Books by Jimena Berzal de Dios
Through an interdisciplinary examination of sixteenth-century theatre, Visual Experiences in Cinq... more Through an interdisciplinary examination of sixteenth-century theatre, Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces studies the performative aspects of the early modern stage, paying special attention to the overlooked complexities of audience experience.
Examining the period’s philosophical and aesthetic ideas about space, place, and setting, the book shows how artists consciously moved away from traditional representations of real spaces on stage, instead providing their audiences with more imaginative and collaborative engagements that were untethered by strict definitions of naturalism. In this way, the book breaks with traditional interpretations of early modern staging techniques, arguing that the goal of artists in this period was not to cater to a single privileged viewer through the creation of a naturalistically unified stage but instead to offer up a complex multimedia experience that would captivate a diverse assembly of theatre-goers.
Papers by Jimena Berzal de Dios
The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema , 2024
* Book chapter in Knowles, K., Walley, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema. Pal... more * Book chapter in Knowles, K., Walley, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan. Pages 161-183. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-55256-4_10
The topic of this essay is transitional objects as they exist in internal/external realities and, following DW Winnicott, how pre-Oedipal object relations can reframe key questions in experimental film, art, and psychoanalysis. In another sense, the essay explores the impossibility of adults to understand children’s aesthetic vision, and how the voracious yearning of artists to reach the child’s world is thwarted by the very aesthetic self-awareness that an artist has. The essay embodies an idiosyncratic and self-aware rhetorical approach: that sounds postmodern, but it is certainly not. Much theoretical framework here can be traced back to the modern world framing Winnicott’s ideas, a rhetorically freer philosophical space. In terms of process, this essay engages in collaborative writing without funneling a unison and synchronized voice. There are two voices in each section of the essay; we’ve not altered the words of each other. They’re in point-counterpoint, but not like a dense Baroque musical threading; lighter rather, hover-crafting—rococo, perhaps. But let us not confuse sincerity with irony, nor think the ornamental superfluous. The question here is whether relation is a form of destruction and usage, and how does that question makes us reconsider contemporary artists (experimental filmmakers…) explicitly concerned with object-relations and formative experiences.
Religion and the Arts, 2024
This article explores José Val del Omar’s religious thought in relation to his Fire in Castile, a... more This article explores José Val del Omar’s religious thought in relation to his Fire in Castile, a 1960 experimental film that sets Spanish Renaissance sculptures in motion by use of pulsating lights, projected patterns, and other striking audiovisual effects. Val del Omar sought to provoke a new and technological mystical encounter: Fire in Castile displaces the viewers’ physical space to create a transcendental and sacred opening, in turn activating the affective role of the sculptures. This essay seeks to contextualize the film in relation to a core theological notion in Val del Omar’s thought, the interlacing of God and time: “God is Time,” he wrote, “the devil rules over space.” For Val del Omar, this is a tragic situation in which God is waiting for us in the entrails of life, which in turn demands a visceral disruption of our spatiotemporal and existential assumptions.
Substance, 2020
This performative essay theorizes madness as a chthonic emplacement to dishevel existentially ins... more This performative essay theorizes madness as a chthonic emplacement to dishevel existentially insufficient and detached interpretations of disorder. Reflecting on Nietzsche’s emphasis on poetry over systematic thought, I take up Lorca and Baudelaire’s visceral language on death and the earthly to revisit chthonic myths as expressing an underworld uncontrollable sphere beyond systematicity. Written from the phenomenologically precarious position of my own mental illness, this essay develops a sincere rhetoric to approach the chthonic from within rather than at sterilized distance. This positioning retains the indexicality of the intense and disorganized as a critical facet, in turn exploring the nuances of the experience without discursive reductions or romantic musings, from the ground down.
Sixteenth Century Journal , 2020
Essay on letter writing as a classroom activity in the era of COVID-19, written for the Early Mod... more Essay on letter writing as a classroom activity in the era of COVID-19, written for the Early Modern Classroom supplement of the Electronic Sixteenth Century Journal.
