Anna
Maiorano
Anna Maria Maiorano was born in Rome, where she lives and works. She teaches Decoration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Her interest in artistic research focuses primarily on site-specific projects, bringing together production, education, promotion and curation. For many years, she has been working in multiple directions and through various approaches on the theme of Memory, not so much in the subjective-psychological sense of the term as in its social, anthropological and religious dimensions.
At several Chinese public institutions dedicated to art education (Chengdu Experimental School Attached to Peking University; Nanjing Ninghai High School; Guangzhou High School of Fine Arts), she has delivered a series of lectures entitled Research, Design and Production in Contemporary Decoration.
Since 1994, she has taught Painting, Decoration and Artistic Anatomy at the Academies of Rome, Palermo, Sassari, Florence, Bologna and L’Aquila.
Since 2016, she has been teaching Decoration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and has organised various art events, exhibition projects, workshops and study trips.
THREE-YEAR COURSE
Learning Objectives
The objective of the Decoration course is to train specialists in the field of aesthetics who are culturally and spiritually mature, capable of proposing innovative site-specific projects in institutional, public and private settings, and of executing them using the languages of contemporaneity.
In the first phase of the course, in relation to the concept of creativity and the observation of the world we live in, students will address issues related to technique, the use of new technologies and the interweaving of artistic languages. In the second phase, students will examine the relationship between the individual and the environment – whether natural or urban – where the raw material for research in the field of aesthetics is the production of images contextualised within real or simulated environments.
Particular attention will be paid to the practice of installation, as it brings together issues relating to space and its identity, light, material and the role of the observer.
Content and topics
The course includes several areas of workshop experience:
• Exercises based on the language of painting and mixed media techniques.
• Practical experience in recycling and reusing materials.
• Development of individual or group projects, to be realised in indoor or outdoor environments.
• Research into the dysfunctions of urban space, for example, when an artistic intervention highlights the shortcomings of the space in which it is carried out.
• Proposals for interventions in spaces using light and sound.
• Research into public and private spaces not intended for art where it is feasible to stage art exhibitions (e.g. exhibitions outside museums – exhibition practices).
• Intervening in the landscape through colour.
• Shaping space through images.
• Representing space through memory.
• Learning to document one’s own artistic production.
Type of teaching
The act of looking is taken as a starting point to analyse the concept of the image as something that shapes our understanding of the world, our imagination and the way we observe things. However, the viewer’s gaze and their ability to ascribe meaning and significance to what they see are also fundamental. To help students understand the aesthetic language of decoration, the course will include theory lectures in collaboration with other modules, visits to art venues and site visits to locations to be agreed.
The teaching will be structured to include theoretical lectures in preparation for the workshop activities, supported by the projection of images and videos, as well as workshop sessions involving practical application. Regular attendance at lectures is required. It is recommended that students visit the most important exhibitions, both historical and contemporary, read a wide range of literature and non-fiction, and watch art-house films.
Teaching methods
Students may experiment with different materials and techniques according to their own sensibilities and personal experience: objects, drawings, photographs, letters, images and other elements drawn from the surrounding environment and used as a source of inspiration to develop an idea for an intervention in a given space or in an environment to be created, taking into account a number of key factors:
• Art-historical research.
• Multidisciplinarity.
• Analysis of socio-economic aspects.
• The relationship between society and the environment.
• Study of the technical characteristics of materials and cost analysis.
• Methods of graphic and plastic representation.
• Use of traditional and innovative means of representation.
Final assessment method
Over the course of the semester, students will be required to undertake three reviews in order to sit the examinations.
During the final exam, students will be required to discuss and present the work they have completed over the academic year in the format agreed upon with the lecturer.
Reading list
The following readings are recommended:
Various authors, What a Wonderful World. La lunga storia dell’Ornamento tra arte e natura.
Massimo Carboni, L’Ornamentale. Tra arte e decorazione.
Elisabetta Di Stefano, Estetiche dell’ornamento.
Pietro Montani, Tecnologie della sensibilità. Estetica e immaginazione interattiva.
Martino Feyles, Ipomnesi. Memory and the Archive.
Marc Augé, Ruins and Rubble. The Sense of Time.
Ernst H. Gombrich, Il senso dell’ordine.
Edited by Silvia Bordini, Arte contemporanea e tecniche.
