Festival della Mente » 2016

Event #38

Festival della Mente — Sun, 04 Sep 2016 19:15:04 +0000

A travel story is like a musical score, where the beginning is the Ouverture . An acoustic event, designed for the ear and the voice, that carves vagabond words into the groove of the vinyl with the needle of voice. Paolo Rumiz tells of the wonderful and terrible, terrestrial and visionary adventure – through marvels and destruction – that unfolds along the oldest of European roads. Alessandro Scillitani describes its spaces through visual and audio productions accompanied live by the tracks he composed along his voyage (Tommi Prodi, guitar, Stefano Ferrari, violin and bass, Marco Macchi, piano, Mimmo Fontana, drums). The itinerary is completed by wuotes from famous travelers, readings from the book Appia by Paolo Rumiz and an original score by Alfredo Lacosegliaz.

Event #37

Festival della Mente — Sun, 04 Sep 2016 19:00:55 +0000

Since the time of ancient Greece, the chorus has always been the basis of theatre. It’s through the chorus that theatre is filled with life, emotions and surprises, and that the meaning of an ancientAfrican saying is fulfilled: “I am us”. This is why the chorus will be the starting point in the lesson on theatre held by Marco Martinelli, founder of “non-scuola”, the method for teaching theatre devoted to teenagers with which he has toured Italy and the world together with his company, Teatro delle Albe, from Napoli-Scampia to Dakar, from Rio De Janeiro to New York. Performing music and dance with a group of teenagers from the La Spezia area, encountered for the first time the very night of the show, the event will show how productive the meeting between theatre and society – and between the stage and life – can be.

Event #36

Festival della Mente — Sun, 04 Sep 2016 17:15:23 +0000

Hypnos, Sleep, and Thanatos, Death, are siblings. Could what we see during sleep put the space of life into contact with the space of death? This is what the «wise» Penelope and Achilles «light foot» seem to wonder, upon awakening from two notorious slumbers. The former when, certain by then of Odysseus’ death, she sees him as a younger version of himself, and feels him entering her bed and her bosom. The latter when, weary from pain for the loss of his friend, he falls asleep and sees him at his side, and speaks to him. What happens when we are visited by a dream? Does it derive from the land of dreams, the land adjoining to the land of the dead? The answer of the Homeric poets is entrusted to a woman, Penelope, and it forces us to come to grips with ourselves. Because the space of dreams is the space of our inner being. Where those who have left us endure forever. Readings by Valentina Carnelutti.

Event #35

Festival della Mente — Sun, 04 Sep 2016 16:30:08 +0000

New boundaries are being drawn in our global geography: fleeing peoples expand from the South of the world towards the North; simultaneously, the Western model is spreading ambiguously throughout every corner of the earth. This is the moment in which redefining the frail demarcation lines between good and evil is necessary. Reason has long wondered on the motives for evil. Today, it may also be worth wondering what the reasons are for goodness. Is it a gratuitous warmth feeding the lives of creatures here and there? Or perhaps a way of action capable of building a future for humanity? While evil acts on the surface, as Hannah Arendt affirms, goodness delves deep, into the foundation of things, at the edges of history. In those spaces where, perhaps, the possibility of new boundaries for humanity may be created.

Event #34

Festival della Mente — Sun, 04 Sep 2016 15:30:02 +0000

The discovery of mirror neurons occurred almost by chance, by studying the motor system of a monkey. Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team allowed it to move freely, realizing that some of its neurons would activate both when it performed an action and when watching an experimentor carry out the same action: “mirror neurons”. Some would call them the “empathy neurons”. Why has this discovery – which revolutionized our idea of the human mind – fascinated not only scientists but also psychologists and philosophers? To what new concept of emotions and intelligenze, of thought and language, of nature and culture, of science and philosophy does it seem to lead us?

Event #33

Festival della Mente — Sun, 04 Sep 2016 14:30:08 +0000

Alberto Casiraghy and Josef Weiss are true book artists. One in Osnago, the other in Mendrisio, they have devoted years to high quality typographical and editorial activity, still printing with a printing press, preserving the memory of a perfect industry made of manual skill and technique but also of inventiveness and poetry. Through their work – inspired by care, quality and beauty – they seem to live in a world apart, far from the frenzy of modern society. Silvio Soldini depicts this persisting and resisting microcosmos in a poetic, lighthearted film that becomes a declaration of love for thought and art. The film screening (72 minutes) will be followed by a talk with the director and two protagonists.

Event #32

Festival della Mente — Sun, 04 Sep 2016 13:30:25 +0000

A voyage in images and ideas through a space that is both so intimate and so collective – our homes. Through a series of live drawings and words pronounced at the same time, Marco Belpoliti explains and describes the idea of home as a shell, guiding us to discover the spaces that are beneath our eyes every day: our kitchens and bedrooms and dinettes and living rooms, our stairways and mezzanines. Starting from the pages written by Gaston Bachelard, an epistemologist and poet, and reviewing a number of texts by 20^th century and contemporary writers (such as My home by Primo Levi), we will take an up-close look at drawers, closets, beds and benches, anything round, anything with corners. Discovering that the home is a place of interiority but also of exteriority.

Event #31

Festival della Mente — Sun, 04 Sep 2016 13:00:36 +0000

Graffiti, tags and murals are spreading throughout the world. Some – like the volunteers of “aestheticism”, the defenders of the candor of walls and mural cleanliness – would like to erase them. But there are also those who want to protect them, and even remove them for their market value. What are the stakes in this battle? What is the difference between street art and contemporary art and what is the nature of contemporary battles on graffiti? What emerges is a broadening of art's boundaries and particularly the will of subjects who had previously been unable to speak their opinion and take control of the aesthetics of their city, or to express their protest or simple irony. The graffiti war turns out to be the artistic version of an old conflict around the issue: who owns the city?

Event #30

Festival della Mente — Sun, 04 Sep 2016 13:00:17 +0000

Like the rest of us, civilizations also leave a mark in the space they inhabit. The proportions change dramatically, yet there is no real difference between the rubble that a climate catastrophe may leave in its wake and the small domestic apocalypse witnessed by our rubbish bins. Remains and rubbish, trash and waste belong to a daily aspect of our existence, simultaneously testifying to a destruction that has already taken place and warning against a planetary cataclysm which may still be avoided. The topic will be tackled by Bruno Arpaia, who imagines a future in which Europe itself is consigned to desertification, and Alessandro Zaccuri, who explores the narrative and artistic uses of rubbish.

Event #25

Festival della Mente — Sun, 04 Sep 2016 12:07:39 +0000

People with high-functioning autism, or Asperger's, have an extraordinary mind that allows us to understand its workings a little better. Indeed, the autistic mind provides a privileged view on the realms of sensory perception, thought development and emotions. Where the boundaries between diversity and syndrome become blurred, the ways in which the mind operates reveal areas of great interest for science. Diversity poses a challenge to our society because it is the only source of rich, constructive ways of thinking. A talk show that proves how powerful, amazing and still unknown the mind really is.