**“Genoa 2001-2021”**
**Histories, Memories and Futures of a Political Event**
**September 9-11, 2021**
**Ecole normale supérieure of Lyon, France**
The G8 summit organized in Genoa on July 19-21, 2001 is one of the
political events that inaugurated the 21st century. The global mobilization
in the Italian city, only six weeks before the attacks of September 11 in
New York, marks the climax and the beginning of a decline of the
alter-globalization movement that appeared on the international scene a few
years earlier (Collectif Samizdat.net 2002). The protests organized on the
side-lines of the G8 heads of state’s meeting have faced a police
repression, which had been unexperienced in Europe and the Western world
since the 1970s (Della Porta and Reiter 2006). The demonstrations were
afflicted by the death of Carlo Giuliani, a young demonstrator shot dead by
a _carabinieri_ under the lens of photographers (Perlmutter and Wagner
2004). Founding moment or turning point, these days of protest constitute,
for all these reasons, a major memorial landmark: the “Genoa 2001” event.
On its twentieth anniversary, at the intersection of arts, social sciences
and political science, this conference intends to reread “Genoa 2001”
through its present and past ramifications, as a long-time event.
The founding dimension of a historical event is relative. At the turn of
the 2000s, the global mobilization experienced counter-summit after
counter-summit, from Prague in September 2000 to Nice two months later. The
demonstrations and actions that took place in Seattle during the World
Trade Organization summit of November 1999 are considered, even now, as the
actual birth certificate of the anti-globalization movement. However, the
“Battle of Genoa” (Collectif 2001) has quickly supplanted the “Battle of
Seattle” in people’s imagination, because it engages for its participants a
complex memorial and traumatic process, both global and local. Already in
Fall 2001, verbal and visual testimonies acted on several levels, from the
exorcism of police violence to the production of evidence in order to
initiate proceedings against the Italian state, of which Silvio Berlusconi
was the head (Centemeri, Cousin, Polizzi and Vitale 2004; Cousin 2006).
“Berlusconi’s mousetrap” (Crudden et _al_. 2002), “besieged sentinel”
(Renzi 2007) or lived space of “another possible world” (Maselli et _al_.
2001): Genoa was and remains an articulation of these different political
views.
Reluctant to disciplinary divisions of academic knowledge, the historical
event also resists the partition between scholarly and activist discourses.
This conference, therefore, aims to conjugate “Genoa 2001” in all tenses of
art and politics, following four non-exclusive multidisciplinary paths of
reflection:
1. **Image as ambivalent witness**
Produced either in July 2001 or after the fact, the images of Genoa
constitute a dense and heterogeneous corpus that remains largely
unexplored. After Seattle, cameras have saturated the G8 counter-summit
protests. While amateurs and professionals alike captured almost every
moment of the mobilization, their images have supported contradictory
interpretations. Instead of constituting unmistakable evidence and
testimony, pictures became spaces of struggle and _contestation. The
introduction of such images and their interpretations in courts and in the
media reopen debates on the legal status of images and their symbolic
dimension in understanding historical events. _Here, we intend recapturing
this political imagery in its context of production and dissemination. The
aim is to understand which media logics have been set up or reinforced in
Genoa, and to consider the role of these images in the constitution of an
archive and a militant, as well as a legal, narrative_.
1. **Narratives, testimonies and memorial writings**
Telling what happened in Genoa in July 2001 amounts to initiate
simultaneously a political, memorial, even traumatic process. Whether
theatrical (Paravidino 2004), literary (Ferrucci 2007) or cinematographic
(Niwot 2011), the writings of “Genoa 2001” are the result of an
interweaving of voices (accounts of direct witnesses and reported
speeches), as well as various temporalities (the brutality of the present;
re-montages or re-enactments of archives or memories). This process
confronts the fragility of testimonies with the challenges of judicial
speeches; it initiates the constitution of a common narrative by pointing
out the need for a transmission of memory. Who are these stories for? How
do they lay the groundwork for a memorial transmission from one generation
to another?
1. **Pasts, presents and futures of Genoa**
“Genoa 2001” is a complex historical event that stretches far beyond the
past twenty years. It branches out into Italian political history, in
particular the “Years of Lead” 1969-1977 (Bianchi 2011). Some iconographic
aspects directly echo the memory of this period; i.e. the death of Carlo
Giuliani and the shooting of the Via de Amicis in Milan in 1977. But it is
also a memory of the future due to its impacts on the imaginations and the
practices of political demonstrations, punctuating the logic of public
order that we have since seen spreading throughout Europe. If the political
history of the 1970s remains “unfinished” (Sommier 2010), Genoa marks a
singular reopening, whose militant speeches trace their own unsuspected
temporalities: “It is still too early to say how many Blanqui were born
into the world during the days of July 20 and 21, 2001 in Genoa.”
