Exile and Creativity

Description

Exile and Creativity is a collection of essays from a program series held in 2017-18 by the Italian Cultural Institute in New York jointly with Centro Primo Levi.

The essays examine the lives of Italian man and women who were forced or chose exile during the Fascist era. Reconstructing these personal experiences, scholars explore the interplay between the ideas of creativity and displacement, and their counter- parts of identity and home.

Whereas the narratives of exile tend to focus on the experience of disorientation and loss, as the curator of the series, Giorgio Van Straten states in the introduction, exile is “also something found: an opportunity, a new culture capable of sparking unexpected, unforeseen developments along one’s path through life and, therefore, the possible enrichment of one’s humanistic and cultural heritage”.