CULTURE AS AN EXPORTABLE EXCELLENCE
ITALY GUEST OF HONOUR AT LATIN AMERICA’S
PRE-EMINENT BOOK FAIR
Saturday 10 May 2008, at 12 Noon
Copenhagen Room – Turin Book Fair
From 29 November to 7 December 2008 Italy will be Guest of Honour at the 22st
International Book Fair in Guadalajara Mexico, a major cultural event for Latin America and
the most prominent one for Spanish language publishers. An extraordinary 9-day opportunity
to show the wide variety of visitors to this international event Italy’s most emblematic face—
that of culture, an exportable excellence that underpins and continuously strengthens our
country’s international relations. From publishing to art, theatre to architecture, design to food
and wine, Italy’s participation will mingle languages and content in the broad embrace of the
“Made in Italy” label and of that “italianidad” in which Latin America is steeped. The event is
being organised in a professional, festive and up-to-date manner and promoted by the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Cultural Assets and Activities, the Ministry of
International Trade and the National Institute of Foreign Trade (ICE) in collaboration with the
Association of Italian Publishers (AIE).
As Guest of Honour at the Guadalajara Book Fair Italy will have a 1500 sqm pavilion funded
by the Ministry of International Trade and designed by the ICE and featuring a large central
bookshop with over 3000 titles by Italian authors providing a showcase for national cultural
achievements.
the Italian Pavilion’s Literary Café will also be the location of the main events associated with
books, and will be the fulcrum of a variegated cultural programme that will include theatre
events, concerts, exhibitions, films and scholarly talks, to be hosted in all of the city’s most
appealing locations. The “Italian Festival” in Guadalajara will also be graced with the
presence of some of Italy’s most eminent authors, intellectuals and artists in an encounter
with the Spanish language on the Latin American continent.
Through its Directorates General (Book, Cinema and Spectacle Treasures), the Ministry of
Cultural Assets and Activities will be contributing to the creation of a broad-based and
detailed agenda of events.
The Directorate General for Book Treasures, Italian Cultural Institutes and Copyright of the
Ministry of Cultural Assets and Activities has tasked the Association of Italian Publishers
(AIE) with coordinating the initiative’s literary and academic agenda along with soliciting the
participation of the publishing world. The common thread running through the programme
locates Italian identity in an thought borrowed from the “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino, one
of the Italian 20th century authors most studied in Latin America. The title/slogan within which
the agenda of conferences, encounters, readings and dialogues is “Italia y italianidad.
Memory, Exchange, Vision, Desire” because, like Calvino’s cities, Italy is a collection of
“memories, desires and signs of language” as well as a place of exchange, not only of goods
but of “words, desires and recollections”. Nine days in which to represent a heritage that has
made history and introduced innovation, an excellence that sinks its roots deep into the past
while it looks, at the same time, toward the future.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in charge of the most prominent exhibitions on the agenda,
has provided operational coordination for the entire event.
Italian Pavilion
In the vast and comprehensive context of the Guadalajara Book Fair (the previous edition
covered 33,000 square metres of exhibition area, 500,000 visitors and over 1,500 publishing
houses from 39 different countries), the heart of the “Italian Festival” will be the 1,500-sqm
Italian Pavilion created by the Ministry of Foreign Trade through the Foreign Trade Institute
(ICE).
The Pavilion’s open and fluid design is marked by the idea of a single giant carpet extending
over the entire surface whose graphic weavings create links and relations for the functions
and concepts of the various parts of the space. At the centre of its many possible routes will
be a bookshop where the books of the authors present will be exhibited and sold along with a
broad selection of the classics, children’s books, scholarly works, poetry and books on art,
photography, fashion and architecture, for an approximate total 3,000 titles in both Italian and
Spanish versions. The bookshop display, facing toward the exterior of the pavilion, will tell a
story told in images associated with the various themes of the fair and its slogan (memory,
exchange, vision, desire) which will be echoed also in the sprinkling of panels hung from the
ceiling and on the walls around the Pavilion’s various sectors. The Pavilion will also host a
multimedia space with a calendar of films and interactive presentations by some of the most
interesting Italian multimedia cultural products, and a “Caffè Letterario” (Literary Café), which
will be the main setting for the dozens of events on the cultural agenda.
The Italian Pavilion will also provide an excellent showcase for the artistic expressions that
are to mark Italy’s presence at the Guadalajara Book Fair, with the most representative art,
projects, multimedia products, and will be the nerve centre of a series of business
encounters for Italian publishing, which has enthusiastically shifted its focus toward
intensifying exchanges with South American enterprise and consolidating the penetration of
Italian literature among Spanish-language readers not only in Latin American but also in the
United States.
Cultural Agenda
Aimed at representing Italian culture in the broadest sense, and taking a page from Calvino’s
“Invisible Cities” with the suggestion of creating a system of possible routes—mid-way
between map and memory—to tell our country’s story, the title/slogan “Italia y Italianidad.
Memory, exchange, vision, desire” links a calendar of encounters, conferences, dialogues,
readings and other events organised by the Association of Italian Publishers (AIE) focused
on current events, Italy and its future, and traditions and notoriety.
The agenda features over 60 of the most internationally famous storytellers, poets,
philosophers, historians, scientists, intellectuals, authors of children’s books and illustrators
bearing witness to the quality and variety of the Italian cultural panorama, and unfolds along
the four aspects suggested by the title. A complete list of the Italian cultural delegation is in
the process of being compiled and will be announced in September.
