Milano Città Mondo

Drawing from a research programme dealing with media and performative arts as tools for the intercultural dialogue (https://www.migrations-mediations.com/), this essay investigates the practices of representation engendered by Milan policymakers who attempt to re-imagine the urban territories by adopting the gazes of migrant subjects settled down in the city. Significantly, many of the cultural projects coping with migrant ‘place-making’ employ the audiovisual device in order to explore how interactions in public spaces shape a new sense of belonging and inclusion within community spaces. By studying the cross-media palimpsest ‘Milano Città Mondo’, this paper aims to provide an analysis of the social and political framework underlying this project in order to deeply understand if a new version of civic identity in terms of inclusiveness and cultural plurality is fully embraced.Drawing from a research programme dealing with media and performative arts as tools for the intercultural dialogue (https://www.migrations-mediations.com/), this essay investigates the practices of representation engendered by Milan policymakers who attempt to re-imagine the urban territories by adopting the gazes of migrant subjects settled down in the city. Significantly, many of the cultural projects coping with migrant ‘place-making’ employ the audiovisual device in order to explore how interactions in public spaces shape a new sense of belonging and inclusion within community spaces. By studying the cross-media palimpsest ‘Milano Città Mondo’, this paper aims to provide an analysis of the social and political framework underlying this project in order to deeply understand if a new version of civic identity in terms of inclusiveness and cultural plurality is fully embraced

The vulnerable gaze of the migrant: Eye-witnessing and drifting subjectivity in documentary web series

In the current media system, we are observing the increasing sedimentation of symbolic forms, discourses and imagery regarding contemporary migrations. With the reuse of videos filmed by migrants, the documentary form represents the best “yielding field” where intercultural modes of representation and visual self-inscriptions can be constantly reinvented. In particular, videos made with nonprofessional devices have drawn viewers’ attention to the capacity of moving images to bear witness to reality “from below” and, in some respects, to reproduce aesthetically the opacity and the contingency of events, even the most tragic ones. This paper examines how such a gaze, when it is embodied by the migrant subject, raises questions about the representation of a first-person experience, an experience which paradoxically constitutes a denial of all identity and subjectivity in a deeper sense. To do this, two interesting experiments recently hosted by the website of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica will be analysed: the web series Com’è profondo il mare and Un unico destino—Tre padri e il naufragio che ha cambiato la nostra storia. These web series not only represent traumatic events, but the images show clashes within the depictions themselves and a collision or negotiation between conflicting points of view

Sick and Injured Bodies : Medical Imagery and Media Practices of Care

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Migrant as an Eye/I. Transculturality, self-representation, audiovisual practices

Experiences such as those of exile, immigration, and transnationality are central in the current political and cultural debate. Several filmic works and visual artistic projects focus their narratives on life stories, as shaped by distance (either geographic or memory-related) and motion (in terms of travel, border crossing and disorientation). Meanwhile, a focus on exilic and diasporic identities may lead potential audience to perceive migrant works merely on the basis of personal traumas of displacement. This special issue of Cinergie aims at scoping the plurality of cross-media productions that define nondominant forms of ethnic subjectivity, in the awareness of both the dynamic contamination of cultural models and the crisis of the ancient dichotomy between Self and Other. How could thus ex-/post-colonial subjects and their antecedents/descendants represent their selves, tell their own stories and subverting the stereotypes of Western culture? How are hierarchies re-inscribed when the Other\u2019s self-image is re-mediated in the Western media system? When and how does the Other actually have the possibility to really represent her/himself? In this age of highest expansion of new autobiographical forms made possible thanks to audiovisual and digital practices (autobiographical fiction and documentary films and videos, digital storytelling platforms, self-portraits and selfies, Vlog, Facebook and Instagram accounts, etc.), it is not only possible for anyone to produce and circulate self-representations as a banal and everyday practice, but it allows for current selfrepresentations to challenge established discourses that reflect power relations at both social and geopolitical level

