In praise of community: shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959-1979)

Project Information

INCOMMON

Grant agreement ID: 678711

DOI

10.3030/678711

Project closed

EC signature date 12 May 2016

Start date 1 June 2016

End date 31 March 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 452 685,91

EU contribution

€ 1 452 685,91

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA IUAV DI VENEZIA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - INCOMMON (In praise of community: shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959-1979))

Reporting period: 2020-12-01 to 2022-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

INCOMMON project is the first research to systematically analyse the field of performance art as derived from a common effort made by artists and activists in order to create forms of being together and producing together, as a direct consequence of the practice of ‘commonality’ both theorized and experienced over the 1960s and the 1970s. In particular, the project is aimed to analyse the history of the ‘laboratory Italy’ as the place where artistic ‘counterculture’ expressed by performing arts arose in a milieu characterized by a profound relation between Critical theory and politics; and where the network dynamics between artists, thinkers and activists took central stage. Italy is therefore assumed as the investigation field of a much broader phenomenon.
INCOMMON starts from the assumption that in Italy performing arts originated from the need of refunding the field of theatre through a multidisciplinary approach and a new way of collaborating among artists. By illustrating this, INCOMMON proposes a pioneering idea of artistic community as the crucial driver of creativity in the period analyzed. In this perspective the network becomes the main mode of investigating and writing a new narrative of performing arts in general under the perspective of commonality and through the relationships between artists, connected by the instances of their mutual collaboration. In so doing, the project connects historical, philosophical and artistic events and debates to those in other sciences, sociology and in particular the methodology of Social Network Analysis (SNA), in order to reveal significant structures of meanings in the artistic community and to highlight the peculiar characteristics of shared creative processes.
The purpose is to answer to some fundamental questions of criticism and art history: how do the multidisciplinary artistic networks work? How do they are connected to social and political ones? What degree of independence do they have from institutions and traditional production methods? INCOMMON analyzes the dynamism, the geographical opening, the historical perspective and social and political composition of this set of movements, creating an innovative digital atlas as medium for promoting a renewed awareness and a new methodology of analysis, preservation and dissemination not only of cutting-edge subject of research, but also of performing arts in general terms.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

INCOMMON has pioneered an archival service that is technically and culturally responsive to the needs of dispersed artistic experiences that put a high value on oral memory and first-hand testimony.
We have used innovative methodologies in relation to new humanities-specific ways of modelling the knowledge and interpretation of the artistic movement of the counterculture related with the sociological analysis of creative networks.
To do so, the team has designed a novel research practice through its web archive useful to trace, interpret, narrate and visualize relational aspects of performing arts scenes.
The clearest breakthrough is the INCOMMON Atlas developed, currently collecting more than 3000 single items, found in private archives and collections mainly scattered around Italy. The private holdings integrate, intersect and interpolate information contained in public repositories, sometimes resulting in a fully renewed understanding of notorious and extensively researched events, illuminating the social, political and artistic time considered far beyond the state of the art. The archive introduced significant innovations both in terms of collecting/metadating and in terms of visualizing networks and relations.
INCOMMON recognizes that the claims for community and shared creativity experienced by performing arts over the 1960s and 1970s should be considered as precursors of the social media revolution. Therefore, it is not until now that we are able to imagine the formats of an archive for performing art practices. With the emergence of Web 2.0 we are facing a process of continuity: networking, which was previously a narrow artistic practice among the counterculture, has found a much wider audience today and is becoming a common mode of interaction. Accordingly, the digital Atlas of INCOMMON is the first example of an archive documenting the practices and results of collaboration among artists. Moreover, this archive incorporates the network structure into the data visualization itself, giving users an overview of the whole ‘constellation’ of relationships at stake in the performing art movement analysed.
Visualizations of its digital atlas provides an avant-garde and modular model that could be adopted in other archives of Performing Arts and, broadly, in any Cultural Heritage Archive.
The project has made available its results to a broad community of scholars, students, artists and curators, contributing to the creation of a new consciousness around the issues analyzed. At the same time, it challenged the mono-disciplinary approach as well as those analysis concentrated on a single artist in favor to an approach oriented to collaboration and community among artists.
A number of national and International events, conferences, workshops and talks has disseminated the project’s results, as well as several scientific publications. Among them the books: A. Sacchi, I. Caleo, P. Di Matteo (edited by), In fiamme. La performance nello spazio delle lotte (1967-1979); S. Tomassini, New York Furioso. Luca Ronconi e «quelli dell'Orlando» a Bryant Park (1970), M. Baravalle, L'autunno caldo del curatore. Arte, neoliberismo, pandemia.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

However the concepts of ‘community?, ‘network’, ‘Art/activism’ are very timely today, no research had been conducted to put in relation the ‘will-to-the-common’ of the Italian thought of the 1970s and the rise of the concept and practice of commonality from which the first, most radical generation of performance artists originated. Moreover Works of performance-based arts represent the most compelling and significant artistic creation of the 1970s, yet because of their ephemeral, technical and collective natures, their memories present significant obstacles to accurate documentation, access, and diffusion.
INCOMMON demonstrates that, despite their differences in terms of background and poetics, Italian artists working with performance operated as a multidisciplinary community that created ‘models for cultural action’, which then spread through their networks to influence cultural practices in other spheres. In this way they made significant contributions to the changing patterns of cultural production, and to concepts such as immaterial labour, cognitive capitalism and biopolitics. INCOMMON has researched, collected, catalogued, imported, acquired, and digitized documents of the case studies selected, in order to gather them in its Digital Open Access Archive. The structure of the archive is meant to be modular and its methodology is designed in order to make it extendable. By creating open and flexible solutions, the project aims to maximise the sustainability of digital resources through technological change, and to facilitate the re-use of the materials in innovative ways. The application is designed to achieve flexibility standards for managing metadata inconsistencies and future changes to the database.

Leo de Berardinis and Perla Peragallo, in La faticosa messinscena dell’Amleto di William Shakespeare