INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS
"ILLUSTRATION, ILLUSTRATIONS"
INSAUSTI PALACE – AZKOITIA - 2007

The rehabilitation of the Insausti Palace, birthplace and future site of the Royal Bascongada Society of Friends of the Country (Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País), will be completed in the Fall of 2006.

A new scientific institution, conceived by the Bascongada Society in 1990 and recently founded –The Institute of Studies of the 18th Century which carries the name of the illustrated and from Insausti, Xavier María de Munibe, count of Peñaflorida– will also be located in and have work tools in Insausti.

For this occasion, the Royal Bascongada Society of Friends of the Country will hold an international congress, titled ILLUSTRATION, ILLUSTRATIONS that will take place in Azkoitia in November 2007.

This first notification informs that a period is open from now until May, 2007 to propose communications in accordance with the general orientation defined by the ad hoc scientific committee set up by the Royal Bascongada Society of Friends of the Country, with responsibility for organising this congress.

| International Congress |

The program of the International Congress ILLUSTRATION, ILLUSTRATIONS is structured along four basic themes designed to best organise the diverse contributions.

1. Spaces and states of Illustration: uniqueness, plurality and versatility.
In this first area will be included those most general and theoretical contributions. The sense of the proposal is to open the question to the opportunity for definitions of European and Iberian peninsula Illustrations; argue the plausible loss of scientific value of the same or, on the contrary, the need for its updating; to relate the concepts of “Light” and “Illustration”, and specifically, provide a moment in the evaluation of this debate, of its vitality, of its lack of pertinence or, of deliberation of the same.

2. Times and styles: Illustration, anti-Illustration and radical Illustration.
In this second category will be grouped those contributions most thematic and specialised, under the prism of epistimologic renovation. “State in question” of the current eighteenth investigation that will house the diverse spaces –physical, literary (in the widest sense), scientific and historical– which articulate the represented and lived around a three-part structure: Illustration, anti-Illustration and radical Illustration. It involves an approximation to the complexity of the way to think and live of the contemporaries, how it was represented or debated and how today the investigator can interpret it.

3. Self-representations and recreations of Illustration.
Questions over the diverse variants and learnings of Illustration cause reflection on the one hand, over the tools of the investigator – in particular regarding the sources of the 18th century– and, on the other hand, over an amplification of the investigation, opening way as well to the world of representations not discursive. In order to learn, in the first place, how Illustration is represented to itself (painting, architecture, furniture, fine arts, recordings, drawings, etc.) and to illustrate, later, in the representations of Illustration in the 19th and 20th centuries: what is it that was chosen in the representations left by the contemporaries?
In order to avoid that this leads, mechanically, to “inherited“ conclusions of Illustration (a question which is arrived at or not, depending how one considers it) but rather an investigation directed towards the current representations of Illustration, in its diverse supports (narrative, essays, theatre, advertising, cinema, comedy, etc.), it will be considered the “what” and “how” of current representations of the 18th century, looking at the permanence of the recuperations and the reading that is offered by these updated representations.

4. The Basques in Illustration.
    The Bascongada Royal Society of Friends of the Country.
Includes all aspects, from persons, Royal Seminary of Bergara and other institutions, publications, Abstracts, Sciences, Medicine, Literature, Iconography, the four Commissions, and the American European bond, among others.