The opening of the SubNetwork on Art Studies has as its main purpose the development of relations between the Academies of Fine Arts and the Mediterranean Universities of the UNIMED network, in particular, with the Faculties of Art and with those involved with Technological and Humanistic Studies. It will be possible to build research paths, either common or different, in a field of study that manages to bring together various themes, subjects and practices.
Our institutions offer the study of traditional disciplines such as painting, sculpture, engraving, design, and new technologies such as photography, video, and multimedia; new digital arts and web design; artistic performance and set design for TV, movie, and theatre; fashion and the ever-evolving connection with scientific research. Cooperation between our universities, in its most diversified forms, can facilitate and increase the capacity to promote exchanges of teachers and students in the future; organize conferences and study groups on specific topics that highlight the activities of one or more institutions; design events on local cultural identities, but shared and revisited, and a great deal more. In essence, it is mainly a matter of accessing the multiple actions provided by the Erasmus+ European program, which is increasingly sensitive to relations with neighbouring countries to the South.
With the ever increasing growth of digital languages, the Internet and Artificial Intelligence, which are substantially transforming cognitive processes, we can model educational structures and research and production methodologies to the different platforms of sharing and participation both online and offline, which are becoming less and less "linked" to territoriality – experimenting with mobility, experienced as a fluid territory, unlimited, in which the study and the work are determined, in time and space. We can imagine activities managed through educational and non-educational infrastructures, of social sharing, permeated by external non-academic resources; imagining migrants in the studio – or, studying by migrating – in places historically shaped by similar flows, where migration itself, impermanence – which characterizes research, the search for a place, a substance – becomes a value in a course of study adhering to the epochal situation we are experiencing.
Therefore, we can extend our attention to unusual interlocutors, not normally thought of by university structures, improving our ability to intercept people in transit across the Mediterranean, from the south and the east: they could be students forced to interrupt their studies, men and women who would have liked, or who would take, the opportunity to undertake artistic studies – artists in transit.
We know that artistic practice does not happen only because it is connected to a physical laboratory where objects with a certain future are produced, in space and time, but it is also, or above all, thought and acted out in conditions that are borderline, extreme, intimate, and inaccessible. The way we engage in a relationship with things, with facts, with people, with the environment, with history, with news coverage, in these cases, seems to be much more important than the artifact itself: let’s say that everything makes sense by virtue of its relationships.
UNIMED – Mediterranean Universities Union is a not-for-profit association with its headquarters in Rome, Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, 244, Italy