Critical Explorations: What is ‘Identity’ in the Arts and Art Histories of Italy?

This project approaches ‘identity’ not as a stable category but as a shifting and contested field through which Italian art and its histories have been narrated, imagined, and disputed. Rather than tracing a linear chronology or a terminological history, it examines how identity discourses emerge and dissolve across different times, places, and media—from historiography to exhibitions, from practices of creation and representation to reception, heritagization, and monumentalization. Attentive to Italy’s role as both laboratory and battleground for concepts of identity and diversity, the project engages sociological, cultural, and postcolonial theories to probe the ambivalence of identity as tool of symbolic power and site of resistance. Its exploratory character lies in testing how artworks themselves unsettle identity formations, inviting post-identitarian readings attentive to multiplicity, contingency, and change.