This thesis aims to shed light on the cultural and aesthetic implications of the relationship between Italy and India on and off the screens of Italy, following the expansion of Bollywood in Europe during the 90s. Bollywood's propagation abroad affected the identity of the South Asian diaspora, urban spaces and aesthetics which generated what Le Guellec - describing the arrival of Indians and Bollywood cinema to Paris - named as Bollywood/India mania. The study began with the exploration of the historical meaning of the term aesthetic in order to offer a contextualization on the sense of the aesthetic as a philosophy of art; furthermore, it established a background for further theoretical debate on South Asian diasporic identity formations within the entertainment industry of Italy. The research methods that predominated throughout this work were those of textual argumentation, aesthetic analysis, quantitative and qualitative questionnaires and interview data. The reasons for using different and interdisciplinary methods and approaches to offer an account on diasporic cultures, resided in the attempt to reveal the multiplicities of the "cultural and social" visible. The theoretical frame that this research intends to follow is through two quite distinct disciplines: aesthetic and cultural studies. The aim is to capitalise on the productive intersection of these two disciplines to analyse parts of the South Asian cultural text on the screen and beyond it as producers of transnational images imbued with melancholic memories and melancholically conceived spaces. This work will attempt to individuate the existence of representational patterns based on the aesthetic of melancholy with its nuances and metamorphoses, which represents, narrates and constructs South Asian and/or fused identities socially and culturally on the screens of Italy. The notion of semiosphere as elaborated by Jury Lotman, was utilised to define the cultural and dialogic dynamics of mainstream products that move constantly closer to each other generating original "formats" characterised by novel transnational and multiple identities. Throughout this thesis, the emphasis was placed on the "encounters", the "journeys" and the "sharing" of cultures, hence highlighting the possible conditions of belonging contemporaneously through multiple modalities: mentally, psychologically and experientially to multiplicities of cultures. In addition, the notion of "world culture" was contemplated in an attempt to practically support what Gilroy, in Black Atlantic, shaped as "inter-cultural" and translational formations.

Depuis la fin de la guerre civile libanaise en 1991, le cinéma libanais décline le mal existentiel et le sentiment de mélancolie d’une génération dont les personnages étrangers au monde comme à eux mêmes, sans repères, font face à la répétition des violences, la séparation, le deuil, ou l’exil, trainent leur mal-être dans une ville en éternel chantier et où les morts tels des fantômes réapparaissent d’entre les ruines. Entre un monde qui s’effondre et un passé qui s’efface, la mélancolie habite ces films dont les récits fragmentés et éclatés ne s’achèvent jamais. Avec Ghassan Salhab, Michel Kammoun, Joanna Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, Mohammad Soueid, Danielle Arbid, Christophe Karabache, Waël Noureddine, Nigol Bezgian, Borhane Alaouié, Jocelyne Saab... un nouveau cinéma s’invente. / As the Lebanese civil war ended in 1991, a feeling of malaise and melancholy started to imprint the works of filmmakers. Between a collapsing world and a fading past, the films’ characters seem to drift aimlessly as they face constant violence, separation, mourning and exile. Their malaise lingers in a city crammed by massive construction sites where the dead, like ghosts, emerge from the ruins. While melancholy roots itself in the films, fragmented and never ending stories interlace.With Ghassan Salhab, Michel Kammoun, Joanna Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, Mohammad Soueid, Danielle Arbid, Christophe Karabache, Waël Noureddine, Nigol Bezgian, Borhane Alaouié, Jocelyne Saab... a new cinema is born.

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The issue of the environment (Umwelt) often fluctuates between two extremes: the cultural environment (architecture) and the natural environment (nature). Although the idea of the "natural environment" can (paradoxically) also be understood as a cultural construct. The project explores the ambiguity of artificial vs. natural through the design of an apartment building. The proposal uses a reinforced concrete skeleton of an abandoned shopping center built at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, into which it inserts individual "dwellings". The design examines the tools ranging from an "artificial stone" in the form of walls made of shotcrete to dramatic views of the nearby Holedná Forest, which both figuratively and literally (eg. during a walk) becomes another room of the apartments. The landscape and human emotions associated with the natural environment are an important motive for the whole proposal. To expose the tension between two modern tendencies: escape from nature vs. return to nature, it samples the topic of apartment and nature.

