Anthropocentric Brazil (Routledge 2023).

Luigi Guarnieri Calò Carducci, (Ph.D. La Sapienza, Roma) is full professor of History of Latin America, Department of Humanities, University of Rome 3. He taught at the Universities of Trieste, Teramo and Luiss "Guido Carli" in Rome. He is the author of various studies on colonial and contemporary America, in particular on Peru and the Andean area, political and cultural relations between Italy and Latin America, and indigenous peoples. Among his studies: Europa e America allo specchio. Studi per Francesca Cantù, Roma, Viella, 2017; Il Perù nella storia e nella storiografia, Roma, Bulzoni, 2013, La questione indigena in Perù, Roma, Bulzoni, 2010; Idolatria e identità creola in Perù. Le cronache andine tra Cinquecento e Seicento, Roma, Viella, 2007. He is former president of AHILA, Asociación de Historiadores Latinoamericanistas Europeos, 2017-2021.

Serena Cianciotto is Ph-candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Siena / Cotutelle with the University of Leipzig. Her dissertation deals with multi-generational novels at the turn of the century in Europe, with a particular focus on Italian, Portuguese, and German literatures. She also investigates Brazilian literary works and her project within the network is to investigate family narrations dealing with the issue of emigration from the North-East of Italy to Brazil at the turn of the century XIX-XX.

Luigi Crea is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Doctoral Program of the Center for Global Studies at the University of Bern. His research project, entitled "The Art of Resistance: A Study of Queer Art in the Brazilian and Peruvian Contexts from 1990 to the Present," focuses on Peru and Brazil, where there is a strong history of artistic production and curatorial narratives challenging norms of gender and sexuality. The project is interdisciplinary, aiming to explore the contemporary artistic production of Latin American queer aesthetics, employing art historical, queer, and decolonial methodologies and the latest philosophical formulations rooted in Latin American queer thought. Currently, he is the beneficiary of the Scherbarth Fellowship at the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome.

Lara Demori is a scientific assistant and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History. Lara was awarded a Ph.D. in 2017 from the University of Edinburgh with a thesis entitled ‘Art Degree Zero: Piero Manzoni and Hélio Oiticica’, which is currently becoming a book (Routledge 2024). In 2018, Lara was Goethe Institut Postdoctoral Fellow at Haus der Kunst, Munich. From 2019 to 2022, she was Marcello Rumma Fellow in Contemporary Italian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Research Associate. Lara works on post-war Italian art and contemporary Latin American art with a particular focus on Brazil and gender and decolonial studies.

Bettina Zellner Grieco is an architect, and has a master’s degree in Architecture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). While working at the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (Iphan), participated in the projects “Patrimônio e Leitura”; and “Dicionário Iphan de Patrimônio Cultural”; as a co-coordinator. Organized the book “Entrevista com Erich Hess”, from the series Memórias do Patrimônio. Currently works as a research assistant at the Portuguese-Brazilian Institute of the University of Cologne.

Fernanda Marinho is a SNSF Swiss Post-Doctoral Fellow (Marie Curie-SPF) at the University of Zurich, where she is developing the project Displacement, Translation, Desire: Italian Art in Brazil during the Fascist Era. Marinho defended her Ph.D. thesis in Art History at the University of Campinas (Brazil, 2013), with a one-year research internship (2012) at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Federal University of São Paulo (2014-18), with a year of research at the Musée du Louvre (2015–16). Marinho was a postdoctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History (2020-22).

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira teaches Visual Culture, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. He is Associate Professor at the Chair Art in Space and Time at the Swiss Institute of Technology - ETH - Zurich. He hold his PhD in Literature Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais – UFMG (Brazil) and École Normale Supérieure – ENS, Paris. He is associate member of the Center for History and Art Theory – CEHTA, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales – EHESS, Paris, and was visiting researcher at Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte DFK, Paris (2022) and Max Planck Institute, Rome (2022). His books are Invented Skins – epidermal readings in Brazilian Art and Literature (Forthcoming 2024); O mundo a zero. Drummond, Haroldo de Campos, Ricardo Aleixo e as máquinas do mundo (editora da UFMG, 2024); O fantasma do método (2024, Iluminuras); A invenção de uma pele: Nuno Ramos em obras (2018).

Onofrio Pappagallo is PhD in Modern and Contemporary European History, developed researches at the University of Bari, the University of Naples L'Orientale and the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci.He is the author of two books reconstructing the relations between the Italian left and the Latin American national liberation movements: The PCI and the Cuban Revolution. The Latin American road to socialism between Moscow and Peking, 1959-1965 (Carocci); Towards the New World. The PCI and Latin America, 1945-1973 (Franco Angeli).Since 2018 he has been the Director of the Library and Historical Archives of the Organizzazione Internazionale Istituto Italo-Latino Americano (IILA).

Mariana Simoni is an Assistant Professor for Latin American Literatures and Cultures with emphasis on Brazilian Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. She is Co-Head of the Project Post-autonomous Artistic Interventions in Brazil and Argentina (Collaborative Research Centre Intervening Arts) and is Associated Researcher at Centre Marc Bloch Berlin. She holds a PhD in Literary Studies from Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and has several publications on performativity and intermedial relations between literature and theatre. Her actual research interests include ecological perspectives in literary studies, Amerindian perspectivism; Animality; and aesthetical-political resistance in Latin America.

Janek Scholz is currently a MBSF-fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studied Romance languages and literature, German as a foreign language and English linguistics in Jena and Naples and spent one year at the Universidade Federal do Ceará, Fortaleza. He holds a PhD in Brazilian Literature from the University of Vienna. From 2020 to 2024, he worked as a research assistant at the Portuguese-Brazilian Institute at the University of Cologne. His Post-Doc project focuses on trans* narratives in contemporary literature from Brazil and Argentina; other interests include Brazilian and Luso-African comics, narrative hegemony, and Luso-Italian literary relations. He co-edited a dossier on the Poetics of Dead Protagonism in Brazilian Literature and an edited volume on temporality and corporealities in Portuguese-speaking literatures (together with Jasmin Wrobel).

Jobst Welge is Professor for Romance Literary and Cultural Studies at Leipzig University since 2018, specializing in literatures written in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. His interests include the history and theory of the novel; the cultural history of the avant-garde and modernism; family narratives and historical imagination in the contemporary novel. Recent co-edited volumes: Anna Artwińska , Ángela Calderón, Jobst Welge (eds.), Family Constellations in Contemporary Ibero-American and Slavic Literatures (Berlin, 2024); Juliane Tauchnitz, Jobst Welge (eds.), Literary Landscapes of Time: Multiple Temporalities and Spaces in Latin American and Caribbean Literatures(Berlin, 2022).

Jasmin Wrobel is Assistant Professor for Latin American Cultural Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Holding a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the same university between 2019 and 2022, and a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Manchester from 2022-2023. Currently, she is working on a monograph on anti-patriarchal agencies in Latin American Comics. Her BRICC project circulates around Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos’s literary contacts with Italy.

Scientific Organization: Fernanda Marinho