Eating Ideas, Educating the Senses through Images. The Magazine “La Gola” in 1980s Italy
A Lecture by Professor Margherita D’Ayala Valvais, Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa
Presented on the occasion of the 2018 Year of Italian Food, as declared by The Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism and the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies
Italy’s society of the 1980s can be narrated through its food imagery: an ideal source for telling this story is the magazine La Gola (The Gourmet or The Glutton give controversial though not complete translations of its title). This monthly periodical, founded in Milan in 1982, was released throughout ten years, a crucial time for political and social changes in Italy, associated with the development of food activism through the set up of the Slow Food movement. The magazine hosted scholarly controversies involving ideological and aesthetical debates with interdisciplinary approaches and with a definite call to activism.
The lecture will show the context of these writings and images, the interests of the editors, their pioneering approach in years when Food studies were not considered a scholarly matter and dealing with food and society from an interdisciplinary approach was not fashionable, but rather could lead to the charge with being a proponent of the ‘caviar-left’.
Margherita d’Ayala Valva is a Fulbright visiting professor at Northwestern University, and assistant professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (Italy), where she earned her PhD. She earned her M.A. in Art History, Museum Studies, from the University of Florence, has taught in the Abroad Programs of James Madison University in Florence and Arcadia University in Rome, has been a Getty Library Research Fellow in 2015, and in the years 2013-18 has conducted research funded by Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) as part of the program entitled Future in Research 2012. Her recent research and publications focus on Avant-Garde artists (in particular Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini) as readers of ancient treatises and writers of their own handbooks of technical recipes on painting in the early twentieth century. These studies on technical art treatises and artists’ notebooks are intertwined with her research on gastronomic treatises and artists’ gastronomic diaries. On this, she has recently been involved in two projects together with Silvia Bottinelli: the volume The Taste of Art. Cooking, Food, and Counterculture in Contemporary Practices (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2017) and the forthcoming issue of the journal Public Art Dialogue (London: Routledge) dedicated to Food Activism in Contemporary Practices.
Free and open to the public.
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