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The essay acts as a blueprint over my artistic practice. It is through the friction caused by th relations between the Keywords mentioned above I strive to achieve a dynamic which will act as an interlocutor between the fields, which are not separated but which fail to understand each others' logic and instead more or less intentionally seek to overwrite each other. / [I examensarbetet ingår utställningen: "Taking care of business":] The show was a total installation spanning over 7 days in which Studio Stök (Fredrik Fermelin and I) were constantly keeping the exhibition going: One room was filled with gelatine and lasers, was connected to another room by a tunnel in which a robotic vacuum cleaner constantly active. The other room was filled with +20 office chairs with incense sticks. Fredrik and I were never seen, but for 13 hours a day (07:00am-06:00pm), we mopped up the water from the "melting" gelatin so people could walk, lightning new incense, switching vacuum cleaners and mixing playlists with binaural beats for the tunnel. It was a way of catering an immediate sensation experienced as a viewer, no textualization was presented and enunciated indicating the exhibition was to be read in a certain way, and no artist was present creating a somewhat eerie sensation of a presence or absence. The smells were carried through the exhibition by the draft from the open doors and each room thus pre-empted the other. . Each room had an entrance and people were thus entering from two directions, there was no wrong way of entering and experiencing, the choreography of the exhibition created a sort of moebious strip which ended as quickly as it had lasted. During the week various flash events were held where the backspace which in normal circumstances acts as the entrance was opened. Material: Various Teknik: Installation The exhibition and partially the essays was a completely collaboration between Cecilie Hundevad Meng and Fredrik Fermelin as the artist group Studio Stök. The Exhibition and the essay(s) was only indirectly connected. / <p>The essay was abstractly linked to the exhibition.</p>

André Du Laurens (1558-1609), professeur à la prestigieuse Université de Montpellier et futur premier médecin de Henri IV, fait publier en 1594 les Discours de la conservation de la vue, des maladies mélancoliques, des catarrhes et de la vieillesse. C’est dans ce recueil que se trouve Le second discours des maladies mélancoliques et du moyen de les guérir, le pendant français de l’Anatomy of Melancholy de Robert Burton, et la première monographie sur le sujet dans notre langue. Ce manuel pratique synthétise, à la fin de l’Humanisme, le savoir médico-moral sur le traitement de l’illusoire « humeur noire », réputée projeter les esprits affaiblis dans la prostration, la démence et la pulsion suicidaire. L’ouvrage mêle des descriptions pathologiques insolites à des anecdotes pittoresques et des ordonnances saugrenues, le tout en une langue transparente, libérée des tics de l’écriture érudite. Tombé dans l’oubli après de nombreuses rééditions et traductions à travers tout le Grand Siècle, nous l’offrons aujourd’hui pour la première fois au lecteur moderne qui y verra comme un bréviaire plaisant venu de la préhistoire de la psychopathologie et offrant un jour inattendu et indispensable à la généalogie de nos inquiétudes et de nos mélancolies modernes. / It is in 1594 that André Du Laurens (1558-1609), professor at Montpellier University and future physician to Henri IV first published his Discours de la conservation de la vue, des maladies mélancoliques, des catarrhes et de la vieillesse. The Discours des maladies mélancoliques [A Discourse of Melancholic Diseases], which forms part of this volume, is the first medical guide book on melancholy written directly in French. Appearing at the end of the Renaissance, it synthesizes fifteen centuries of medical and moral knowledge on the treatment of the dreaded and yet illusory black bile, thought to be at the origin of numerous fears, sorrows, dementia and suicide attempts. It also represents the French source of (and counterpart to) Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which was to be published only three decades later (1621). Du Laurens’ work brings together odd and often hilarious pathological descriptions with improbable therapies and prescriptions in a language which is easy to understand, and far removed from the complex medical jargon. Reprinted throughout the 17th century, but forgotten thereafter, we now present the modern reader with this unusual medical treatise from the prehistory of psychopathology, a text that will help us better grasp and understand the long genealogy of all our sorrows and modern melancholies.

This thesis studies the literary genre of pastoral between 1559 and 1647. The first of these dates is that of a work that changed the course of early modern pastoral, Montemayor’s Diana; and the second marks the English translation of Gomberville’s Polexandre, a pastoral romance which exemplifies the shifts in cultural values that re-shaped Montemayor’s model over the century that followed its publication. My study focusses on the significance for this genre of the ethical quality known to classical moral philosophy as otium, and translated in early modern English by words such as peace, leisure, retirement, ease and idleness. Otium has strong historical associations with the tradition of Virgilian pastoral. Its significance in early modern pastorals, however, has been largely overlooked, despite the fact that early modern interest in otium had been revitalised by the rediscovery of some of its most important classical discussions. This renewed interest in otium, I argue, was essential to the development of early modern pastoral. My argument challenges both old and new critical perspectives on pastoral, and engages with key issues in early modern culture which literary scholars have neglected. Older studies understood pastoral otium simply as idyllic retreat; newer ones accept this view, but argue against its privileged and quietist political implications, preferring to concentrate on the tradition of interpreting pastoral as political allegory. Otium’s principal connotations, however, were neither quiet nor idyllic. Though its restorative qualities were sometimes cautiously acknowledged, otium’s potential to corrupt was ever-present, and affected a range of areas including privacy, politics, moral psychology and medicine. When people wanted to imaginatively explore those effects, I argue, pastoral was the genre to which they were most likely to turn. Listening to what pastorals say about otium can play an important role in reconstructing this crucial and misunderstood aspect of early modern culture.