XXII Week of the Italian Language in the World
“Utopia”: the words of art, from the Treccani Vocabulary
OCTOBER 17-23
CO.AS.IT 189 Faraday Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Free event.
Registration is mandatory. Please register here https://www.coasit.com.au/settimana-della-lingua-italiana
The Italian Cultural Institute of Melbourne, under the High Patronage of the President of the Republic, in honour of the return of the XXII Week of the Italian Language in the World presents a series of lectures in collaboration with Treccani and CO.AS.IT.
The lectures focus on the Italian language and the tools Treccani offers readers to investigate its proper use and countless facets, with a particular focus on the contemporary context, in line with the theme chosen for the Week: “Italian and Youth. Excuse me? I don’t follow you!”
Invading the walls with the words of the Treccani Vocabulary and with the images of the artists to consolidate the vocabulary and stimulate the imagination of the reader and the observer is the ultimate goal of the Utopia project. On display 8 works by: Marcello Maloberti, Ettore Favini, Claire Fontaine, Piero Golia, Alessandro Piangiamore, Emilio Isgrò, Rä di Martino, Elisabetta Benassi.
The Treccani Vocabulary contains over 150,000 entries (headwords), making it an inexhaustible resource for studying the Italian lexicon and its evolution over time. The Utopia project aims to illustrate its content through the contributions of artists, a call to arms to complete the utopian enterprise of creating a vocabulary of images, a collection of artist posters to celebrate contemporary creativity, and the fascination of the language we speak and write, through which we interpret the present and imagine the future.
Each of the participating artists chose a word from the Vocabulary that best describes their creative process and philosophy. The artist assigned an image to the selected word — made to perfectly suit, chosen from his body of work, either reworked, or already suitable. With unlimited freedom of expression, the artist was able to support, revise, destroy, or complete the selected definition in relation to the lemma’s content.
It is not so much a question of accompanying the text with an image to make it easier to read, but rather of complicating it, highlighting its complexities and suggesting new possible meanings.
The poster, dedicated to the Italian language, has an image on the front and the lemma, as well as the artist’s signature and the numbering, on the back of the sheet.
The exhibition is curated by Treccani Arte.
Image @Treccani Arte. “Ascolto,”Di Claire Fontaine.