Festival della Mente » 2014

Event #39

Festival della Mente — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 21:15:00 +0000

On 2 April 1982 Argentine troops landed on the Falkland Islands, a British colony that Argentina had always laid claim to. The military junta, which already had thousands of desaparecidos on its conscience, hoped to muster up the consensus of a country crushed by inflation running at 600%, and did not imagine that a modern European democracy could react with a declaration of war. Instead that’s just what happened: the British government led by Margaret Thatcher sent out its fleet to recapture the islands. But in what way did the mechanisms of politics, pressure from public opinion and the game of international alliances lead the Argentine generals to get their calculations wrong, and the United Kingdom government to take on the responsibility for a war?

Event #38

Festival della Mente — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 19:18:00 +0000

A writer in crisis, Antonio Pascale, and an astrophysicist enthralled by the wonders of the universe, Amedeo Balbi, discuss the topic of determinism and free will in a performance-encounter. Are the characters that a writer wants to put down on the blank page free, or are they subject to the laws of physics? Can their actions be described and calculated by equations? And if everything that takes place in nature, including the nervous impulses in the synapses and the deliberation of our mind, is determined by a chain of causes that goes all the way back to the Big Bang, where does our feeling of being free and of being able to change the future come from? By means of a philosophical, ironic and popular dialogue, Pascale and Balbi will try to provide some food for thought, in an attempt to sum up what we have until now understood about the link between mind, matter and freedom.

Event #37

Festival della Mente — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 19:15:00 +0000

With a piano, two violins and a cello, the classical quartet Salut Salon – which includes Angelika Bachmann, Iris Siegfried, Sonja Lena Schmid and Anne-Monika von Twardowski – enjoys fascinating and amazing the public with a concert of its own kind that unmasks musical conventions thanks to an impassioned virtuoso, incredible instrumental acrobatics, and all done with a great sense of humour. These four German musicians, along with their mascot Oskar, bring to Italy for the first time ever a lively, fun performance that explores the world of classical music – from the Mephisto Waltzes by Franz Liszt to the frenetic Dance Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns – and tells the stories of “fate” by combining tango, milonga, chansons, folk and film soundtracks. Perfect solos and artistic sketches worthy of the best cabaret, of explosive style and formidable self-irony.

Event #36

Festival della Mente — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 17:15:00 +0000

Matteo Renzi wears white shirts. According to a version proven by reporters, he always has an extra white shirt in his suitcase. Starting from this detail, Marco Belpoliti tries to describe Renzi the man through the clothes he wears. A visual and anthropological study that harks back to his previous works on Berlusconi and Bossi, but also an intervention on the clothes worn by Italian politicians, from Alcide De Gasperi all the way down to Beppe Grillo. And what about the seven shirts? “Sudare sette camicie”, sweating seven shirts, this Italian expression means making a huge effort or undertaking. But the shirt is not just the item of clothing that became the symbol of the middle class and the bourgeoisie in general in the twentieth century; rather, it is the “object” that swaddles the well-born. To be born wearing a shirt, as the Italian saying goes, (meaning, to be born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth): to be lucky, according to a popular version, which, in Renzi’s case, accompanies his vocation for carrying out legendary feats, he being a latter-day, contemporary Hercules.

Event #35

Festival della Mente — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 17:00:00 +0000

A new model of femininity is spreading in Postmodern society, inspired by “being, knowing and knowing how to do” everything. Femininity that is “exaggeratedly thin, intelligent, strong and successful”, capable of making every affective role its own, escaping from the complementary nature of the relational exchange. While civilization demands multiple and flexible identities, the encouragement to always do better and more that looms over young women fuels a laboured search for multitasking excellence. The performance principle forced on contemporary femininity risks stifling the expression of identity-related projects, nurturing the spread of eating disorders, by now epidemic in the female population, the symptomatic outcome of the projection onto the body and the image of the intolerability of the limit that inspires the culture of narcissism.

Event #34

Festival della Mente — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Creating doesn’t mean improvising: it means choosing between ideas, starting from an insight and working on it. Fostering mental associations and emotional contaminations. Avoiding sloppiness and ambition. Knowing how to read one’s own talents, and warding off the interference of passion. Beppe Severgnini tries to guide us through his work, and he hopes to be helpful in ours. Books, newspapers, television, theatre, trips, different languages: does being involved in many things help or distract us? How and where are ideas born? How many of these become concrete? How do people bring their ideas to a group, and then accept the ideas given back by that same group? To be able to create, is it useful to put together different skills and generations? Power without control is useless, was the slogan used by a memorable car advert: imagination without method takes you off course, also in the world of ideas and words.

Event #33

Festival della Mente — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 15:30:00 +0000

The changes that have taken place in roles and relationships between genders and between generations within the family have created new tensions. Can we relate these transformations to the tension between inheritance (tradition) and change, between respect for experience and the impossibility of changing, between the need to come forward (young people) and the temptation to wipe everything out? From this point of view, the conflict underway between those who don’t want to change anything, and those who instead do choose change regardless of content seems to be an exemplary case of how the “elderly/youth” dichotomy (where have middle-aged adults disappeared to?) is the simplified narrative key to issues that are much more complex.

Event #32

Festival della Mente — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Transgressive behaviour is typical of adolescence. Anti-social, smug, tough, impulsive adolescents run against educational norms established by adults, and end up challenging the laws that regulate social relations. Such behaviour is not just the expression of a lack of control or empathy, of an absence of shame or guilt feelings; rather, it is above all a manifesto of intentions, an appeal to the culture of adults. Kids “against” have lost faith in the idea that adults can help them to grow, and seek solidarity in their peers. Rules won’t help them, but a commitment on the part of adults who can guide them in what they need to grow will.

Event #31

Festival della Mente — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 13:01:00 +0000

For young people, being motivated to study and the difficulty in using their role as students for their personal fulfilment are issues of crucial educational importance. In the past, the responsibility for the school drop-out rate was often attributed to damaging and educationally inadequate “out-of-school” situations. Recent experience has shown how many drop-outs are in contact with teachers who are in turn burdened by malaise and pain. And it is precisely this spiral that drives them to share a “mental dispersion” that no longer has any contents. The core of the educational work carried out by the Maestri di Strada is the community enlivened by the “thinking groups” that patiently rediscover – together with young people and in their contexts – meaning for the common effort of living. Santa Parrello will give her contribution during the workshop.

Event #30

Festival della Mente — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 13:00:00 +0000

Is it possible to understand, describe and manage what is real through calculation and mathematical objectivity? And what happens when in a person’s life certain variables arise, variables such as love, dream, poetry, chaos, in other words, all that is human, all that is real? After having dealt with these themes in their novels, Errico Buonanno and Chiara Valerio, sensitive and lucid intellectuals in their analysis of the mechanisms that regulate the contemporary, discuss the consequences of the current collapse in a vision that has encouraged the previous generations, the vision of “scientific” utopias and exasperated rationality. But they also discuss an eternal problem: is reality what we see, what we can count, what we can enumerate? Or is the invisible ready to botch up all our calculations?