NYU Florence, in collaboration with The Opera di Santa Croce, teamed up to have one of our students, Serena Mahal Ponciano (CAS ’22) become an ambassador for the current “Sisters in Liberty: From Florence, Italy, to New York, New York.” This exhibition at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration in New York is currently open until April 26, 2020.
Serena, under the guidance of Paola Vojnovic and Donata Grossoni from the Opera di Santa Croce, completed a six hour training course in order to present the exhibition in New York to New York City school children. This unique opportunity to create a bridge between Serena’s experience in Florence and her return to NYU in New York allows her to bring her Florence experience to New York.
This exhibition depicts the special exchange of ideas and art that inextricably unites Florence and Italy with New York and the United States. Two special “Sisters in Liberty” statues: the solemn Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World by Frédéric Bartholdi, which has dominated the New York harbor since 1886, and the elegant Liberty of Poetry by Pio Fedi, inaugurated in 1883 as a monument to the Italian patriot Giovanni Battista Niccolini in Santa Croce in Florence, embody this special exchange, where people’s stories intertwine with the pursuit of freedom and democracy. These two statues are sisters because they are similar in stance and in detail. And still today, among art historians, the question is an open one: was Bartholdi, who visited Florence, inspired by Fedi’s Liberty?
This initiative, promoted by the Opera di Santa Croce is linked to the celebration of the bicentennial of the United States Consulate General Office in Florence. The project partners are: the National Parks Service / Statue of Liberty National Monument and Ellis Island, Kent State University, US Consulate General in Florence, Italian Consulate General in New York, Garibaldi Meucci Museum, The Union League Legacy Foundation.
On December 11, 2019, NYU Florence will host a talk with Professor Philipp Ther entitled The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1942. Professor Ther is a Professor of History at the University of Vienna, winner of the 2019 Wittgenstein Prize, and will speak about his new book. Professor Ther will discuss the long history of refugees in modern European history, and will reflect on how that history might shape our understanding of current crises of displacement, at a moment when the movement of labor migrants and refugees has become a deeply polarizing political preoccupation in contemporary Europe.
On October 16 and 17, 2019, NYU Berlin hosted a remarkable gathering of scholars that was both reflective and forward-thinking. The gathering being hosted in Berlin was meaningful as this year marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Directors from NYU Berlin, NYU Florence, and NYU Prague collaborated in making the occasion, organising the conference, Never-ending History: How did we get to 2019 from 1989?. This conference provided prominent thinkers to an opportunity to gather and consider a range of issues that have occupied academic and public debates, as well as the people who had lived on either side of the “Iron Curtain” and who became active or passive participants in the establishment of a ‘new’ European and global “post-communist” East. While the conference considered the global dimensions and significance of 1989, Never-ending History also addressed legacies of continuity and change in Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic in politics, economics, and culture.
Professor Larry Wolff, NYU Professor of History and NYU Florence C0-Director, gave the keynote address, entitled Everyday Ecstasy: Revisiting 1989 in Sober Perspective and Double Exposure. His inspiring and interesting talk set the stage for the engaging presentations and provocative dialogues that ensued over the two days of this gathering.
The impressive contributors and panels considered a wide range of topics that were organised into four lively panels: Internationalism, Nationalism, and Identity Formation in Post-1989 Europe; Aufarbeitung? Historicizing East Germany; Redrawing Europe; and Artists as Chroniclers and Storytellers of Political Change. These panel presentations and discussions considered issues as diverse as the successes and failures of liberal democracy and market economy in former Communist/Socialist countries and visions of citizenship and nationality, the impact of the transitions on women and minority groups and media, arts, and culture in post-Communist societies, the resurgence (or continuity) of authoritarianism and nationalism and changing concepts of grassroots democracy / social movements in an age of populism and social media.
NYU Professor of History Mary Nolan delivered an inspiring closing keynote address. Professor Nolan’s impressive scholarship is focused on Europe and America in the Twentieth Century, the Cold War, the history of Human Rights, the global economy in the twentieth century, modern German history, and European women’s history. Her closing keynote, Women and Gender Politics since 1989, was a stirring commentary on how women, gender, and politics have featured in political and social debates Europe over the last thirty years.
