The Neptune Encounter, Giambologna and Poseidon: the new humanities, programs and prospects

At an ISA lecture (19 March 2019) I announced ‘The Future of Memory’ program examining the role of the ‘new humanities’ in a time of environmental emergency. The program examines the potential of situated past creative achievement to inform creative responses (locally and regionally) to currently unsustainable political, cultural and environmental practices. An important inspiration is Giambologna’s civic scenography, Neptune and the Four Rivers (Piazza Maggiore, Bologna). New interpretations of this work and the context of its commissioning locate it within a regional hydro-geography under imminent threat as well as reflecting on the work’s symbolic function in a society that hosts diverse water cultures.  They also question the capacity of public space (and indeed the traditional humanities) to generate new discourses able to articulate human/non-human inter-dependencies - new modalities of poetic fluency. At the time of the original lecture, the first initiative of ‘The Future of Memory’ program, the exhibition ‘Poseidonia, citta d’acqua: archaeology and climate change’ (National Archaeological Museum, Paestum, 4 October 2019 – 4 October 2020) was in planning. The exhibition is a radically new appraisal of Poseidon (symbolic, scientific, urbanistic), for whom Paestum/Poseidonia is named. The interdisciplinary methodology applied to the interpretation of a major collective memory site has important implications for research conversations we hope to convene in Bologna and regionally under the title, Le identità di Nettuno: naufragio, fluidità e pluralità nell’epoca di cambiamento climatico.

Short bio

Paul Carter is a writer and artists based at RMIT University, Melbourne, where he is professor of architecture and urban design. He co-curated the exhibition ‘Poseidonia, citta d’acqua: archaeology and climate change’. His recent books include: Amplifications: poetic migration, auditory memory (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Decolonising Governance: archipelagic thinking (Routledge, 2018). His chapter ‘Emergency Languages: echoes of Columbus in discourses of precarity’ has just been published in Migration and the Contemporary Mediterranean. Shifting cultures in 21st-century Europe, ed. C. Gualtieri, Peter Lang Publishers, in 'Race and Resistance Across Borders, the Long 20th Century' Series, 285-304, 2018. For further information relevant to his Visiting Fellowship at Institute of Advanced Studies, Università degli Studi, University of Bologna, see Paul Carter and Roberta Trapè, ‘Archaeologies of Diving: Paul Carter’s engagement with Italy,’ Le Simplegadi, 2018, XVI, 18: 227-238, online journal.

ISA Topic "Identity: one, no one, one hundred thousand”. The lecture is organized in collaboration with Silvia Albertazzi, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.