Metamorphosis: Ancient Myth, Contemporary Practice
The conference scheduled to take place in Mantua from 21 to 23 June 2024 will be a founding moment and inspiration for all the initiatives that will follow. The theme of metamorphosis is firmly at the centre of artistic and philosophical reflections throughout modernity. It is certainly so in the culture of the 16th century, which drew heavily from ancient myth to compose itself in an amalgam capable of combining magic and mechanics; but also subsequently, in the time of power thinking from the mid-17th century onwards to the present day.
The conference is called upon to explore this thought by including it in a long-term vision in which the ancient, the modern and the contemporary, while clarifying their cultural characteristics, are placed as extremes in dialogue and as an opportunity to elucidate a concept capable of embracing art and science, which over time has become imaginary, practice and destiny.
Panel 4 – 23 giugno 2024
10.00 -13.00 | Museo MACA (english panel)
Lorenzo Giusti, Galleria di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo – Nothing is Lost. Three trajectories to tell the metamorphosis
The talk by Lorenzo Giusti – art historian, director of the GAMeC in Bergamo – will retrace the genesis of the exhibition project “La Trilogia della Materia” (The Trilogy of Matter); focusing in particular on the “alchemic” premises; which inspired the chapter dedicated to the relationship between art and chemistry and the superficial metamorphoses of matter.
Isaac Julien, Artista e Giuliana Bruno, Harvard University, Cambridge – Metamorphosis: Museum Space and Moving Images
Professor Giuliana Bruno (Harvard University) will engage in a dialogue with the artist Isaac Julien on the meaning of metamorphosis as transformation of the past into present aesthetic forms, focusing on the morphing of cultural memory into future forms of imaging, and especially on how museum culture translates into moving images. The conversation will touch on Julien’s multiscreen installations Vagabondia (2000), Lina Bo Bardi: A Marvellous Entanglement (2019) and Once Again…Status Never Die (2022).
Marc Mézard, Università Bocconi, Milano – Accademia dei Lincei, Roma – Metamorphosis in Science
Over the last few millennia, our representation of the world has been largely dominated by our perception at “human” scale. However this representation varies a lot when one changes scale. In particular, going to very small -atomic- scales the world changes completely. This talk will address this change of vision depending on scale, and insist on the radically new ideas that have been put forward by quantum mechanics 100 years ago, which have forced us to think of a completely different “world” in which one even needs to reconsider the principle of reality.