Florence Summer Program

Tavolo Vivente: Architectures of the Culinary Imaginary (6 Credits)
Faculty: Constance Vale

Food is a well-recognized aspect of Italy’s cultural identity. Local histories inform recipes, transferring the past to the present via gustatory tradition. This is not a static cultural narrative but one informed by a vast immigrant population that brings their own culinary traditions, transforming the city’s identity. Food is a part of the everyday; it sustains human life as we cyclically cook, eat, and digest. Food can also take on the status of cuisine, elevating cooking and eating beyond the everyday by virtue of an excess of time and effort and insistence on creativity and novelty. This renders dining an aesthetic experience wherein the gastronomic image is as vital as taste.

Tavolo Vivente, translated as “living table,” alludes to our studio’s vested interest in the gastronomic image. In this studio, we will look to the culinary arts as a starting point to design a restaurant, starting at the intimate scale of a utensil, then increasing in scale to a place setting, a dining table, a room, a building, and garden that relates out to the city. On the one hand, your project will focus on the interior’s object, spaces, color, and atmosphere, while also acting as a microcosm that allows us to explore the role of food in the city at a macro level.

Throughout our travels, you will document your design, observations, and collected artifacts in a coherent fiction. To build up this fiction, you will hybridize past and future by combining media, including printmaking, cyanotypes, photography, photogrammetry, and 3D scanning technology. Gathering, resituating, and analyzing architecture, landscapes, paintings, sculptures, and culinary art from Florence and across Italy, you’ll encapsulate your narrative in a container made to position your discoveries in relation to one another and carry them back with you on your departure.

Diaries in print (6 Credits)
Faculty: Joe deVera

Students will engage and utilize various printmaking and experimental/hybrid mediums to create a journalistic overview of their experiences in Florence, Italy. The class will embark upon contingencies of repetition, seriality, time, and storytelling to create a chosen narrative framed by the events of their stay in the historic city.

To inform their print process, students will utilize drawing, digital photography, field study (studies on site/from life), and digital rendering methods to aid in gathering material/evidence for their print work. Site visits, group excursions, and local immersion will aid as a backdrop.

Initial studio work will introduce foundational lessons on traditional relief and/or intaglio, monoprint, and transfer methods, as well as provide an overview and scheduling of studio resources. Later, coursework will include alternative, expanded methods and will require personal experimentation within the various mediums. Students can expect to create variations of standard print editions, books/zines, monoprint experiments, and installations. Prerequisites: none