While it is hard to distill two days of dynamic conversation into themes, NYU Prague Director Jiri Pehe, noted the discussions suggested that “there seem to be similar developments in all post-communist countries, which seems to suggest that we need to look for most answers to what is now going on in the region in the era before 1989.” NYU Berlin Director Gabriella Etmektsoglou described the conclusions being drawn, by Mary Nolan and others, as “path-breaking work”.
“It was enlightening to do work with Commedia dell’Arte, a centuries old style of performance, and then use it as a pathway to help us grow as actors in the modern world,” says Ian LoCascio, a rising senior, Tisch School of the Arts, of his experience studying this summer at NYU Florence. Having toured with a Commedia group early in his career, James Calder, head of movement, Tisch Graduate Acting Department, and founder of the Commedia in Florence program, created a forum for learning the inventive theatrical form in its birthplace.
With a long and rich cultural heritage, Commedia dell’Arte (comedy of professional players), is an Italian theatrical tradition that originated in the Middle Ages. It is a genre, explained Calder, that combines mask making, circus skills, and lazzi (bits and specialty acts) and is still visible in the “modern-day theatrical and cinematic works of Dario Fo and Roberto Benigni.” An integral part of Italy’s collective imagination, imagery rooted in Commedia, said LoCascio, “pop[s] up everywhere from museums to souvenir shops.”
A defining feature of Commedia is its focus on character driven narratives in comedic situations, and masks represent this concept, said Calder. During the summer program at La Pietra, students learn to create their own using traditional techniques, under the guidance of sculptor-in-residence, Joan Harmon. “When we did work with the Commedia masks, we were embracing the same characters and scenarios that have been associated with those masks for centuries,” says LoCascio. “ We did not, however, merely stop there and only approach the Commedia work from a classical perspective. A heavy emphasis of the program was taking the brutally honest, gleefully imperfect humanity at the root of those Commedia characters and channeling that honesty and vulnerability in the work that we do with any text.” Students applied Commedia’s highly theatrical approach in “nuanced ways while acting texts from contemporary television in front of the camera,” explained LoCascio.
“To do this program anywhere would be amazing, but I don't think it would be anywhere near as life changing if it weren't in Italy"
Ian LoCascio
Unlike traditional theater’s use of a memorized and rehearsed script, Commedia’s plot is chosen first and then the actors develop the story in spontaneous ways as they play off of one another, said Calder. A successful performance hinges on one’s ability, explained LoCascio, to “embrace discomfort and uncertainty” while quickly building upon the unforeseen and transforming any given stage props and coperformers’ dialogue into one’s own scenario.
Calder noted that it is the uniqueness of each performance that generates a sense of excitement among the audience, as they follow characters through a story. And the inventive nature of the performance calls attention to the actors themselves as they navigate obstacles that arise during the act. There is a sense of uncertainty, he said, as the Commedia troupe attempts to steer the performance to a successful and entertaining finale.
This form of acting allows performers to weave together, often satirically and polemically, old texts and current social issues. As LoCascio explained, “with our final Commedia performance of “Buffo Tartuffo” (funny truffle) – a riff on Moliere’s play “Tartuffe” – we took a very old text and approached it from a modern perspective, using it to address such highly relevant topics as abuse of power and the #MeToo Movement.” Turning to the early history of Commedia when sensitive topics were not allowed in the theater, improvised performances could avoid censorship, and enabled open discussion about social and political issues.
