The Fondazione Ignazio Buttitta is organizing this event in the Sala delle Capriate of the Steri Monumental Complex (Università degli Studi di Palermo) and at the Museo internazionale delle marionette Antonio Pasqualino.
Sixty-five years after the publication of La cultura figurativa popolare in Sicilia, a volume that not only delineates and defines folk culture and art but also reveals Buttitta’s early interest in semiotics and anticipates key lines of research in visual culture studies, the Fondazione Ignazio Buttitta, in collaboration with the University of Palermo's Departments Cultures and Societies and Humanities, the Association for the Preservation of Folk Traditions, the Sicilian Semiological Circle, and the Academy of Fine Arts of Palermo, is organizing a conference. This event will, on one hand, reflect on Buttitta’s contribution to the study of folk art and visual anthropology, and, on the other, assess the current state of research on artistic expressions of folkloric and ethnological significance in the Italian and European contexts.
Scholars from France, Russia, Sardinia, Romania, Spain, and Italy participated in the event. In addition to highlighting the impressive work and legacy of Antonino Buttitta, they reflected on contemporary figurative popular culture.
Professors M.ª Pilar Panero García, Ramón Pérez de Castro, Carmen Morán Rodríguez, and Adrián Stoicescu took part. Although she presented on a topic unrelated to MASKS, Professor Adelina Dogaru also participated.
The meeting provided an opportunity for these five members to discuss and clarify various aspects of the project within the unique setting of the Puppet Museum, a center that houses a beautiful collection of masks, which is directed by Professor Rosario Perricone. The topics addressed by our partners, which will be published by the Ignazio Buttitta Foundation, are:
M.ª Pilar Panero García and Ramón Pérez de Castro (Universidad de Valladolid), “The Traditional Mask in the Context of Religious Ritual: Perspectives from Castilla y León (Spain)”:
This study will address the use of masks in certain religious rites within the current autonomous community of Castilla y León. We will analyze their evolution throughout history, paying special attention to documented examples from the Early Modern period—providing unpublished documentation on the subject—particularly in Holy Week and Corpus Christi, as these are the best-known cases that have survived to the present day.
At the same time, we will focus on the uses that reaffirm the contemporary social, cultural, and artistic commitment to masks. We are particularly interested in debates that reconsider the transcendental and secular uses of masks both in the past and present, from the perspectives of cultural anthropology, critical heritage studies, ethnology, the arts, and also craftsmanship.
Carmen Morán Rodríguez (Universidad de Valladolid), “Masks and Ritual in Pasolini’s Medea”:
This presentation analyzes the film Medea (1960), by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in relation to the context of its time, and specifically as an allusion to the disappearance of traditional Sardinia due to tourism and militarization. This explains why the recreation of the ancient masks of Colchide alludes to traditional Sardinian carnival masks, which are linked to specific figures and meanings, as I will attempt to demonstrate.
Adrian Stoicescu (Universitatea din Bucureşti), “From dancing the bears to Bear Dance - ritual, aesthetics and heritigisation”:
From the multiplicity of rituals and ceremonies marking the end of the year, few survived in contemporary Romanian folk life and of those much if not all original meaning got replaced by new functionalities. Additionally, the regional circulation of the cultural practices exceeded the locality of performance by means of digital communication which, eventually, not only contributed to the dissemination of the practice, but also led to the digital heritigisation of such. This paper proposes to look diachronically to the Jocul Ursului (Bear Dance), with a special focus on the contemporary performance of the group from Asau (a region in the historical province of Moldova) in order to maps the functional, aesthetic and role transformations. With a constant presence to festivals and folk tradition competitions and designated social media pages, one particular group braded the Bear Dance and developed its own individual style of performing the tradition. All of these transformations will be looked at in order to theorising the paths form traditional practice to 'branded' tradition.
We thank Professor Ignazio E. Buttitta for the invitation to participate in such an important conference. It is an honor to remember his father, Professor Antonino Buttitta, and his important work.
Carmen Morán from the University of Valladolid talks about masks in contemporary times and MASKS at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Granada
Professor Carmen Morán, a member of the MASKS team, delivered a keynote lecture at the prestigious University of Granada on the occasion of the celebration of their patron saint, Saint Isidore of Seville. The event took place on April 24 in the García Lorca Hall.
Our colleague gave the conference "The Soul of the Celebration: Reflections on Humanity, Celebration, and Contemporary Culture," in the presence of the Dean, Ana Gallego Cuiñas. She approached the subject in an innovative way, focusing on the concept of celebration from various fields of knowledge, such as art, music, philosophy, anthropology, literature, culture, and history, among others.
Under the motto The Festival of Letters, these days of celebration will allow each discipline of the faculty to offer unique perspectives on what a celebration is, its social functions, symbolic meanings, political implications, and artistic and cultural representations. From Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian, to Clifford Geertz's reflections on social rituals, Bakhtin’s carnival, and the studies on festivals by Jacques Le Goff and Carlo Ginzburg, along with Goya’s paintings, the novels of Fitzgerald and García Márquez, and popular songs, among others — all of these contribute to an understanding of a phenomenon that explores the dynamics between identity, alterity, and community, the very essence that defines the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the UGR.
