Privacy in Ephemeral Borders: Privacy and the Dynamics of Temporary Urban Art and Architecture

This seminar examines the intersection of privacy and fragile borders, focusing on the ephemeral nature of urban environments. 

It will analyze how temporary representations, such as façade painting and textile construction, influence personal expression and public engagement. How façades and city edges serve as dynamic platforms for diverse media and performances, reflecting ongoing tensions between public and private realms.

The speakers, Alexis Culotta, Anna House, and Solmaz Sadeghi will share their research from painted façades in Renascence Venice and Rome to London’s Frost Fairs on the Thames.

Targeted at interdisciplinary students and scholars, the event emphasizes the significance of temporality for sustainable societal and artistic rebuilding. It aims to integrate historical insights into contemporary discussions on the coexistence of publicness and privacy. Join us to explore the potential of these transient constructs, recognizing the complexities and struggles inherent in the dance between private and public.

The seminar is open for all.

How does the concept of privacy intersect with fragile borders? This seminar will analyze how façade painting and textile construction, as temporary representations influence personal expression and public engagement in early modern examples. How façades and city edges serve as dynamic platforms for diverse media and performances, reflecting ongoing tensions between public and private realms.

Navigating two distinct urban scales, the seminar reveals that façades and city edges become fluid emelents engaging in a continual struggle to reshape expressions within the public despite probable oppositions and inherent difficulties.

Temporary structures hold unique significance as they embody a confluence of fleeting desires and enduring aspirations of collectivity and individuality, catering to periodic demands across diverse eras. Historically, these ephemeral elements serve as catalysts, transforming public and private spheres as they transition fluidly between meanings and functions. From painted facades in Venice and Rome to forgotten London Frost Fairs on the Thames River, the seminar will uncover how early modern momentary environments reflect societal rhythms, cultural practices, and political norms among artistic expressions while negotiating tensions between public and private practices.

Aimed at young interdisciplinary thinkers, this event highlights the importance of understanding temporality for multi-faceted sustainability. It brings historical lessons into mainstream discussions, which are increasingly vital for the co-living of today’s publicness and privacy. The seminar explores how, in Old Europe, less permanence and more adaptability can sustain the societal rebuilding through provisional borders full of performances, utilizing both imaginative (painting) and practical (textile construction) methods.

Programme

14:00 Welcome and Introduction on PRIVACY by Mette Birkedal Bruun (Director of PRIVACY)
14:20 Proto-Individuality on the Thames by Solmaz Sadeghi
14:40 Public Facing, Private Meaning by Alexis Culotta
15:00 Painting in the Streets by Anna House (online presentation)
15:20 Questions & Discussion
15:40 Event Wrap-Up by Peter Thule Kristensen (Core Scholar at PRIVACY)
16:00 Wine Reception

Abstracts:     

Public Facing, Private Meaning
Assessing the Themes of the Renaissance Roman Frescoed Façade

Alexis Culotta
Professor of Practice, Art History, Newcomb Art Department, Tulane University School of Liberal Arts

Observant visitors to Rome today can still glimpse fragments of the frescoed façade tradition that proliferated across the city’s streets in the early sixteenth century. Though vanishing quickly and minimally documented, these painted faces that appeared along Rome’s core thoroughfares nevertheless offer a fascinating lens through which to consider how the intermediality and related ephemerality of these surfaces conjured myriad symbolic and theoretical associations between motifs, makers and patrons. By exploring these themes, and in consideration of the façade’s inherent intersections between public and private space, these designs can be interpreted as core to manifesting urban identity in a rapidly transforming city. This talk explores some of these aspects via several case studies that both demonstrate the breadth of imagery that these Roman facades incorporated to cultivate a private patron’s public identity and begin to reconstruct a nearly lost facet of Renaissance visual culture. 

 

Painting in the Streets
Encounters with the Frescoed Façade in Sixteenth Century Venice and the Veneto

Anna House
Associate Profess​or, Art History, School of Visual Art and Design, University of South Carolina

The great popularity of painting palace facades with monochrome or coloured fresco in sixteenth-century Italy was met with an equal measure of concern—even disdain— among architectural theorists. Writers including Sebastiano Serlio, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, and Giovanni Battista Armenini lamented the many ills of such imagery, particularly the potential for an indecorous public display of private, secular subject matter.  Armenini praises a frescoed façade in Mantua with a coloured frieze with putti in elaborate poses, but contends that “similar inventions are more appropriate in closed gardens and courts than in the aforementioned places”; Lomazzo insists that painters must control their caprice when painting in the streets, choosing subject matter “according to the level of the audience, and above all else observing decorum and truthfulness,” lest “the dignity and nobility of painting [be] thrown to the ground.” This paper considers three ways that painted facades in Venice and the Veneto tested boundaries between public and private: the continuation of painted subject matter from the interior to the exterior of a palace; the popularity of illusionistic motifs creating “windows” or figures protruding into public space from the façade; and the evidence of intimate, time-intensive encounters with façades provided by the drawings and prints made after them. 

 

Proto-Individuality on the Thames
Performers on the Stage of Frost Fairs

Solmaz Sadeghi
Marie-Curie Fellow, Institute of Architecture and Design, Royal Danish Academy

Frost Fairs on the Thames served as stage for the emergence of proto-individuality in the Early Modern London. These fairs, which transformed the frozen river into a vibrant public stage, provided a unique setting where expressions of personal identity began to surface. Participants at the fairs demonstrated an emerging sense of individuality through distinct dress, behaviour, and public interactions, breaking away from the collective norms of early modern society. The Frost Fairs served as a venue for cultural and social experimentation, allowing individuals to step outside their usual roles and engage in public performances of selfhood. By examining these early instances of individuality within the festive context of the Frost Fairs, this talk sheds light on the shifting dynamics of personal and collective identity in early modern London, offering insights into the development of individuality long before it became a fully realized concept in the 18th century.