“In addition to plays performed for the Florentine community on La Pietra’s amphitheater, the Continuum Theater stage, students are also involved with a summer theater festival.” For over a decade, Calder has directed the La Pietra Summer Theatre Festival. Sculptors create huge masks and giant puppets and students join a procession through the town, he explained. Delivering works, such as the Odyssey and the Iliad, in ancient courtyards, accented by the talents of the many renowned artists who join the program every summer, the festival has “quite a regional and expat following,” said Calder
Further enriching the program, a grant from the Dean of Tisch, Allyson Green, said Calder, has brought the Continuum Company, a group of Tisch graduate acting alumni and other artists, to Florence to develop classical and new works. Artists-in-residence this summer include many award winning alumni, such as Nina Arianda, a Tony Award winner for Venus in Fur; Sterling K. Brown and Susan Kelechi Watson from This is Us; and André Holland from Moonlight, Selma, High Flying Bird, and The Knick. For the past 13 years, he explained, undergraduate students have worked alongside the alumni in La Pietra’s immersive and intimate learning environment, providing “an experience that isn’t possible in New York.” The alumni also offer, said LoCascio, “unfiltered insight into what life is like as a working actor.”
Studying Commedia, explained Locascio, and learning a style of acting “radically” different from his training at his primary studio in New York, the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, which is very intellectual and heavily text-based, pushed him to “embrace uncertainty. With Jim and Jacob’s [teacher of acting, stage presence, Commedia dell’Arte and clown]ceaseless support, encouragement, and provocation, I challenged myself in entirely new ways and think that I am a far better and bolder actor for it.”
“Living in a new place with a new group of people, many of whom I did not know before,” LoCascio said, “and learning a whole new approach to acting was such a rewarding combination.” He added that “to do this program anywhere would be amazing, but I don’t think it would be anywhere near as life changing if it weren’t in Italy.”
Stemming from her own experiences delivering art therapy workshops around the world, Ikuko Acosta, director of NYU Steinhardt’s Graduate Art Therapy program, and clinical associate professor, wanted to offer her students the invaluable experience of practicing art therapy internationally.
More than a decade ago, Acosta established a global internship program at Steinhardt to provide “the opportunity for students to develop racial and cultural self-awareness, work with diverse communities, hone critical thinking skills, and explore the role of art therapy in another culture.” Says alumna Krystal Atwood of her decision to enroll in the internship in Buenos Aires, “I wanted to learn everything I could to provide the most nuanced and culturally fluent art therapy services possible to a range of client populations.”
Coordinated in collaboration with several of NYU’s global sites, Acosta’s interns have practiced therapeutic arts in a wide array of foreign settings, including Florence, which welcomes its third cohort in July 2019. Some of this year’s group will serve a geriatric population that has worked with two different intern cohorts. Acosta recalled that this population was especially receptive to engagement in creative activities, noting “their facial expressions became cheerful, moods were boosted, and their social interactions improved.” In Accra, Ghana, students have worked at a rehabilitation center for young men with mental, cognitive and physical disabilities. A grouping, Acosta said, that contrasts with “facilities in the US where patients are usually separated based on the nature of their disabilities.” The men are also provided with “job training and various types of skills to survive in society” explained Acosta. During the three weeks that the men worked with interns, she emphasized that “they are not treated in a clinical sense, yet a very positive change can be seen in their self-esteem due to their increased ability to express themselves freely without being judged. Their general attitudes became more positive.”
Returning to NYU’s global sites offers faculty the opportunity to observe the long-term impacts of programs. In Ghana, when the van entered the driveway to the rehabilitation center one year later, Acosta and her students were greeted by shouts of “art therapy!” “And,” she added, “the young men went right back into making art as if they had done so yesterday.” When returning to the geriatric facility in Florence two years later, the demeanor of the residents immediately became “uplifted,” and they “even remembered the names of some interns from prior years,” providing “evidence,” that the “experiences were etched in their memories.” Acosta says that “while what we do may be little, at a basic human level, the experience leaves a bright and memorable spot in their minds.”
“There is an amazing resilience that each location reveals. The internship leads to a questioning of one’s values in a way that can’t be gained inside a classroom."
