Agenda

Interview
1. Please provide a brief outline of your training and scientific activity.
My research interests coincide to a large degree or are complementary with those Professor Stefano Petrungaro is working on in his research group within the research project Ideas, Languages, Politics - Metamorphoses in Space and Time. As a visiting researcher in his research group, I intend to continue and upgrade my research in two main fields. 
2. Please state your reasons for choosing Venice and the Department for your research and teaching stay.
The first is the weaponization of urban culture, specifically how ongoing, recent, or historical political controversies are constructed and reflected in the contemporary urbanscape. I'll particularly deal with political graffiti and street art in two regions where I conducted intensive fieldwork in the last few years: the Balkans/Central Europe and the war-torn Ukraine (since I was there three times in 2023 and in 2024). On one side, the walls of the postsocialist cities and towns serve as mnemonic media; they are one of many ways to remember the past of a certain society. On the other hand, they are agents of political (counter-)propaganda, a weapon of the weak (to borrow James C. Scott's concept), but increasingly also a weapon of those in power. Traditionally, they were more images of dissent, attacking social injustices, but now they are becoming just another way to disseminate hegemonic ideas and support their institutions. In one way or another, political graffiti, murals, stencils, stickers, etc., celebrate our cause, praise our political and military leaders, call for mobilization and resistance, identify and condemn enemies, etc. In my archive, there are a few thousand photos of them that I took over the last few years. I'll consider political graffiti and street art from these two regions in a broader perspective by comparing them with those in other parts of the world in which I've been conducting research recently (Western Europe, the US, the Caucasus, and Japan). The second research field I intend to develop during my stay at Ca' Foscari is a more theoretical one - namely, metamodern shifts in contemporary culture and art. I will study smooth surfaces, uneven foundations, and jagged edges of the new cultural-and broader social-paradigm that follows the optimism of postmodernism and which, in the absence of a universally acceptable term, is called metamodernism. This is shaped, if not determined by, the conditions of digital revolution and new communication situations, the global dominance of ideologies and political practices of neoliberalism and ethno-nationalism, the confrontations between global village situations and the rise of neo-traditionalism, post-Cold War tensions between unilateralism and multilateralism, practices of new sincerity facing those of the rising field of posthumanism and transhumanism, the imperative of unlimited growth against the concept of un-growth and new environmentalism, the emergence of new exclusions, deepening social injustices, and populist politics with global and local resistance to all that. I'll be mostly interested in vibrant, controversial, and multi-sided metamodern phenomena in popular culture and art in a comparative perspective; however, I'll again focus my research on issues related to the politics of memory, retro culture, and (post-)nostalgia.
3. Have you ever had a research collaboration with the teaching staff of Department in the past?
I’ve been following the work some researchers of the Department for a longer period of time, since we share similar research fields and approaches. I meet them for the first time when they invited me to the international conference Memory Practices, Post-Socialist Transitions in Eastern Europe, organized by T. D’Amico, A. Farsetti and S. Petrungaro in May 2025.