Centro Studi di Civiltà e Spiritualità Comparate
Performance: Underwater Lines – Live Painting
Performance parte del Convegno Comics and the Invisible.
Eventi
La Fondazione Giorgio Cini, in linea con la propria storia e tradizione, ha deciso di creare il nuovo Centro Studi di Civiltà e Spiritualità Comparate. Il Centro si configura come la naturale evoluzione del preesistente Istituto “Venezia e l’Oriente” che era stato istituito nel 1958 con l’intento primario di promuovere lo studio delle civiltà dell’India e dell’Estremo-Oriente e che negli anni è stato il fulcro di un incessante dialogo fra Oriente ed Occidente, nonché un punto di riferimento per gli studiosi di tutto il mondo grazie alla sua ricchissima biblioteca, ai seminari, alle conferenze e alle pubblicazioni. Questo Centro propone un approccio comparativo allo studio di diverse culture, religioni e spiritualità. Tale comparazione è intesa come strumento per la promozione del dialogo tra civiltà, come scambio e confronto non soltanto di nozioni diverse, ma anche di differenti esperienze politiche, teoriche ed estetiche.
Tra i progetti che vorremo sviluppare e promuovere:
– Misticismo, esoterismo, spiritualità e religione popolare sono concetti sfuggenti, che, come dice Michel De Certeau, spaventano ancora l’epistemologia delle scienze sociali contemporanee. Invitiamo i ricercatori a lavorare su questi termini in maniera interdisciplinare, connettendo riflessioni filosofiche, scienze sociali e teologie. I ricercatori potranno lavorare nella biblioteca del Centro, che ospita una ricca collezione di testi di storia delle religioni, letteratura coloniale, orientalismo, ed esoterismo.
– I confini tra scienza e religione sono spesso fluidi. Alcuni storici, orientalisti e psicanalisti del XX secolo come Mircea Eliade, Henry Corbin, e Carl Gustav Jung sono stati definiti “religionist”, in altre parole hanno mescolato concezioni ed esperienze del sacro con descrizioni storico-scientifiche. All’interno dei nuovi movimenti religiosi e nella cultura New Age si è sviluppata una corrente strettamente legata alle narrative delle scienze naturali, chiamata anche “Quantum mysticism”, dove le categorie delle scienze sono rielaborate per descrivere fenomeni religiosi. Completamente diversa, anche se con qualche assonanza, è la “svolta ontologica” descritta dall’antropologia contemporanea, che apre alla possibilità di altre realtà e dimensioni. Chiediamo agli studiosi di esplorare i confini tra scienza, cultura e religione.
– La relazione con l’Altro. Ogni forma religiosa si deve confrontare con l’alterità, tematizzando il confine tra “noi” e “loro”, che sia di natura culturale, etnica, linguistica, o legata all’orientamento sessuale e all’identità di genere. Chiediamo agli studiosi di tematizzare i confini religiosi. Come è percepito l’Altro? Chi è l’infedele? Come si muovono queste frontiere in base al contesto politico e sociale?
– Tra New e Old Age. Le scienze sociali hanno cercato di descrivere i cambiamenti delle pratiche religiose nelle società contemporanee coniando nuove categorie, quali “modernità religiosa”, “bricolage”, “post-secolare”, “new age”. Il rischio è quello di cadere nel presentismo, ascrivendo tutte le caratteristiche dei fenomeni religiosi alla cosiddetta svolta della modernità. Proponiamo quindi di indagare le relazioni tra vecchie e nuove tendenze nei fenomeni religiosi.
– Fenomenologia del corpo religioso: percezioni, emozioni, sensazioni e costruzione del corpo. Chiediamo agli studiosi di descrivere l’intreccio tra corpo, percezione, comprensione e cultura.
– Progetti dedicati allo studio e valorizzazione dell’Archivio Tiziano Terzani, donato dalla famiglia alla Fondazione Giorgio Cini, contenente documenti personali e fotografie.
- La biblioteca
La biblioteca del Centro Studi di Civiltà e Spiritualità Comparate è caratterizzata dalla presenza di raccolte librarie specializzate nelle culture dell’Oriente con particolare attenzione alle grandi tradizioni spirituali del mondo sia d’Oriente che d’Occidente. Tra queste spiccano quelle di Alain Daniélou, Tiziano Terzani e Giovanni Vacca. Inoltre, grazie al fondo Daniélou, il Centro Studi conserva una grande collezione di copie manoscritte di trattati di musicologia sacra delle tradizioni dell’India e di libri attinenti allo studio del pensiero tradizionale. Non di meno, la specificità della biblioteca è da cercarsi nelle riviste dedicate allo studio comparativo delle civiltà, che la Fondazione Cini si impegna ad aggiornare ogni anno. Il fondo di microfilm della biblioteca imperiale di Pechino impreziosisce ulteriormente le raccolte.
