Images of the Body: First World War and its Aftermath

This workshop aims at examining the centrality of the body in the narration, representation, experience and understanding of the First World War.

It will take into account individual bodies in war, as they were compelled in the trenches, wounded, dispersed, exhausted, mutilated, or killed. As well, it will consider how those bodies came to symbolize the national community as a whole. Therefore, the workshop approaches the topic by paying attention to both the war and the home front, to both wartime and post-war societies.

The main idea is to involve historians, art historians and visual culture historians to reflect upon specific key-questions concerning the representation of bodies during and a er the First World War.

PROGRAMME

Thursday, 9 June

10:30 Martin Baumeister (Director, DHI Rome)
Welcome

10:40 Martina Salvante (Rome)
Introduction

I - The Male Body Revisited
Chair: Annette Becker (Paris)

11:00 Sarah Kinzel (Berlin)
Expulsion from Paradise. Representations of the human body in early 20th
century painting

11:30 Monica Cioli (Rome)
From Man at War to Machine Man. The Evolution of the Body in the 1920s

12:15 coffee break

12:30 Flavia Marcello (Melbourne)
Art, Architecture and the Body of the Soldier in Marcello Piacentini's
Casa Madre dei Mutilati in Rome

13:15 lunch break

II - Memorializing the Body
Chair: Martina Salvante (Rome)

14:30 Martin Baumeister (Rome)
Filling the big void: mourning fallen soldiers and the thirst of
representation

15:00 Paolo Nicoloso (Trieste)
Memory Strategies: Ossuaries on the Eastern Italian Border

18:00 Keynote Lecture
Michael Diers (Berlin)
Fragments. Politics and Aesthetics of the Body in Pieces

19.00 Reception

Friday, 10 June

III - Wounded and Dead Bodies
Chair: Martin Baumeister (Rome)

10:00 Alessandro Faccioli (Padova)
Landscapes of Death in the Italian WWI Cinema

10:30 Marjorie Gehrhardt (Reading)
The Face of War: repairing Gueules cassées, rebuilding society

11:30 coffee break

IV - Bodies of War and their Representations
Chair: Michael Diers (Berlin)

11:45 Bernd Huppauf (New York/Berlin)
Images between Ethics and Aesthetics - Mutilated Bodies after World War
I

12:15 Annette Becker (Paris)
To Photography, to camouflage, to draw: images of a war of bodies,
1914-2014

12:45 Final Discussion

13:30 Lunch Break