Conversational Tour

with Cecilia Canziani and Francesco Ventrella

Cecilia Canziani

Cecilia Canziani is an art historian and independent curator. Her work focuses on contemporary artistic practice, writing and teaching on contemporary visual culture, and collaboration as a curatorial methodology. She is co-founder of the contemporary art research centre IUNO and of the Les Cerises publishing project for children’s artist’s books. She teaches Phenomenology of Contemporary Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in L’Aquila. Recent exhibition projects include the first institutional retrospective of Linda Fregni Nagler in Italy, organised for the GAM in Turin; the Festival of Foreign Academies and Cultural Institutes at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome; two exhibitions dedicated to Elisa Montessori at the Italian Cultural Institutes in Warsaw and Kraków; Io dico io at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, and the Anastasia Potemkina exhibition at MAXXI L’Aquila. She has been following the work of Chiara Camoni since 2010, of whom she edited her first monograph (NERO, 2017) and, since 2018, they have worked together on the touring research project La Giusta Misura.

Francesco Ventrella

Francesco Ventrella teaches art history at the University of Sussex, where he is affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence. In 2007, he was a visiting fellow at the CATH Centre, University of Leeds; between 2013 and 2016, he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, and in 2019 he received the Paul Mellon Rome Fellowship at the British School at Rome. Francesco has explored gender and corporeality in art writing, and his research in the field of feminist and queer art history focuses on affective categories such as enthusiasm, empathy and resonance to rethink the relationship between sexuality, gender and modernity. He co-edited, together with Giovanna Zapperi, the volume Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: the Legacy of Carla Lonzi (Bloomsbury, 2021).