Ikuko Acosta
Indeed, Acosta notes that “the program is not geared toward addressing mental illness directly” and that “it would be unrealistic to treat a patient in three weeks.” Furthermore, she explained that “applying a western concept of art therapy to non-western societies can create tension with local attitudes around mental illness. And therapeutic techniques that are not adapted to the culture situate the therapist as a colonialist.” But while mental illness is viewed in various ways around the world, she emphasized that “the symptoms and behavioral manifestations of mental and psychological disturbances are very similar. What differs are cultural attitudes and treatment.” Yet she has observed that art therapy brings together commonalities in international settings. “Art is universal and so too is human suffering.”
Regardless of location, Acosta says, art therapy students work to build a “human connection.” In every country in which the course has been held, Acosta has seen “students establish relationships despite not speaking the local language. They learn to become highly receptive and attuned to the subtleties of body language and other non-verbal cues.” She added that her students “thoroughly enjoy getting to know each client’s personality beyond his/her disability through creative communication.” Inevitably, explained Acosta, “basic human bonds are formed during experiences that are not bound by a singular form of expression. Connecting in this way is a universal phenomenon.”
Other skills that students quickly acquire, said Acosta, are “flexibility and adaptability, because their clinical training does not translate directly in foreign locations.” She went on to say that “outside of the US, concepts of boundaries between patient and client are much different, particularly those that are physical – it is common and natural for patients to openly and physically express affection to their therapists in many cultural contexts. Another example is corporal punishment, which seems to be an acceptable form of discipline in some countries.” Therapists in the US, Acosta explained, are trained to report signs of “abuse,” so it can be “difficult to set aside feelings of confusion about roles and responsibilities during the internship.”
Reflecting on her experiences in Buenos Aires, Atwood explained that she “felt humbled by the grace and dignity with which Dr. Acosta acknowledged our interpersonal struggles while maintaining hope for all of the involved parties and, ultimately, guiding the student interns toward providing life-changing art therapy services to the clients.” The level of care delivered by the interns is possible, says Acosta, because they “very quickly, learn to take a humanistic perspective and adapt to local mores.” “Interns observe, learn, and respect the host country and are not there to negate or impose their cultural norms,” she explained, and added that “after we leave, they resume their own lives, yet are instilled with memories of the brief but undeniable human connections that we all shared.”
“Students also learn to adapt their planning process for clinical sessions,” said Acosta, as “they develop activities appropriate to the population […] and seek out locally available art materials.” During an early iteration of the program in India, coordinated by Cross-Cultural Solutions, a New York-based non-profit that provides volunteer service to communities around the world, Acosta said her students “found beautiful textiles with which they made dolls with women at a shelter for victims of domestic violence. They also collected many found objects from the streets, which they incorporated into a piece of artwork.” In Florence, a capital of the art world, “students find low cost materials at art stores and unusual items from junk shops.” Acosta elaborated that “these experiences too contribute to students’ creative growth and help them to become more flexible and less confined in their practice of art therapy.”
“Through exposure to how others survive amidst adversity,” Acosta noted, “with very limited resources and significant hardship, students gain a sense of humbleness.” For Atwood, her work with refugees and asylum seekers in Buenos Aires provided a glimpse into individuals’ experiences – many had fled war and violence, and struggled to live with uncertainty in the confines of refugee centers. During the internship, explained Krystal, she saw increases in “self-efficacy and a reduction of isolation as they connected with other refugees and asylum seekers in art therapy groups.”
“There is an amazing resilience that each location reveals,” said Acosta. “The internship leads to a questioning of one’s values in a way that can’t be gained inside a classroom. And that is essential as a therapist because personal value systems can’t be brought into clinical sessions.”
