Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ANIMATE (Animation, Materials, Transcultural Ecologies: Performing Worlds at the Baroque Savoy Court of Christine of France)
Reporting period: 2022-01-01 to 2023-12-31
The four main chapters for the monograph resulting from ANIMATE have been written. The monograph - whose prospectus has been successfully submitted - will focus on how the interaction among bodily animation, poetic text, and stagecraft in the spectacles promoted by Christine of France represented contemporary dynamics of production, management, and consumption of natural resources, and their conversion to commodities.
A specific part of my results has been preliminarily disseminated in the Conference Proceedings of the 35th CIHA – Comite International d’Histoire de l’Art World Congress “Motion: Migrations” (Saõ Paulo 2022). The data related to this paper have been published in the UNIBO repository AMS Acta.
During the outgoing phase, the project was hosted by the Department of Art History at UCLA. The collaborations with the UCLA Center for Early Modern Global Studies, the Center of 17th- and 18th-Century Studies and the W. A. Memorial Clark Library have been conducive to the events organized as part of the project and their advertising. ANIMATE has also benefited from the establishment of new scholarly collaborations with the international project “Making Green Worlds - Early Modern Art and Ecologies of Globalization”, the research networks “Oecologies” and "Earth Sea Sky", and the Ècole de Printemps in Art History.
By pursuing an art historical and cross-disciplinary approach, ANIMATE's training objectives for the outgoing phase were to expand my expertise in Italian visual and performative culture and to develop a global and environmental approach to the study of art history. The 35 activities (such as conferences, seminars, talks) I attended and participated (e.g. conferences, workshops, poster in research fair), as well as the 2 conferences and 2 workshops organised were carefully tailored to these objectives. Likewise, all the primary and secondary sources examined. The interdisciplinary scholarly exchange at conferences, as well as the feedbacks received through teaching, mentoring and outreach activities, have been crucial to the development of the monograph and its theoretical aims at the intersection of art history and economic history, performance and literary studies, micro and global narratives.
The conference “Converting Natural Resources – Representations, Performances, Narratives”, held at UCLA on 1 and 2 December 2023, co-organized and co-sponsored with the project "Making Green Worlds - Early Modern Art and Ecologies of Globalization", brought together scholars from a range of humanities disciplines and perspectives at the intersection of art history, ecocriticism and economic history to explore the complex relationships between resources, labour and consumers in the early modern world. By examining a wide range of textual, material and visual sources, the papers questioned their value and use in rethinking the demands and state of the humanities. The conference brought together graduate students, museum curators and academics, as well as residents and visitors to California.
The research data and outputs stemming from ANIMATE will be useful to scholars and students in the humanities (visual and performative arts historians, science historians, philologists, anthropologists, environmental scholars, and gender scholars) and, as the outreach event has demonstrated, to non-academic public interested in the field.