On Ploughed Land, Work Tools and Community Rituals. Artistic Practices and Rural Italy 1968–1986

Dr. Elisabetta Rattalino

Following the Second World War, Italy’s landscapes and ways of life underwent profound transformations. Industrialisation, urbanisation, internal migrations, agricultural mechanisation and the spread of consumerism contributed to these changes. Together they created the conditions which impacted the country’s topography and unsettled long-standing economic and socio-cultural relationships between cities and the countryside.

On Ploughed Land, Work Tools and Community Rituals. Artistic practices and Rural Italy 1968-1986 examines the works of those artists and architects who, in these circumstances, reoriented their practice to actively partake in the cultural production of rural areas or making experimental works about the landscapes, tools and knowledges of the countryside. During the Fellowship, the research aims to scrutinise how participatory art interventions of Rome-based verbo-visual artists Mirella Bentivoglio, Maria Lai and Gisella Meo (among others) performed Italy’s changing environments.

Adopting an integrated understanding of the city-countryside relation as an analytical lens, this study exposes how rural areas were conceived as a socio-cultural environment where forms of cultural productions alternative to the hegemonic, urban ones could thrive. More generally, the project offers the possibility to test a methodology that aims at capturing the Italian cultural-specific imagery of the city-countryside dichotomy from the perspective of art history and visual studies, therefore advancing the study of Italy’s postwar changing environments.