From Friday 9 to Sunday 11 June – Bologna
(Preview June 7 & 8)
NipPop 2023 (13th Edition)
JAPAN ON THE ROAD
The NipPop Festival, promoted by the Department, is back again this year
LILEC of the University of Bologna and the homonymous cultural association,
with the artistic direction of Paola Scrolavezza.
Three days of workshops, meetings, free performances and round tables with artists and Japanese culture experts from Italy and abroad who will discuss the thematic core around which this year’s festival revolves: travel. Among the first, great guests already announced, the writer and essayist Ryōko Sekiguchi and the
mangaka Kan Takahama, accompanied by prestigious names in culture including Giorgio Amitrano (University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’) and Giampiero Raganelli (journalist, film and theater critic), and publishing as
Asuka Ozumi (Dynit) and Claudia Calzuola (Star Comics).
The XIII edition of NipPop: Words and Shapes from Tokyo to Bologna takes place in the spaces of the DAMSLab – Department of the Arts (Piazzetta PP Pasolini 5b – Bologna), with two previews, on 7 June at the traditional location of the Teatro del Baraccano, and June 8 at Palazzo Pallavicini, in collaboration with the Yōkai exhibition. the old prints of Japanese monsters.
The thematic nucleus around which this year’s festival revolves is travel, to once again enhance the dialogue and exchange between cultures and exorcise those anxieties and fears and anxieties at the center of the 2022 edition. Real travels, for the Japan and from Japan, but also imaginary trips, trips to escape ed
estrangement from reality, travel between worlds and in other worlds, travel back to the past, but also forward to discover a distant future. The journey is literature, but not only: it is also cinema, comics, animation, videogames – infinitely declinable and declined, but each time different and unpredictable. A theme that is still very topical today: even if long journeys to distant and unknown countries now seem to belong to the distant past and modern technology offers us the possibility of moving from one point of the globe to another in one
handful of hours, the last two years have reminded us that nothing is taken for granted.
The days of NipPop will be divided into meetings, workshops, performances and round tables with artists and Japanese culture experts from Italy and abroad. NipPop’s goal has always been to involve not only the Japanese community in Bologna, but all citizens in activities that focus on the inclusion of diversity and prefer the participatory and interactive method of sharing different points of view.
This year’s program includes the participation of artists such as mangaka Kan Takahama; writer, poet and essayist Ryōko Sekiguchi; by scholars such as Giorgio Amitrano (University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’), Marta Fanasca (University of Bologna), Anna Specchio (University of Turin), Cristian Pallone (University of Bergamo); of editorial managers including Claudia Calzuola (Star Comics) and Asuka Ozumi (Dynit Manga); by film critics such as Giampiero Raganelli and many other scholars, translators and experts on Japan including
Francesco Comotti, Patrick Colgan, Stefania Viti, Antonio Moscatello.
NipPop 2023 is an event organized in collaboration with the LILEC Department, the Department of Arts, the GEMMA – Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree and Asia Institute. The project was also implemented thanks to ALMArie CURIE 2021 – SUPER Line financed under the resources of Ministerial Decree 737/2021 and by the European Union –
NextGenerationEU.
All events of the NipPop Festival, including the exhibition area, will have free admission.