Lecture by Francesca Tarocco (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia)
23rd Week of the Italian Language in the World
As part of the program of the 23rd Week of the Italian Language in the World, devoted this year to the theme of Sustainability, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sydney welcomes Prof. Francesca Tarocco, NICHE’s director, for a lecture on language, memory, and landscape.
“Enchanting colours, white clays, small patches of green, scattered here and there” is how Carlo Levi, the Italian writer, describes Basilicata while in exile there in 1935. Landscape speaks to us. But how? In this talk, she will look at some of Italy’s most distinctive morphological configurations in order to understand its landscape’s variant dialects – its distinctive personalities.
From her privileged vintage point, Prof. Tarocco will also consider how the study of the Italian language can be part of Environmental Humanities, and look at NICHE -established in 2016 at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice to produce transdisciplinary environmental scholarship and public engagement initiatives – in its effort to respond to urgent global concerns.
Prof. Tarocco is also participating in the Talanoa Forum, which will take place at the Sydney Powerhouse Museum between October 10 and 12, and which is included in the program of the “Giornata del contemporaneo”.
Francesca Tarocco is the director of NICHE, The New Institute Centre for Environmental Humanities and a Full Professor at the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Before joining Ca’ Foscari, she also taught at SOAS, New York University, and the University of Manchester, and was a visiting professor at the Asia Pacific Institute at New York University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of four books and of more than fifty articles and book chapters on various aspects of environmental and global history. Currently, she is researching for two new books on cosmotechnics and on different trajectories of human-environmental relationships. As a writer and art critic, she has written for publications including Frieze, Art in America, Parkett and Flashart International, the Gwanju Biennale and many others.
The lecture will be in ENGLISH.
Free entry. Limited seats.
Booking essential: www.eventbrite.com.au