Abstract. At the twilight of the nineteenth century, the French symbolist writer Marcel Schwob as... more Abstract. At the twilight of the nineteenth century, the French symbolist writer Marcel Schwob assimilated Paolo Uccello (c. 1397-1475) into modern sensibilities: "For Uccello did not care about the reality of things, but about their multiplicity and about the infinitude of lines." Schwob's consideration of Uccello (much like Antonin Artaud's, who wrote the surrealist "Uccello le poil") has been traditionally neglected by art historians. And yet, these literary encounters with the painter retain a sense of hermeneutical validity that, I argue, transcends the "merely" poetic. In this essay, I examine an unusual work of art, The Funerary Monument to John Hawkwood, which has been seen as exemplifying Uccello's artistic deficiencies in its lack of unified space and illusionistic volume. In contrast, by being attentive to Schwob and Artaud's analyses, I propose that the fresco presents a never-fulfilled visual experience in which resonating negations (of centrality, spatiality, and existence) articulate the spatial relationship between the artwork and its viewers. A reticent monument, the paradoxical space in Uccello's Hawkwood presents a series of dislocations, traces, and erasures, which disclose the artifice of the painting and bring Hawkwood forth, not as a living being, but as a disembodied memory.
Exploring Gilles Deleuze’s works one finds what seems to be a critical voice against Renaissance ... more Exploring Gilles Deleuze’s works one finds what seems to be a critical voice against Renaissance art. Because of its emphasis on quantitative space, optics, control over nature, and linear perspective, the Renaissance appears in contrast to Gothic, Baroque, and Modern art. In this essay, I propose a nuanced analysis of Deleuze’s engagement with fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century art. Despite an apparent aversion towards the Renaissance as a period, there are, in Deleuze’s oeuvre, multiple positive engagements with central Renaissance artists. Indeed, his own concept of “the fold” relies on Cinquecento painters like Tintoretto or El Greco. What is more, Deleuze’s concept of ligne de fuite, or “lines of flight,” is itself rooted in a technical term associated with linear perspective, literally meaning “receding lines.” Addressing the interstitial gaps in Deleuze's philosophy as openings onto Renaissance and contemporary thought, this essay sketches the significance of Deleuze’s actual engagement with the period and how his insights can inform contemporary interpretations of Renaissance art, thus complicating the common understanding of perspective as a hierarchical apparatus of social and visual control.
Velázquez’s Democritus (c. 1630) presents a unique encounter: not only there are few depictions i... more Velázquez’s Democritus (c. 1630) presents a unique encounter: not only there are few depictions in which the Greek philosopher appears with a sphere that shows an actual map, but Velázquez used a court jester as a model for Democritus, thus emplacing the philosopher within a courtly space. Studying the painting in relationship to the literary interests of the Spanish Golden Age and its socio-political circumstances, the figure of Democritus is far from just another instantiation of a conventional trope. The philosopher’s smile and his crepuscular globe entrap the viewer in a semiotic game with pedagogical and ethical goals. While the scholarship on the painting has dwelt extensively on the identification of the figure, this essay moves beyond the superficial aspects of subject identity in order to explore how the painting articulates and requests a profoundly philosophical engagement. I thus examine Democritus in relation to contemporary literary and philosophical themes, many of which were present in Velázquez’s own personal library: the period understanding of the philosopher, cartographic spheres, and treatises on laughter. Considered in this manner, Velázquez’s figure is not responding to the folly of humanity in general, as is commonly the case in representations of the philosopher, but is rather presented through a courtly prism in which conquest, geography, and politics are inescapably interrelated. Velázquez’s Democritus emphasizes the philosophical and moral qualities of a learned and decorous laughter, which performs a critical and ethical role framed by Spain’s political difficulties.
Sixteenth Century Journal, 2014
This essay sets forth a nuanced interpretation of Baldassare Peruzzi’s stage design for La Caland... more This essay sets forth a nuanced interpretation of Baldassare Peruzzi’s stage design for La Calandria (1514) that addresses the spatial disassociations found in the drawing in relation to active modes of visual engagement. Eschewing traditional and overarching generalizations about scenography in the sixteenth century, like the pictorial manifestation of Aristotle’s theory of unity through single-point perspective, it shows that Peruzzi presents a multifarious and het- erogeneous space, not a defined place in which the action is contained. Using as a fulcrum the flattened, disproportional and paradoxical arrangement of the ruins of Rome, the space in the drawing can be understood to present Rome as a monumental concept. Peruzzi’s drawing thus articulates an interplay of relations that, maximizing the artificial by conjuring an anomalous space, displaces the phenomenological expectations of the viewers in order to create a fantastic albeit impossible space that is, ultimately, truer to Rome than any mimetic instantiation of the city.
