Programmazione 2013 en Download

Dear friends of Festival della Mente, thank you. On the Festival’s 10th anniversary, we wish to express our gratitude to you all for the unforgettable editions spent together. Like all good things, these ten years have passed fast. The memories of past editions make up a snapshot of our country the way we would like it to be always: a country full of people who are keen on listening and reflecting, of thinkers and intellectuals who enjoy the challenge of discussing things in depth and share an interest in the common good. The Festival has shown that Italy has a lively, strong culture not based on the narcissism of loud statements or impressive figures but on quality, on real excellence, on openness to dialogue, on the desire to know and share – in one word, to improve. This is the goal that guided us in these first ten years, and we have worked to achieve it together with the many people who flocked to Sarzana from distant places, as well as with the more than five hundred speakers who helped make the Festival della Mente one of the most popular cultural events in Italy. Popular even among youngsters – more that four thousand of them – who offered their volunteer work for the Festival and thus became part of its audience and its ambassadors as well. We hope that the memories they hold of the Festival’s events will encourage them to better understand reality. All of us together are proof that Italy is different from what many think – a country not so inclined to exhibitionism as to work hard and to appreciate the nourishment of culture. This year we have once again tried our best to build an original, stimulating program, beginning with the quality of our speakers, some of whom will be back again on this 10th anniversary. We hope to build on the dialogue established in 2004 between speakers and audience and make it an ever-renewed opportunity for encounter. So once again, dear friends, thank you from Giulia Cogoli, the Festival’s director for ten years, and from the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio of La Spezia and from the City of Sarzana, that have offered the Festival their unwavering support in spite of all the difficulties due to the economic crisis. Together, we have created a small but bright spark of the future.

Before he obtained his three caravels from Queen Isabel of Spain, Christopher Columbus had to persuade the wits in Salamanca that the Earth was round. Many thought he was insane, and that after reaching the confines of the world he would fall into the void as the Earth was flat. This story is universally known and it has been depicted in countless works of art in the past two centuries, ranging from the pompier paintings to Altan’s cartoons. But why can’t we find any traces of it in the art before the 19^th century? And if people in the Middle Ages believed the Earth was flat, then why did all Medieval kings and emperors depicted in the period’s miniatures, frescoes and statues hold a globe in one of their hands to symbolize their rule of the world?

To inspire: to inhale, exhale, expiate, expire, then aspire to re-inspiring and being re-inspired. After which, by way of one’s imagination and creation, one becomes sudden heat, fervor, prophecy: the great extroversion that makes us something else, something different, an energy that devastates the occult proportion all the way to becoming, not only doing, all the way to conscious and unconscious art, to transcendence which explodes thanks to genius and makes it impossible to remain short, or small, or modest, or unborn. The suddenness bursts out, speaks, shake, sculpts; awareness of being blood and vein at the same time, inclination to propulsion, thinking, writing and speaking in a chain, but one that does not bind, at most it joins—does not constrain, but rather broadens. Comedian Alessandro Bergonzoni’s comeback to the Festival della Mente after ten years—a hilarious dialogue with the audience on creativity.

The choreographer and dancer Virgilio Sieni has designed this performance to invite the audience to reflect on the Resistance. The dancer meets some former freedom fighters a few minutes before going on stage, and together they conduct a dance structured as a “game of touch”. The dance is meant as a recollection of their life experiences in the painful struggle for freedom, as well as to the beauty and dignity of bodily gestures. With Naomi Berrill (cello). A production of Compagnia Virgilio Sieni, Théâtre du Merlan scène nationale à Marseille.

Recently it was shown that there is a sort of “brain in the brain”, that is, an area in the brain that gets very busy when the brain itself is not doing anything in particular. The area includes parts of the prefrontal cortex, which is activated when we think and imagine, and of the posterior parietal cortex. All of this area of the brain does has no name, but we could call it the default circuit, because it is activated by default. It is more active when the brain does not do anything and calms won when it is doing something specific. So what is the purpose of this vast area of the brain? According to one particularly interesting hypothesis, it “thinks of the future”, that is makes plans for what will be, or better still, what can be in the future. According to another hypothesis its activity is connected with consciousness, that is, the awareness we are there, even in the absence of any specific content of the brain.

Br. Enzo Bianchi addresses the Song of Songs, a literary gem describing the relationship of two lovers, symbolizing all couples who repeat the miracle of love. Theirs can indeed become a genuine exercise in freedom and creativity as they open up to every Other all the way up to “the” Other who is God. “For love is as strong as death”: such is the epilogue of the Biblical text, alluding to the dilemma of the encounter/clash between Love and Death. Love is “a divine flame”, a source of life and creativity. Yet for the Massimo Cacciari the connection between creativity and love is not always so straightforward: how to find in passion the food for the mind’s creativity? Is the possible connection that which is alluded to by the term philo-sophia, originally used to designate science or knowledge? And can one speak of such philìa only in connection with the mind? A dialogue between a theologian and a philosopher on the creativity of love.

Simone Weil once wrote that “whenever we reflect on beauty we come up against a wall. Whatever was written about it is lamentably and evidently inadequate”. Few other notions are as variable and subjective as the notion of beauty: what seems beautiful to us may seem ugly or unimpressive to someone else. That is what happens when we comment on a movie or a contemporary work of art. At the same time there are a few things – a child’s gaze, the color of a sunset – whose inherent beauty no-one would ever question. To some people, beauty is connected the individual taste; to others, beauty must fulfill certain criteria that can be objectively established. In an attempt to solve this conflict, Umberto Curi examines the ways in which beauty was conceived at the origins of the West’s cultural tradition.

“Not a day without picking up my pencil and drawing a line… my imagination was always chaotically crowded”. Antonio Marras draws, picks up looks and fragments for his works to be: a way to draw maps, to mark territories, to organize voices and silences. To him, fashion is a connection to other languages, a new alphabet to communicate with them. This conversation is a journey into metamorphoses, and the idea of journey plays an all-important role in outlining the confines and the forms of the contemporary, where the frenzy of change marks identities. A dialogue in pictures between Marras and FAM, starting fro the encounter as poetic and political strategy, as constant flow, as movement overcoming barriers, as escape from control strategies, as an interstitial space.

Human beings are incapable of remaining indifferent to other people’s suffering and to share experiences, but they also have an ability to humiliate and de-humanize others. Empathy, this deep human feeling, is closely intertwined with the conflicts of contemporary life. This is why the study of empathy is no longer confined to philosophy departments or to neuroscience labs and is taking on a decisive role in ethics and politics. Certain crucial aspects of the ongoing crisis – the deterioration of our environment, the triumph of greed and corruption in finance and politics, the erosion of social bonds – can only be overcome by recognizing and caring for others, and by solidarity. We are witnessing the lack of an education to empathy within the household and in school, not to mention the contempt of empathy in the spheres of the economy and politics.

In this time of crisis, what are the rules of cultural production in the broad world of museums and exhibitions in Italy? Giovanni Agosti and Jacopo Stoppa raise a few issues on certain phenomena that endure in spite of the shortage of resources: fake Leonardos and Caravaggios, Great Works published by subsidized art presses, location-invitations, timeless Impressionists on tour, replicas of great 20^th-century masters…all the way to the bottom of the barrel. The Love of Art was the title of a 1969 book by Pierre Bordieu and Alain Darbel, which was translated into Italian in 1972. Few other authors have since been as radical in investigating the rules of cultural production and dissemination (duration: approx. 120’).