La nostra rivista Religiographies
Religiographies è una rivista open-access e peer-reviewed dedicata allo studio dei fenomeni religiosi che mira a promuovere un approccio interdisciplinare, promuovendo il dialogo tra storici, sociologi, antropologi, studiosi letterari, filosofi e psicologi. Inoltre, si dedica quei temi che sono spesso trascurati dalle scienze sociali e umane – come il misticismo, l’esoterismo, la spiritualità – che, secondo le parole di Michel de Certeau, “perseguitano l’epistemologia scientifica”.
Borsisti presenti e passati
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Elisa Palomino (periodo borsa: luglio 2024)
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- Sketchbook Journeys: Unravelling the Artistic Odyssey of Luigi Pericle and Fernando ZóbelDuring the Utopia, Art, and Spirituality Research fellowship, I aim to conduct a comparative study of two mid-20th-century European abstract artists: Luigi Pericle and Fernando Zóbel. By examining their sketchbooks, I seek to uncover the interplay between their artistic expressions and their engagement with Zen calligraphy, mysticism, and Eastern philosophies. Pericle and Zóbel were avant-garde artists, integrating form, colour, and matter with mysticism, abstraction, and spiritual depth. Pericle’s intellectual pursuits included astrology, theosophy, alchemy, and mysticism, while Zóbel’s interests spanned archaeology, comparative religion and philosophy. Pericle’s ink drawings and Zóbel’s calligraphic gestures influenced by oriental calligraphy, integrated its elegance and meditative qualities into their art. Their artistic processes were meticulous and dedicated, with Pericle transitioning to abstract expressionism and Zóbel planning his paintings through extensive preparatory studies. Pericle and Zóbel were avid intellectuals, with libraries that enriched their artistic practices. Pericle’s library reflected his esoteric interests, while Zóbel’s collection fostered historical preservation. Both artists retired to small towns, Ascona and Cuenca respectively embracing alternative lifestyles and philosophies. Their sketchbooks, comprising thousands of pages of reflections, offer invaluable insights into their creative processes and philosophical inquiries. This research will analyse these materials to illuminate their artistic evolution and legacy.
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Sébastien Mantegari Bertorelli (periodo borsa: maggio – giugno 2024)-
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- Through the Visions: The Visual Works of C. G. Jung and a Renewal of Spirituality in the Arts in the 20th CenturyThrough his scientific research in the field of psychology and his contributions to the visual arts, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) not only formulated an alternative narrative to the prevailing discourse on modernity, often confined to the lens of historical avant-gardes, but also initiated a profound reflection on spiritual renewal in the 20th century, emphasizing individualism and an internalized sense of sacredness. This research project is devoted to examining Jung’s visual works and their intersection with the discourses and creations of contemporaneous artists, particularly those active in Ascona, centered on the artists’ colony of Monte Verità, the annual Eranos meetings, along the shores of Lake Maggiore, and Luigi Pericle (1916-2001). In fact, it appears that artistic, intellectual and conceptual dialogues can be initiated between them around the question of a spiritual renewal at work in modern art which may take the shape of a new formal language as well as a new conception of the visual work itself. Through the example of Jung, the aim is to show the possible artistic alternatives to a normative modernity in the first half of the 20th century; emphasis is placed on underscoring the importance given to the sacred, myth, and spirituality in art during this period.
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Anna Scarabel (periodo borsa: febbraio, settembre 2024)
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- The Night Jasmine Tree of Vedic Meaning. Two opposing ways of retaining the meanings of the Veda. Svāmī Karapātrī’s and Dayānanda Sarasvatī’s ideologiesIcon worship is a widespread ritual practice in Hindu religious traditions. In the 19th century, Svāmī Dayānanda Sarasvatī (1824-1883), the founder of the Ārya Samāja (1875), a reformist Hindu organization revealing a matrix of Orientalist influences, challenged this practice and led the debate on its ‘authenticity’ within Hindu traditions. On the contrary, several ‘orthodox’ Hindu scholars of 19th and 20th century India opposed the spreading of Svāmī Dayānanda’s positions.