Film Memoirs. Figures of Memory in Italian Amateur Cinema, 1926-1942

A partire dagli anni Venti, in Italia come all'estero, iniziano a diffondersi nuovi dispositivi tecnologici per la produzione e la visione di film amatoriali. Analizzando dieci collezioni italiane di film privati e film di famiglia, realizzati da alcuni cineamatori tra il 1926 e il 1942, la ricerca si focalizza sia sui codici linguistici della rappresentazione, sia sulle pratiche sociali di realizzazione e fruizione di tali film. In particolare, lo studio della cinematografia amatoriale come pratica culturale di conservazione della memoria privata consente di aprire alcuni percorsi di ricerca, dal punto di vista teorico e semiotico. In questo senso, il concetto di memoria filmica si pone come asse di intersezione tra una problematizzazione storiografica di un settore degli studi cinematografici, che solo recentemente ha coinvolto gli studiosi, e una riflessione teorica sui processi di elaborazione di una memoria intima e familiare, che si imprime sulla pellicola cinematografica.In Italy as abroad, the Twenties saw the establishment of new technological devices for the production and vision of amateur films. Analysing ten Italian collections of private films and home movies, made by cine-amateurs between 1926 and 1942, my research examines both the linguistic codes of representation and the social practise of realisation and reception of these films. In particular, it addresses amateur cinematography as a cultural practise of conservation of private memory. Following both a theoretical and semiotic approach, I use the concept of filmic memory as THE intersection for this new historiography. In this sense, I am establishing a new field of cinematic research, whilst offering a theoretical reflection upon the inscription of the intimate and familiar memory into film

L'impulso autoetnografico: radicamento e riflessività nell'era intermediale

I nuovi assetti mediali hanno contribuito a rafforzare la percezione che la soggettività abbia definitivamente perso il proprio baricentro, a causa di una continua dispersione di rappresentazioni frammentarie la cui stessa ricomposizione appare oggi uno sforzo privo di tenuta. Nell’epoca attuale, grazie alla crescente diffusione di dispositivi maneggevoli e applicazioni estremamente accessibili, l’insopprimibile impulso all’autoesposizione non solo si concilia facilmente con la maggiore condivisibilità dei contenuti sulla scena sociale delle piattaforme web, ma va incontro a un processo che sembra rendere irrisolvibile la scissione del sé con le sue molteplici, disperse proiezioni. A fronte di tale panorama, il numero monografico vuole intrecciare una serie di riflessioni che convergono verso un campo di indagine capace di rilanciare in chiave differente lo studio e la lettura dei fenomeni di autorappresentazione: l’autoetnografia. Tale metodo di ricerca, proponendosi di connettere l’elemento personale a quello culturale, consentirà di studiare e ripensare le forme di autorappresentazione nell'epoca intermediale contemporanea.The essay moves from an exploration of an elusive but increasingly compelling field: the pervasiveness of autobiography in the contemporary media landscape. From artistic and experimental practices to non-fiction film, from collaborative digital projects to confessional modes of self-representation in television and internet, such a personalisation of art and the media may be seen, in broad philosophical terms, as a consequence of postmodern discourse and as a result of the growing fragmentation of the human experience in a globalized world. Nevertheless, as many media projects show, such focus on subjectivity does not imply a definitive displacement of the self, neither a closure within the horizon of one’s self. On the contrary, the impulse of self-investigation and self-reflection is linked to a real desire of communication, where the addresser engages with the addressee within a shared space of embodied subjectivity. Finally, the contemporary proliferation of first-person modes of expression in audiovisual and digital media responds to a common vocation to attest the social nature of the I, which means the essential embeddedness in his or her life world

Archives in Human Pain. Circulation, Persistence, Migration

The images of atrocity, either analog or digital, are always the trace of an encounter between the gaze of a photographer or a cameraman and a human being suffering from the painful effects of man-made violence. The archive images resulting from such encounter raise some inevitable questions: who took them and for what purpose? Is it possible to retrace the process that produced to these shots? What do they hide beyond what the eye can see? This special issue of Cinéma & Cie will not only focus on the production of such images, but also on their persistence on the synchronic level (in the media: newspapers, magazines, cinema, television, the Internet, museums…) as well as on the diachronic level (across time: mutation, re-editing, inversion…). From propaganda to counter-propaganda, from purposes of memory to artistic aims, the circulation of these images proves that repetition always implies difference

Sick and Injured Bodies: Medical Imagery and Media Practices of Care

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Representation and Care of Illness. Visual Culture, Trauma, and Medical Humanities

For a long time, scholars in the Humanities have been trying to move towards a boundary space that touches upon the medical and scientific disciplines. More than others, the topic of representation/visualisation, the relationship between ways of seeing, images, and the techniques to create them has emerged as a fertile and valuable ground for dialogue. This special issue of Cinema & Cie sets itself the ambitious goal of opening an interdisciplinary discussion reflecting on the images of illness, wound, pain, scar, and cure, which are shared today more than ever and go beyond the narrow medical field. In order to develop a new interdisciplinary methodology suitable for capturing the emotions, material dimensions, bodily practices, performative dynamics, and intersubjective systems that, as a whole, consolidate the mise en discourse of the body as an object of care, we have called upon the traditions of Trauma Studies, Medical Humanities and Visual Culture of science and medicine. In this perspective, images are not only the starting point for understanding knowledge production processes but also a valuable restorative tool for care and therapeutic practices