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We are pleased to announce that on Wednesday 30 September at 6 pm, Trieste Contemporanea will present a new publication in its libraryline series: the English translation of Valentina Valentini’s essay Formati Installativi. Written in 2022 as the introduction to the major exhibition Video arte in Italia. Il video rende felici (Video Art in Italy. Video Makes You Happy), curated by Valentini, a leading Italian scholar of contemporary theatre and multimedia arts, and held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the essay is a key text on the history of this new medium’s development in Italy, which emerged among the expressive possibilities of international contemporary art from the mid-1960s onwards.

Valentini focuses in particular on the Italian figures who explored the spatial and intermedial dimensions of video art. The essay also pays close attention to Italian theoretical thinking on this new format, discussing studies that can now be regarded as fundamental contributions to the international art-historical debate on the moving image.

Trieste Contemporanea will make Valentini’s essay available in print and digital formats on 30 September, the day commemorating Saint Jerome, translator of the Bible, which the United Nations General Assembly designated International Translation Day in 2017.

Introduced by Elettra Maria Spolverini, director of the Trieste Contemporanea Library, the event will feature a conversation with Valentina Valentini led by art historian Giuliana Carbi Jesurun, Nickolas Komninos, lecturer in English Language, Translation and Linguistics at the University of Udine, and Cosetta Saba, lecturer of Film Studies at the University of Udine.

The initiative to translate this Italian essay, co-produced with Fondazione Franco Jesurun ETS, forms part of the public outreach undertaken through the libraryline activities promoted directly by the Trieste Contemporanea Library. These activities include advancing knowledge of the work and thought of artists and distinguished commentators who have made major contributions to European contemporary visual art or to its understanding, bringing together in a dedicated series unpublished texts and first English translations of works previously available only in their authors’ native languages.