Mina. The voice of silence: Presence and absence of a pop icon
International Conference
Organized by Giulia Muggeo, Gabriele Rigola, Jacopo Tomatis
March 23-24 2020
Mina’s body – with its presence and absence – crosses the last sixty
years of Italian history. Starting from her debut as an urlatrice on the 1950s
television show Il Musichiere, and in the Italian musicarelli movies between
1959 and 1960, up to her “physical” farewell in 1978 and her latest “virtual”
appearances, Mina stands out as one of the most powerful Italian pop icon.
During her entire career, Mina was able to establish herself as a key figure of
Italian popular culture, but also as a cult artist, paving the way in Italy for
an American-inspired sophisticated song (Fabbri 2008, p. 113). Yet, there are
many more Minas: the TV icon of the 1960s, the reassuring presence (and voice)
of the Carosello commercials, the independent woman blamed by the media, the
record producer, the columnist...
Mina thus represents a unique figure, encompassing different fields of
study; her uniqueness seems to challenge the usual research paradigms, and
possibly contributed in discouraging scholars: despite Mina’s recognized
cultural relevance, a specialized bibliography can be hard to find. Among the
few academic contributions, we can remember those of Paolo Prato (2014), Rachel
Haworth (2017; 2018a; 2018a; 2018b; 2019), Lucio Spaziante (2016) and Franco
Fabbri (2017); Franco Fabbri himself, with Luigi Pestalozza (1998), edited the
only collection on the subject, with articles by Roberto Favaro, Maurizio
Franco, Mauro De Luigi, Giovanna Marini and Edoardo Sanguineti among the
others. As for the rest, Mina has been incidentally analyzed in the few ample
works available on Italian popular music (Fabbri 2008; Prato 2010; Tomatis
2019).
At the same time, systematic studies on Mina, both in Italy and abroad,
on the role she has played in the history of the Italian mass media system and
in the general context of visual culture are almost nonexistent; only few
contributions have offered a perspective on this issue, connecting Mina’s
figure with celebrity and performance studies (Acca 2011; Mosconi 2014;
Valentini 2017).
The study of Mina’s figure in an intermedial perspective can thus
provide a contribution to the understanding of the specificities of different
media – from the popular press to television – and their history in Italy; and
to the comprehension of social and cultural changes in fashion, habits, and the
very idea of show business and entertainment in Italian cultural industry.
This international conference on Mina and her image – in the year of her
80th birthday, sixty years (or a little more) from her debut – is part of
CRAD’s and Sylvia Scarlett Gender Media Lab’s activities at the University of Torino. As demonstrated by past events and conferences, among the goals of both
organizations is to support an intermedial, transdisciplinary approach,
encompassing the studies on visual culture and cinema with sound studies,
popular music studies, gender studies, media studies, cultural history and
semiotics.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
- Body/Voice:
- Presence/absence/disappearance of Mina’s body: resistance/persistence of the star and of her voice
- Mina’s body and image changes in relation to cultural changes: from Baby Gate the urlatrice to the “sophisticated” television presenter, up to Mina’s present image
- Performance:
- Mina as a television star: the performer and the TV host
- Mina on screen: musicarelli, soundtracks, songs re-used by cinema and contemporary tv series (from Pedro Almodóvar to Master of None)
- Mina live and on record
- Mina and the dance
- Collaborations and duets through the years, from Adriano Celentano to Alex Britti and Fabrizio De André
- Mina and her authors: Augusto Martelli, Massimiliano Pani, etc.
- Mina, jazz music, Brazilian music
- Style, image, (self)representation:
- Style, fashion, iconicity: from television’s costumes to the stereotypes of Mina’s contemporary image
- Mina and the visual culture: Mina as a pop icon, from popular press to album covers and videoclips
- Mina and the advertising: commercial value of Mina’s image and voice (from Carosello to Barilla and Tim ads)
- Transfigurations and experimentations around Mina’s body: animation, digital image, self-representation
- Mina’s writings: from Liberal to La Stampa, to the reader’s column in Vanity Fair
- Popular culture, writing, audience
- Mina’s reception in Italy: gossip and stardom
- Mina’s international reception
- Mina in popular culture
- Re-writing Mina: from interviews to biographies
- Fandom practices: fan clubs, social networks, tributes and more (Vogue’s Forever Mina, etc.).
- Imitations and the satire on Mina, from Loretta Goggi (Tale e quale) to Lucia Ocone a Ennio Marchetto
- Gender:
- Mina and the feminine models in Italy, from the 1950s until the present day
- Mina as a queer icon
Authors should send their proposals (max 250 words, in Italian or
English), along with a short bio and 5 keywords to:
centroricerche.crad@unito.it, giuliafrancesca.muggeo@unito.it,
gabriele.rigola@unito.it, jacopo.tomatis@unito.it
Deadline for proposal: December 5, 2019
Notification of acceptance: December 20, 2019
Conference fee
50€: Professors
25€: PhDs and postdoctoral fellows
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