Richard Demarco. The Italian Connection (March 2018 – July 2020)
Team:
Principal Investigator: Prof Elaine Shemilt
Co Investigator: Prof Stephen Partridge
Co Investigator: Dr Laura Leuzzi
Archivist: Adam Lockhart
Richard Demarco: The Italian Connection is an AHRC funded research project based at Duncan of Jordastone College of Art & Design (University of Dundee). The aim of the project is to investigate Richard Demarco’s under-examined connections to Italy.
Richard Demarco – artist, gallery director, educator, promoter of theatre and cultural commentator– has been a key figure in the promotion of the European avant-garde in Scotland and internationally since the 60s. Although some research and publications have been devoted to Demarco’s endeavours, little is known today about his exchanges with Italy, how he promoted Italian visual and performing arts in Scotland and how he influenced the Italian cultural context.
This gap in the historical canon of knowledge is extraordinary because in the Demarco’s archives – a portion of which is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA, (representing activities from 1963 to 1995) and a portion at the Demarco European Art Foundation (at Summerhall in Edinburgh) – are many traces of exchanges between Italy and Scotland promoted by Demarco as part of his larger European network and contribution to the Edinburgh Festival. These documents include photographs, ephemera, notes, catalogues and artworks that feature events involving relevant Italian or Italian-based artists, producers, performers, directors, critics including: Palma Bucarelli, the Count Panza di Biumo, Giulio Paolini, Jannis Kounellis, Bruno Ceccobelli, Toti Scialoja, Carlo Quartucci and Carla Tatò, Mimmo Rotella, Mario Merz, Fabrizio Plessi, Achille Bonito Oliva, Maria Gloria Conti Bicocchi, Giuseppe Chiari, Guido Sartorelli.
It remains the case that an extensive body of largely un-catalogued documentation in the Demarco Archives has still not been fully assessed or researched and the strong associations between Scotland and Italy have been overlooked. The network built by Demarco around his Italian connection has only been partially identified and is under-acknowledged. This project will highlight the most important of the exchanges, discussions, and relationships thus far marginalised in previous projects and publications. It will inform those existing materials, and give an underlying context to the history of the Edinburgh Festival and the Fringe.
The project is based at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee.
EWVA European Women’s Video Art in the 70s and 80s aims to recover and reassess the seminal contribution of women artists to early video art in Europe and more generally to the development and evolution of video as a then relatively new medium.
Despite the fact that several women artists had been experimenting with the medium since the Seventies and Eighties, women artists’ contribution to video art is still marginalised and has partially fallen into oblivion. Several women artists’ video works are today lost or have not yet been migrated to digital archival formats.
As a result many women artists’ seminal and pioneering experiments remain under-researched and neither accessible nor critical writing upon them published.
EWVA aims to fill a fundamental gap in the history of video art and provide a useful tool to practitioners, artists and scholars as well as organisations (including curators, contemporary art museums, archives, foundations, media centres). It will inform and contribute to a future recovery and migration to digital format of women artists’ videotapes that are at risk of loss due to the obsolescence of the original formats.
EWVA was launched at the Media Art Festival in Rome in February 2015.
The project is based at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee.
Principal Investigator: Professor Elaine Shemilt
Co-Investigator: Professor Stephen Partridge
Post Doc Research Assistant: Dr Laura Leuzzi
Hon Research Fellow: Deirdre Mackenna
Hon Research Fellow: Dr Cinzia Cremona
Archivist: Adam Lockhart
REWINDItalia is an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project, led by the scholar and pioneer of British video art – Professor Stephen Partridge (DJCAD, University of Dundee). It follows the AHRC funded research project REWIND (2004 – ongoing), which has collected and remastered over 450 works (single screen and installation) by British artists from the 1970s and 1980s.
REWINDItalia started in 2011 and aims to explore the histories and narratives of video art activity in Italy from the 1970s and 1980s and to bring it to the attention of international scholars and practitioners for interpretative and historical assessment.
Interviews, documents and ephemera collected during the project are now available on http://www.rewind.ac.uk/
Principal Investigator: Professor Stephen Partridge
Co-Investigator: Professor Sean Cubitt
Research Assistant: Dr Laura Leuzzi
Hon Research Fellow: Deirdre Mackenna
Hon Research Fellow: Cinzia Cremona
Archivist: Adam Lockhart
(Text by S. Partridge & L. Leuzzi)
Participation in financed Research Projects in Italy:
- 2009 As a PhD student I took part to “Progetto di Ateneo Federato 2009” Tre diari d’artista (Three diaries of artists) PI: Prof. Antonella Sbrilli.
- 2008 As a PhD student I took part to “Ricerca Ateneo Federato 2008” Sguardi italiani su Joseph Cornell (Italian glances on Joseph Cornell), PI: Prof. Antonella Sbrilli.
- 2007 freelance collaboration at “Ricerca di Università 2007” La visualizzazione mentale dell’opera d’arte (The Mental Visualization of the artwork); coordinator: Prof. Antonella Sbrilli.