About
The project Straniere: the reception of non-European arts and cultures in Italy aims to offer an initial overview of the different visual, critical, and exhibition interpretations of non-Western arts in Italy in the 20th century. The survey examines case studies relating to the history of the market, exhibitions, museum displays, publishing, photography, and artistic research that presented non-Western works and artifacts or absorbed their characteristics, thus introducing new paradigms for translating and interpreting these “foreign” arts in Italy that differed from the canons of national culture. The project analyzes the archival collections of five categories of actors in the art system (art historians, dealers and collectors, photographers/artists, designers/architects), with whose reference institutions a collaboration network has been created.
The visual, textual, audio, and video sources investigated during the project are cataloged and annotated in a digital archive—designed with the advice of CNR ISTI and the Artificial Intelligence for Media and Humanities Lab (AIMH)—and are partially accessible in open format on this platform. The Straniere archive–presented at the Digital Heritage – International Congress 2025–was created with the aim of being interoperable with the digital ecosystems of national and European cultural heritage (I.PaC and European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage – ECCCH). It aims to update the tools of historiography by experimenting with new research methodologies in the field of computer learning. Based on certain lexical and visual constants noted by researchers in the sources investigated, the project aims to reveal the ideologies underlying the various phenomena of visual, critical, and expository reception of otherness in Italy, seeking to explain how an aesthetic canon gradually established itself during the 20th century, thanks in part to the confrontation with the ‘foreign’.
Today, art history must face an intercultural discourse in which–as exhaustively examined by Edward Said (Orientalism, 1978)–it is not “truths” that circulate but “representations,” which require methodological revision in order to be inventoried and examined with historiographical objectivity. The project therefore seeks to rethink the archive—an essential tool for Italian art historiography based on a philological approach, yet accused of Eurocentrism by post-colonial anthropology due to the taxonomic processes underlying it—by working on a third way: a digital documentation environment in which to apply collaborative processes between the critical thinking of the research group's scholars and the statistical capabilities of computers in order to recognize the traces, in Italy's artistic heritage, of the slow process of decolonization of our gaze.
The project embraces a participatory archiving model, recognizing users' “right of reply” regarding the information and data collected. It therefore invites anyone, particularly those belonging to the cultures examined in the sources investigated, to contribute to the research by sending requests for corrections, omissions, and cataloging proposals to straniere@unistrasi.it.
In March 2023, the University for Foreigners of Siena organized a first conference on these topics, the proceedings of which were published by Quodlibet in the series “Biblioteca Passaré. Studi di arte contemporanea e arti primarie”. In January 2025, the University hosted Straniere. International days dedicated to non-European arts and cultures in Italy, focusing on the reception of non-Western cultures in Italian art in the second half of the 20th century, the contributions of which are currently being published by Edizioni Unistrasi.
The research relies on a working group that is constantly updated thanks to various regional, national, and international funding allocations. This platform was created as part of the PRIN 2022 PNRR Straniere project: the reception of non-European arts and cultures in Italy (1945-2000), presented by the University for Foreigners of Siena (Principal Investigator: Caterina Toschi) together with the Universities of Parma (coordinator: Alessandra Acocella) and Udine (coordinator: Luca Pietro Nicoletti), recipient of PRIN PNRR 2022 funding awarded by the Ministry of University and Research and the European Union (NextGeneration EU).
PRIN 2022 PNRR project’s research units:
University for Foreigners of Siena
Principal Investigator: Caterina Toschi.
Research fellows: Yasmin Riyahi, Andrea Lanzafame.
University of Parma
Associated PI: Alessandra Acocella.
Research fellow: Alessandro Ferraro.
University of Udine
Associated PI: Luca Pietro Nicoletti.
Research fellow: Alberto Vidissoni.
Related projects:
– PRIN 2022 project BorderArt(E)Scapes. Contemporary Art, Anthropology and Borderscapes: from the late nineteenth century to the 2000s, reading contemporaneity and experimenting with new research practices (PI: Giorgio Bacci, University of Florence).
Associated PI, University for Foreigners of Siena: Caterina Toschi.
Research Fellow: Biancalucia Maglione.
– Two-years project Eco-sussistenze: la rilettura del "vuoto” nella ricerca di Laura Grisi, supported by Tuscany Region and the Galileo Museum in Florence.
Scientific coordinator: Caterina Toschi.
Research fellow: Livia de Pinto.
– Two-years project Un esoarchivio digitale: la ricezione delle culture extraeuropee nelle ceramiche Richard-Ginori (1923-2000) supported by Tuscany Region and Fondazione Museo Archivio Richard Ginori della Manifattura di Doccia.
Research fellow: Caterina Toschi.
Research fellow: Biancalucia Maglione.
– Project Straniere in Italia: il contributo di Licia Collobi e Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti (1945-1987) supported by Fondazione Centro Studi sull’Arte Licia e Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti intitolato.
Research fellow: Caterina Toschi
Research fellow: Rachele Zanone