In my research “The Night Jasmine Tree of Vedic Meaning. Two opposing ways of retaining the meanings of the Veda. Svāmī Karapātrī’s and Dayānanda Sarasvatī’s ideologies, I address the philosophical debate developing around the practice of mūrti pūjā, or devotion to icons, between the neo-Hindu reformist movement Ārya Samāja and the Hindu traditionalist Svāmī Karapātrī (1907-1982). While Dayānanda Sarasvatī was known as one of the fathers of modern India, Svāmī Karapātrī was referred to as a ‘champion of orthodoxy,’ an influential voice in the religious, social, and political spheres of colonial and post-colonial India. Overall, this project studies a traditionalist response to the spreading of a reformist Hindu movement, the Ārya Samāja, thus illustrating how ‘old systems of thought’ are adapted in the confrontation (and refutation) of ‘modern’ religious instances.
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Tara Smith (periodo borsa: gennaio – marzo 2024)
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- “Blood for the Blood God!” - Transformation with Gods and Religion in the Warhammer 40K UniverseThis project will explore how Warhammer 40,000 players interact and understand the gods and religions present within their game world. This game environment includes miniature wargaming, model hobbying, video games, engaging with lore and instructional content in a variety of mediums, and interacting with other players (both online and offline). The aim of this project is to develop new knowledge and understanding in these relationships. This project will utilise a multi-modal methodology will explore the way in which players and non-players utilise religious symbols within the game for political means. Additionally, it will explore the potential spiritual connection and flow state through the act of miniature painting. This project will draw on archival work from the Fondazione Giorgio Cini to understand religious experiences of flow. This research was selected for the post-doc scholarship “Spirituality and the Arts”, granted by the Center for the Study of World Religions of Harvard Divinity School, the Warburg Institute, the University of Amsterdam, and the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities of Giorgio Cini Foundation.
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Claudia Dellacasa (periodo borsa: aprile – maggio 2023)
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- Intersectional Eco-Polyphony: Dialectical Relations between East and West, Nature and CultureIn my project, I aim to create an ecocritical framework for reading experimental poems and eco-fictions written in English and Italian by women writers with Buddhist interests. Situated at the intersection of the environmental humanities, comparative literature and philosophy, and gender studies, this research will make an original intervention to analyse the ability of environmental writing to gesture towards an understanding of the categories of species, cultural, and gender identities in their mutually constitutive relations.
On one hand, I envisage ‘intersectional eco-polyphony’ as a prism that allows us to critically defuse stringent binaries such as female/male, nature/culture, East/West, and to understand individual and collective identities dialectically. On the other hand, I propose this concept as an original ecocritical coordinate that emphasises the complex system of rhetorical strategies through which environmental writing orchestrates the voices of humans, animals, and plants, while adopting different cultural approaches to the engagement with non-human beings. In this way, the interconnection of diverse life forms within the texts emerges in a dialectical relationship with the fluidity and multiplicity of experiences that are outside and generate them, moving towards the construction of sustainable environmental imaginaries.
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Emanuele Confortin (periodo borsa: settembre 2022)
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- BanglaveniceBanglavenice is an observational documentary exploring and questioning the coexistence with water in Venice. The narrative key is the experience of some Venetian citizens intertwined with that of some migrants from Bangladesh, who after leaving a country increasingly affected by the effects of global warming, find in Venice a continuity with the places they come from. In Banglavenice the subjects are portrayed in their everyday life, their stories united and linked by the element of water. During six months of fieldwork, the camera’s eye enters the city (including Mestre and Marghera) to give space to multiple interpretations of human creativity and tenacity. Water is the leitmotif of this work, a “giant to be respected because water can stop fire, but fire can do nothing against water”. Although the effects of global warming in Venice are still far from Bangladesh levels, the unique architectural features of the city combined with the rising sea level make Venice the front-line of climate change in Europe. Through a transversal and immediate visual language, Banglavenice offers a multidimensional look at the city that highlights at the same time its fragility and its extraordinary ability to regenerate continuously.
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Gregory Vandamme (periodo borsa: maggio – giugno 2022)
- The Influence of Ibn ʿArabī’s Thought in the Modern West and the Limiting-Case of Ivan Aguéli (d. 1917)The intellectual and spiritual legacy of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) has been the object of multiple socio-political and religious appropriations. The goal of this research is to deepen our understanding of the questions raised by the contemporary interpretations and instrumentalizations of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought, by looking into the limiting-case of a particularly relevant, albeit eccentric actor of its first introduction to Western audiences, Ivan Gustaf Aguéli (1869-1917).This research project aims at investigating the – often allusive – doctrinal content of Aguéli’s texts in the light of the Akbarian tradition by addressing the following questions: How does Aguéli’s reading and presentation of Ibn ʿArabī’s intellectual legacy articulate his radical and revolutionary form of Anarchism to the traditional Islamic doctrines? Could we find an authentic form of contemporary Akbarian commentary behind what often appears at first glance as a peculiar and confused appropriation? In turn, how did this peculiar interpretation of Ibn ʿArabī shape and influence his first reception in the Western audience?By identifying the aspects of his reading that are radically innovative and creative, and those that prove to be rooted in the Akbarian interpretative tradition, this limiting-case should allow us to better understand the dynamics behind the contemporary interpretations and uses of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought.