Angela Vettese, Capire l’Arte contemporanea.
Angela Vettese, Si fa con tutto il linguaggio dell’arte contemporanea.
Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction.
Henri Focillon, Vita delle forme.
Franco Speroni, La rovina in scena: per un’estetica della comunicazione.
Roland Barthes, La camera chiara.
Piero Zanini, Significati del confine. I limiti materiali, storici, mentali. Material, Historical and Mental Limits.
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
Gottfried Semper, Style.
Site studies
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/installazione/
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/tag/arte-povera/
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/arte-concettuale/#
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/orientamenti-dell-arte-contemporanea_(XXI-Secolo)/
TWO-YEAR COURSE
Contrary to popular belief, Decoration is not merely a ‘technique for producing beauty’ but, in more modern, contemporary and engaging terms, a visual language with a multidisciplinary, multifunctional and cross-disciplinary purpose, in which – as confirmed not only by art history but also by cultural anthropology – all disciplines (from painting to sculpture, from architecture to the aesthetic and ethical rules of social behaviour) find their own specific mode of application, both rational and design-oriented and creative and expressive. In its contemporary sense, therefore, the teaching of Decoration cannot be limited academically to two-dimensional drawing; rather, by leveraging the discipline’s operational autonomy, it must address some of the most important dimensions of the design of the space in which our phenomenal, cultural and spiritual experience unfolds.
Learning Objectives
The aim of the Second Level Course in Decoration is to broaden students’ knowledge of exhibition practices and the new languages of Environmental Art, with the objective of training independent professionals capable of performing both design and operational roles, who are also able to conceptualise, design and produce decorative elements for architecture, interior decoration and related furnishing solutions, in collaboration with other professionals.
Content and topics
In the contemporary art practices of recent decades, issues have emerged concerning the placement of the artistic work, starting with Minimalism, which defines the specific object in relation to the space, or Land Art, whose works are integrated into the landscape. In Installation Art, in Public Art and, more generally, in what is now referred to as site-specific art, the focus shifts from the object to the place for which it is intended. The multimedia and collective nature of decoration can also be found in the current collaborative practices of Relational Art and in the myriad possibilities that digital technology has opened up for the interaction of multiple forms of expression.
Starting from the concept of space understood as the environment that surrounds us, streets and squares are portions of space that represent our roots, and, even inadvertently, space is always at the heart of every personal and collective story, with its own identity, character and era. The space-environment is our home, our city; therefore, in addition to its ecological and natural dimension, it can also be understood as a formal, political, historical and social context. These places (cities, regions, landscapes) and these portions of space (factories, streets, subways, historic and council housing, shopping centres and, above all, abandoned sites) can possess highly diverse qualities. Based on this premise, environmental decoration recognises the need for works to inhabit space and to establish physical, perceptual, mental and sensory relationships with the viewer. The challenge is to steer students towards a culture of activity, with proposals and practices that focus on community responsibility, as opposed to a culture of consumption and ‘wanting everything for little’.
Teaching methods
The course is structured as an active workshop, in which students’ curiosity will be stimulated to focus on the contemporary languages most closely related to the public sphere. The course will include lectures supported by video projections. In addition, there will be group discussions to reflect on the phenomena that have, in particular, reduced the capital to a low-cost city, but also to consider the slow, gradual decline that has transformed Rome into a city of bed and breakfasts and tourists dragging their luggage from one makeshift accommodation to another, and so on. It is clear that, in this context, the sense of mutual respect for people and places tends to diminish, and with it, civic education (from cives, citizen) in the broadest sense of the term.
Through interdisciplinary work, each individual student will be required to develop their own environmental project, which may also be interactive, natural or urban in nature, or an environmental work of art, based on historical and environmental research that takes into account the historical memory of the specific location, using the tools deemed most appropriate, such as photography, video, sociological research, etc.
Final assessment method
Over the course of the semester, students will be required to attend three meetings with the lecturer to take examinations. During the first-year exams, students will be required to discuss and present the ongoing individual or group project agreed at the start of the academic year, as well as submit the working drawings, the scale model and the theoretical report.
During the second-year examinations, students shall document all the procedural phases of the completed project or work in which the student actively engages with the environment.
The same project may subsequently be presented as the final assessment for the artistic/workshop part, provided that it is consistent with the theoretical-historical part.