Course Description

What is a self-portrait? The simple answer is that it is a portrait of the self. The complex answer is: anything that a person finds relevant to one's identity. Sometimes self-portraits are built around a positive idea, sometimes around a sense of loss; sometimes they are constructed as a shield or as a weapon, and turn into a manifesto of the self; sometimes they include a physical representation, sometimes they deny legitimacy to the body; sometimes gender or race (or both) are at the core of the identity, sometimes they are hidden; they are, however, never neutral and are always meaningful. In this class we will learn how to disentangle these multiple layers and will work on deconstructing them: we will focus on how each facet shapes and determines the representation and will appreciate the tactics and strategies used by the artists and authors in our syllabus.