Shobhana Xavier (periodo borsa: novembre-dicembre 2021)
My current book project is an ethnographic study of Sufi shrines in Sri Lanka set against the context of growing Buddhist extremist nationalism and anti-Sufism. During my time at the Cini Foundation, I worked in the library, particularly the India Room, reading and sifting through books and writings by European Orientalists and travelers who visited Sri Lanka (Ceylon) to understand how they did (or did not) discuss Sufi spaces and shrines, while also taking note of their framing of Islam broadly on the island. This material that I was able to engage at the Cini Foundation will be valuable for my historical contextualization of Sufi shrines and hagiographies in the context of colonial Ceylon (or British Sri Lanka) in my upcoming book on the contestations and accommodations that unfold around Sufi shrines in contemporary Sri Lanka.
Mariano Errichiello (periodo borsa: maggio – luglio 2021)
The project carried out at the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities articulates around two main focus areas. The first one is the sociological analysis of the modern Zoroastrians of India. The adoption of the interpretive model of religious economies has been assessed and refined. The process of religious individualisation during and after colonialism has been recognised as an axis of research that can facilitate the study of the Zoroastrian community over time. The second focus area entails the consultation of primary and secondary sources held in the library of the Centre. The main findings include several reports of Orientalist scholars on the religions in India, including Zoroastrianism, and the first translations into European languages of textual sources belonging to antinomian religious movements that emerged after the Arab conquest of Persia and spread across the Persianate world.
Francesco Baroni (periodo borsa: ottobre – dicembre 2020)
Julius Evola (1898-1974) was the most prominent Italian representative of perennialism, a school of thought based on two core ideas: the spiritual decadence of the modern West, and the existence of a “primordial Tradition”, a long forgotten repository of spiritual wisdom of non-human origin, whose traces subsist in the esoteric dimensions of Eastern and Western religions. Beside inspiring scholars such as Mircea Eliade, Evola’s work, in Italy as elsewhere, helped to establish a countercultural and anti-modern discursive framework with philosophical as well as political ramifications, particularly in the area of radical right. Still today, however, the scholarship on this author and his cultural legacy is scarce. Our research examines the relationship between Evola and the Austrian scholar Hans Thomas Hakl (born 1947). After translating Evola’s main books into German, Hakl has established himself as one of the most reliable specialists of the Evolian thought, contributing to its international resonance in the years of globalization, as well as to its recognition as an academic object of study. Our research took place mainly in Graz, Austria, where Hakl’s library and private archives are located. Access to these facilities proved invaluable, enabling the identification and study of unpublished documents.
Bernd-Christian Otto (periodo borsa: ottobre – dicembre 2020)
Who is Hans Thomas Hakl, the man behind the Octagon library? Based on 10 hours of semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted in March 2021, the project “Hans Thomas Hakl: Three lives in one” presents for the first time an extensive biographical account of the entrepreneur, scholar, publisher, book collector, and spiritual seeker Hans Thomas Hakl. As much of Hakl’s work was driven by a“respect for the honest – I might even say honourable – losers in the clash of world views” (Hakl 2008) and thus a strong interest in marginalized and disputed topics, authors, and ideas – many of which manifested in the Octagon library – Hakl himself became somewhat of a disputed figure. The project hence aims at portraying a most nuanced and multifaceted picture of the founder of the Octagon library, which seeks to transcend one-sided political or ideological perspectives.
Linda Zampol D’Ortia (periodo borsa: agosto – novembre 2019)
Questo progetto si propone di identificare il ruolo delle emozioni nel progetto evangelizzatore della Compagni di Gesù in Asia in epoca moderna. A questo scopo, considera i copioni emotivi presenti nella produzione letteraria di quattro missionari gesuiti italiani, pionieri delle rispettive missioni e promotori di una politica di evangelizzazione basata sul dialogo interculturale (la cosiddetta accomodatio).
I quattro missionari presi in considerazione sono: Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606), visitatore della Provincia Indiana della Compagnia, autore di vari trattati sui popoli indiano e giapponese e sostenitore dell’accomodatio; Rodolfo Acquaviva (1550–1583), rappresentante della prima missione presso l’impero Mughal in India; Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), uno dei fondatori della missione in Cina, che studiò la cultura cinese per quasi trent’anni; e Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733), uno dei primi europei a visitare il Tibet e a scrivere a proposito del buddhismo tibetano.
Lorenzo M. Capisani (periodo borsa: luglio – ottobre 2018)
