Italian (NUI Galway) and Tulca Festival of Visual Art present Transformative Memories: Curatorial Practices in the Third Millennium

A Roundtable event with Valentina Zucchi (Mus.e Florence), Linda Shevlin (Curator, Tulca Festival of Visual Art, Galway), Mary McCarthy (Crawford Gallery, Cork), Paolo Bartoloni (Italian, NUIG)

Friday November 9, 6-8pm, O’Donoghue Theatre, National University of Ireland Galway

The current world is inextricably linked to a past that not only forms identity, tradition and individual or collective tastes, but also shapes the urban landscape as it evolves through transformative interactions with time and history. Memory plays a crucial role in shaping and re-shaping identity and urban development, evermore present in our lives, as both menacing and redeeming. In the twin realms of culture and heritage; memory represents a field of energies that can be activated to reflect the dominant narrative: borders are redrawn, past alliances erased, place transformed. Memory, with subtle reframing, can collapse or powerfully reprise a narrative.

Disrupting the mechanisms of memory, offering counter points, examining the risks and limits of nostalgia should be key concerns for our civic conversations.

Professor Bartoloni, Head of Italian, explains the idea behind the event: “Innovative curatorial practices are reinventing the ways we look at and inhabit the visual, understood both as a form of creative practice and an experience of the world. Our intention is to provide a forum in which curators, artists and academics can share ideas as well as tell their stories, and what it means to promote art in the third millennium.”

This round-table event features cultural producers from Ireland and Italy, two nations whose cultural heritage is at once comforting and normative. This forum will discuss how innovative curatorial and artistic practices can help us see our present as shaped by the past, calling the potent role of nostalgia as benign celebration into question.

https://transformativememories.eventzilla.net/web/event?eventid=2138710305

In the spirit of openness regarding cultural processes that so many Galway spokespersons have called for of late, audiences are invited to shape the discussion by submitting questions to the panel at: transformativememories@gmail.com