Back to the Futurists: Avant-gardes 1909-2009

Conference, 2-4 July 2009

At Queen Mary University of London

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

2009 marks the centenary of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, published on 20 February 1909 in the Paris daily Le Figaro. Organised at Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, Back to the Futurists: Avant-gardes 1909-2009 is an international conference called with the aim of reassessing the contribution of Futurism to Modernism and tracking its enduring legacy in cultural movements around the world.

The conference is timed to coincide with the major Futurism exhibition at Tate Modern (12 June – 13 September). As Le Futurisme à Paris. Une Avant-Garde Explosive, the exhibition opens in Paris at the Centre Pompidou (15 October 2008 to 26 January 2009), before moving to the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome (20 February to 24 May 2009). The conference will focus on verbal, visual, musical, ideological, sociological and other manifestations of Futurism and its successor movements from the birth of the notion of avant-garde to the present day.

Besides re-evaluations of futurist literature, painting, sculpture and architecture, possible conference strands include:

Milan-Paris-Berlin-Moscow; Futurism and Cubism; Futurism and Expressionism; Futurism and Vorticism; Futurism and politics; Futurist architecture; Futurism in music; Futurism and fashion; Futurism and photography; Futurism and cinema; Futurist journals; Apollinaire, Futurism and the French avant-garde; parole in libertà; the wireless imagination; digital art; centre and periphery; concrete poetry; avant-garde/neo-avant-garde; machine aesthetics; avant-garde and mass culture; the legacy of Futurism.

Proposals for papers: please email a 300-400 word abstract to Professor Elza Adamowicz (e.adamowicz@qmul.ac.uk) by 15 January 2009.

Link from correspondent Przemyslaw Strozek via Avantgardenet