(“Quelques agents du Parti imaginaire” 2006: 13).
1. **Local and global political iconographies**
Genoa appears in retrospect as a pivotal moment in the renewal of the
iconographies of revolt, well beyond the arts as properly understood. It is
the site of a “violence performed and imagined" (Juris 2005), such as that
of the “black blocs,” the embodiment of contemporary anarchist and
libertarian activism. It is also the site in which truly
alter-globalization tactics have been performed, including that of the
“Tute Bianche”: Italian activists close to the political ideas of the
Zapatista movement in Chiapas (Albertani 2002; Boidy 2019). Twenty years
later, do local strategies for global mobilization make it possible to
rethink the current forms of political relocation (sustainable development
of “Areas to be defended” as counterpoint to the former ephemeral
“Temporary autonomous zones,” the yellow Vests in France vs. “No TAV”
movement in Italy, etc.)? It will be a matter of reflecting on the future
of this political imagery, on ways of operating the junctions of scales not
only between the local and the global, but also between methodological,
disciplinary and critical approaches.
Proposals can be sent to : conference.genova2021@???
One page long, they will detail both the thesis and the empirical corpus.
Deadline for submission of proposals: February 15, 2021
Final response to participants: March 31, 2021
**Steering committee**
Maxime Boidy (Université Gustave Eiffel - LISAA)
Marie Fabre (ENS de Lyon - Laboratoire Triangle)
Claude Gautier (ENS de Lyon - Laboratoire Triangle)
Boris Gobille (ENS de Lyon - Laboratoire Triangle)
Alice Leroy (Université Gustave Eiffel - LISAA)
**Bibliography**
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mouvement antimondialisation,” traduit de l’italien par Nicole Thé, _Les
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Amicis, 14 maggio 1977: la costruzione dell’immagine-icona degli_ _“anni di
piombo”: contesti e retroscena_, Rome, Derive Approdi.
Boidy Maxime 2019, “Visibilities in Words, Visibilities on Bodies: Academic
Sociopolitical Theories of Visibility and Militant Teachings from the Genoa
Summit of July 2001,” _Qualitative Sociology_ 25(4), pp. 445-455.
Centemeri Laura; Cousin Bruno; Polizzi Émanuele; Vitale Tommaso, 2004, “Les
Justes et les brutes: la littérature de témoignage sur les violences de
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**Filmography**
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Sollima Stefano 2012, _A.C.A.B (All Cops are Bastards)_.
Vicari Daniele 2012, _Diaz. Don’t clean up this blood_.
**Additional Bibliography**
Houssa Émilie 2007, “Le Siège de l’image, une utopie réelle. Sur le G8 de
Gênes en 2001,” _Vertigo_ 32, pp. 87-91.
Masse Jean-Pierre; Bayon Nathalie 2002, “Petites impressions génoises.
Chroniques quotidiennes d’une mobilisation anti-mondialisation,” _Cultures
& Conflits_ 46, pp. 127-143.
Palidda Salvatore _2011,_ _“Policiers italiens condamnés…_ _et promus,”_
_Le Monde diplomatique_ _688, juillet 2011, p. 6._
Palidda Salvatore 2012, “En Italie, une justice ambiguë,” _Mediapart_, 18
juillet. En ligne:
http://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/les-invites-de-mediapart/article/180712/en-italie-une-justice-ambigue
.
Sommier Isabelle; Fillieule Olivier; Agrikoliansky Éric, 2008 (sous la
dir.), _Généalogie des mouvements altermondialistes en Europe: une
perspective comparée_, Paris/Aix-en-Provence, Karthala/Institut d’Études
Politiques.
Sommier, Isabelle, 2010, “Histoire inachevée. Enjeux et limites des
interprétations des ‘années de plomb’,” _L’Italie des années de plomb. Le
terrorisme entre histoire et mémoire_, sous la dir. de Marc Lazar et
Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, Paris, Autrement, 2010, pp. 133-145.
Starhawk 2001, “Fascisme à Gênes,” traduit de l’anglais par Anne Querrien,
_Multitudes_ 7, pp. 28-32.