Educational by Jimena Berzal de Dios
Working bibliography covering 1400-1600, updated version a previous one. Feel free to message me ... more Working bibliography covering 1400-1600, updated version a previous one. Feel free to message me if you have suggestions for additions or corrections.
Checklist for undergraduate and graduate students to professionally present their papers in semin... more Checklist for undergraduate and graduate students to professionally present their papers in seminars and conferences.
Interviews by Jimena Berzal de Dios
Art Founders Project, Jan 2013
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Books by Jimena Berzal de Dios
Examining the period’s philosophical and aesthetic ideas about space, place, and setting, the book shows how artists consciously moved away from traditional representations of real spaces on stage, instead providing their audiences with more imaginative and collaborative engagements that were untethered by strict definitions of naturalism. In this way, the book breaks with traditional interpretations of early modern staging techniques, arguing that the goal of artists in this period was not to cater to a single privileged viewer through the creation of a naturalistically unified stage but instead to offer up a complex multimedia experience that would captivate a diverse assembly of theatre-goers.
Papers by Jimena Berzal de Dios
The topic of this essay is transitional objects as they exist in internal/external realities and, following DW Winnicott, how pre-Oedipal object relations can reframe key questions in experimental film, art, and psychoanalysis. In another sense, the essay explores the impossibility of adults to understand children’s aesthetic vision, and how the voracious yearning of artists to reach the child’s world is thwarted by the very aesthetic self-awareness that an artist has. The essay embodies an idiosyncratic and self-aware rhetorical approach: that sounds postmodern, but it is certainly not. Much theoretical framework here can be traced back to the modern world framing Winnicott’s ideas, a rhetorically freer philosophical space. In terms of process, this essay engages in collaborative writing without funneling a unison and synchronized voice. There are two voices in each section of the essay; we’ve not altered the words of each other. They’re in point-counterpoint, but not like a dense Baroque musical threading; lighter rather, hover-crafting—rococo, perhaps. But let us not confuse sincerity with irony, nor think the ornamental superfluous. The question here is whether relation is a form of destruction and usage, and how does that question makes us reconsider contemporary artists (experimental filmmakers…) explicitly concerned with object-relations and formative experiences.
Educational by Jimena Berzal de Dios
Interviews by Jimena Berzal de Dios
Examining the period’s philosophical and aesthetic ideas about space, place, and setting, the book shows how artists consciously moved away from traditional representations of real spaces on stage, instead providing their audiences with more imaginative and collaborative engagements that were untethered by strict definitions of naturalism. In this way, the book breaks with traditional interpretations of early modern staging techniques, arguing that the goal of artists in this period was not to cater to a single privileged viewer through the creation of a naturalistically unified stage but instead to offer up a complex multimedia experience that would captivate a diverse assembly of theatre-goers.
The topic of this essay is transitional objects as they exist in internal/external realities and, following DW Winnicott, how pre-Oedipal object relations can reframe key questions in experimental film, art, and psychoanalysis. In another sense, the essay explores the impossibility of adults to understand children’s aesthetic vision, and how the voracious yearning of artists to reach the child’s world is thwarted by the very aesthetic self-awareness that an artist has. The essay embodies an idiosyncratic and self-aware rhetorical approach: that sounds postmodern, but it is certainly not. Much theoretical framework here can be traced back to the modern world framing Winnicott’s ideas, a rhetorically freer philosophical space. In terms of process, this essay engages in collaborative writing without funneling a unison and synchronized voice. There are two voices in each section of the essay; we’ve not altered the words of each other. They’re in point-counterpoint, but not like a dense Baroque musical threading; lighter rather, hover-crafting—rococo, perhaps. But let us not confuse sincerity with irony, nor think the ornamental superfluous. The question here is whether relation is a form of destruction and usage, and how does that question makes us reconsider contemporary artists (experimental filmmakers…) explicitly concerned with object-relations and formative experiences.