On April 10, NYU Florence will host a dialogue with Dario Miccoli, Lecturer of Modern Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. When thinking about the Holocaust, almost everyone refers to the Jews of Europe and, particularly, countries like Poland, writers like Primo Levi, and places like Auschwitz. Few people remember that the Jews of North Africa also experienced the Second World War and, in some cases, the Holocaust: think of the Jews of Algiers subject to Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation, or the Libyan Jews deported to Bergen-Belsen in 1944. Even though the situations of the Jews of Europe and North Africa during the war can hardly be compared, over the last few years a number of Jews of North African origin now living in Israel or Europe have started to discuss the idea of a ‘North African Holocaust’ through literature, movies and in spaces such as museums and heritage centers. Focusing on the work of Italian, Israeli and French writers and artists of North African Jewish origin, Miccoli will investigate the emergence of the idea of a ‘North African Holocaust’, asking to what extent this constitutes the rediscovery of hitherto little-known memories, or something that largely bespeaks contemporary societal and political agendas in the context of today’s Europe and Israel. Special emphasis will be placed on the case of Libya under Italian rule, the vicissitudes of the Libyan Jews during the Second World War, and the impact of the Holocaust on the memorialisation processes put forward by Jews of Libyan origin – from the writer Victor Magiar to the heritage activist David Gerbi – living in contemporary Italy.
On March 4, NYU Florence’s La Pietra Dialogues will host an event considering the history of European integration and the common market. Hosted by Davide Lombardo, a Lecturer at NYU Florence, the questions to be considered include:
How did the European Union, after World War II, grow from six to twenty eight member states?
How has it met the challenges following the end of the Cold War to emerge as the economic and political power that it is today?
A crucial general election was held in Italy less than one year ago. The outcome of the election was a hung parliament, with no party or coalition of parties winning the majority of seats on its own. The most remarkable result was the unprecedented success of the two populist parties, the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League, at the expense of the two mainstream parties, the Democratic Party and Forza Italia. After three months of complex negotiations, an M5S-League government was formed. While the new dividing line in Europe that sets eurosceptic, anti-immigrant and anti-globalization parties against europhile, pro-multiculturalism, and pro-globalization parties seems to be gaining momentum, so far Italy is the only country in Western Europe where the populists stand in office unopposed. This may have consequences for the future of the Italian political and party systems as well as for the relationship between Italy and the EU.
On February 4, NYU Florence will host an event, Inside Italian Politics, featuring Roberto D´Alimonte, LUISS Guido Carli Rome and NYU Florence, and Alessandro Chiaramonte, University of Florence and NYU Florence.
Check out student coverage of the Italian Elections of March 4, 2018 on LPD´s Italian Politics Brief (run by NYU Florence students).
NYU Florence Director NYU Ellyn Toscano will soon be departing and assuming a new position with NYU in Brooklyn. On 29 November, the city of Florence recognized her contribution to the city by presenting her with a set of keys to the city. This honor was given in recognition of her “commitment to sharing her knowledge and love of the city of Florence with generations of students.” Ellyn is the founder and director of both La Pietra Dialogues and The Season, which have contributed significantly to NYU Florence / Villa LaPietra’s place as an intellectual and cultural center in the city of Florence.
On 18 October, NYU Florence’s La Pietra Dialogues will host Nicholas Boggs from the NYU Department of English. Dr. Boggs will discuss the collaboration between James Baldwin and Yoran Cazac, a French painter and illustrator living in Tuscany. Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood was recently republished to great acclaim by Duke University Press.
NYU Florence, in collaboration with The Opera di Santa Croce, teamed up to have one of our students, Serena Mahal Ponciano (CAS ’22) become an ambassador for the current “Sisters in Liberty: From Florence, Italy, to New York, New York.” This exhibition at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration in New York is currently open until April 26, 2020.
This exhibition depicts the special exchange of ideas and art that inextricably unites Florence and Italy with New York and the United States. Two special “Sisters in Liberty” statues: the solemn Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World by Frédéric Bartholdi, which has dominated the New York harbor since 1886, and the elegant Liberty of Poetry by Pio Fedi, inaugurated in 1883 as a monument to the Italian patriot Giovanni Battista Niccolini in Santa Croce in Florence, embody this special exchange, where people’s stories intertwine with the pursuit of freedom and democracy. These two statues are sisters because they are similar in stance and in detail. And still today, among art historians, the question is an open one: was Bartholdi, who visited Florence, inspired by Fedi’s Liberty?