In the “Memory” section we find a space for the history of Italian literature with the presence
of some of its most significant voices doing readings/tributes to some of the great authors
and historic events of our country’s past as well as historical, philosophical and narrative
analyses of the contemporary present, current events and chronicle as a memory of the
present, as well as dialogues on new and old generations of the historic Italian novel.
The “Exchange” section will be dedicated to meetings with the Latin American and Hispanic
culture through the presentation of cultural cooperation projects, encounters between Italian
and Mexican authors who share affinities, bilateral conferences on the best-loved genres
(mysteries and noir, for example), business meetings and as well as literary “tastings”
involving samplings of words, knowledge and flavours.
The “Vision” section will host the presentation of several of the many Italian exhibitions in
Guadalajara, along with a master lesson on classical and contemporary Italian art and on
Italy’s vast museum patrimony, as well as dialogues on the Italian landscape—urban and
rural, real or imagined, present or future—and reflections on the customs and aesthetics of
today’s “italianidad”. There will also be a calendar dedicated to films on literature—“from the
page to the screen”—in collaboration with Filmitalia, offering a cycle of recent Italian films
made from as many literary works and with the participation of the authors and directors of
those works who will be recounting the differences and similarities, techniques and intuitions
accompanying the two different forms. There will also be a Spanish-language publication
illustrating all the films made from books between 2000 and 2008, with descriptions and
analyses of both the books and the films.
Finally, the “Desire” section is the broadest category and is concerned with what remains, as
yet, the future in the eye of the philosopher, scientist, artist, poet and storyteller: a space
open to a discussion of the “Italy to come”. This will also be a space for the publishers of
those works that best deal in desire—children’s books—where the best authors and
illustrators of children’s books will tell how desires can take shape thanks to imagination and
creativity.
Academic Agenda
The University of Guadalajara, which is organising the International Book Fair, offers an
intense academic programme every year that is carried out in specially selected settings and
to which particular importance has been associated. As Guest of Honour Italy will be
contributing a meaningful voice to the traditional forum, especially in the fields of philosophy,
social sciences and cultural studies—ranging from sociology to politics—and in various other
contexts ranging from gender studies to history, didactics of foreign language to university
organisation, and from communications to design. And in a special convention dedicated to
Italy a series of topics will be discussed with the aim of illustrating the richness and variety of
Italian research and practice in the areas of contemporary history and philology, geopolitics,
economics, aesthetics and scientific thought, as well as historical and literary relations
between Italy and Mexico.
This participation is the result of special collaboration agreements with the Universities of
Milan and Turin that allow for the broadening of their academic scope with the addition of
scholars already engaged in the literary programme. In total of over 25 conferences and
special lectures are planned for various Italian universities.
Exhibitions and Spectacle
The “Italian Festival” in Guadalajara is to be enriched by the imposing presence of
exhibitions and spectacles located throughout the city in its most attractive cultural settings.
The exhibition agenda, handled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will consist of
approximately ten exhibitions hosted in the city’s main museums that offer an interesting
assortment of our country’s extraordinary artistic output, and what is one of Italy’s main
claims to fame. Among the main themes is that of Italian contemporary art, with the exhibition
of 100 works from the foreign ministry’s collection, an itinerant exhibition en route to various
foreign countries and that culminates in Guadalajara—a major anthological exhibition of
Italian art from 1950 through 1980 featuring some of the most significant artists of the 20 th
century, particularly from the decades following the Second World War: Carla Accardi,
Roberto Almagno, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Jannis Kounellis, Mimmo Paladino,
Michelangelo Pistoletto. Ample attention will also be devoted to design, with an exhibition
realised in collaboration with the Region of Piedmont on the occasion of Turin’s designation
as “Capital of Design 2008” of over 200 industrial design objects, designed in the most wellknown studios of Piedmont between 1995 and 2006; examples of the manifold application of
the art of design to avant-garde industrial production. In the same context of highlighting the
multi-faceted nature of “Made in Italy”, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in collaboration with the
Region of Lombardy, will also be organising a fashion show.
The agenda of live spectacles, handled by the Directorate General for Live Spectacles in
collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, includes all the various expressive forms
that distinguish the Italian style, from music and song, to theatre and dance. In addition a
series of theatrical events will be taking place around the city: a cycle of nine performances,
one for each evening of the fair, to conclude in the Fair’s 8,000-seat arena, The Explanada,
with the sounds and atmospheres of Italy at its most festive. The agenda ranges from
concerts—which include the Italian Orchestra conducted by Renzo Arbore and its grand
tradition of the Neapolitan song, and the Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio and its multiethnic
sound telling the story of the “new Italy”—to the dance performances of the Artemis Dance
Company and a series of highly original theatrical experiments ranging from the mingled
street theatre, clown arts and parades of the Teatro Potlach to the great tradition of the
Opera dei Pupi Siciliani of the Figli d’Arte Cuticchio (since 2001 included on UNESCO’s list
of Oral and Intangible Heritage).
Press Office for Italian Publishers attending
Ex Libris Comunicazione
Torino - Via Palazzo di Città, 21
Roma - Via Zanardelli, 34
Milano - Via Giulio e Corrado Venini, 25
tel. +39 011 5695614 – fax. +39 011 19785300
e-mail ufficiostampa@exlibris.it