Final conference of the project SPECTACLE - The Lure of the Foreign Stage: Italian Arts and Artistry Serving the French and European Spectacle
Creators: name: Cazzato, Elisa
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023
Subjects: art history, theatre, ephemerality, eighteeenth century, costumes, music, stage design, slavery, Black Atlantic

description: Here Today? Gone Tomorrow? Ephemerality and Materiality in France in the Long 18th - Century: Arts, Theatre, and Spectacle.

The Greek etymology of ephemeral, ephḗmeros, denotates something that only lasts for one day. In many ways, the ephemeral has become a key subject for our 21st-century lives, via temporary architecture and installations, digital art, but also new forms of media and social communication. However, with the invention of photography and videorecording in the late 19th century, and with new digital technologies in contemporary times, the ephemeral has also found new ways to become enduring, sustainable, and collectable in new archival forms. Yet ephemeral art and ways of being that existed before are more difficult to trace.

The study of 18th-century artistic and performance culture has naturally focused mostly on material objects that have survived in physical or representational forms, like paintings, decorative arts, written texts, and musical scores. But what happens to those forms of art whose material nature is short-lived, fleeting, or perishable? Does the absence of a surviving object preclude the possibility of its examination?

This conference investigates the topic of ephemerality in French culture in the long 18th-century, embracing both artistic, theatrical, and performance practices created through fragile and temporal media like theatre settings, sketches, fireworks, or spectacles that were performed but never replicated or transcribed, as well as trends in modes of dress, walking, and ways of being. In order to exist, however, ephemerality needs materiality, since any creative process intersects with the material requirements that both artworks and performances need: materials, location, scripts, costumes, instruments. How do ephemerality and materiality connect within the cultural context of 18th-century France?

This conference seeks to foster a debate not only about the aesthetic significance of ephemerality but also about the political and cultural meanings of the ephemeral. It questions whether, and how, short-lived forms of art had a role in communicating ideas of power. The conversation also embraces the politics of absence: What is the long-term effect of ephemerality? How can we create a history of the ephemeral? How do we deal with the relative paucity of sources? And how might our failure to deal with ephemerality exclude certain groups or cultures.

Organization:

Elisa CazzatoMarie Skłodowska-Curie Research FellowDepartment of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies

Università Ca’ Foscari

With the support of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles

Scientific Committee:

Renaud Bret-Vitoz (Sorbonne Université)Elisa Cazzato (Università Ca’ Foscari)Emanuele De Luca (Université Côte d’Azur)Meredith Martin (NYU)Barbara Nestola (CMBV)Gerardo Tocchini (Università Ca’ Foscari)

https://spectacle.elisacazzato.com/here-today-gone-tomorrow/