Letter of Seminar
Waste products, a part of our everyday lives, have become an object of study for scientists who examine here their physical and technological but also anthropological, sociological, economic, philosophical, political, and ecological dimensions. While this object has for a very long time been granted privileged status in the scrutiny of past societies, it also ...
Annette Becker is known for her fine knowledge of wars and genocides. She is now studying the conditions under which they are being exhibited in museums that have preserved traces thereof. Such museums have become sites of both commemoration and mourning. Especially since the 1990s, a bit everywhere in the world and there, too, ...
At a time when people are asking themselves about the status of living and nonliving beings, of the human and the nonhuman, things are of concern to us as active agents of the world that act upon us as much as we act upon them. Marielle Macé restores to poets the freshness of their endeavor, ...
Jean Rouch discovered the rituals of possession among the Songhai populations of Niger when he was a colonial public-works engineer before quitting that job to devote his life to research. He began filming in order to document ceremonies during which things are “activators of affects” for purposes of healing. Clara Pacquet notes the correspondences ...
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has helped to bring Giuseppe Arcimboldo out of the comfort zone wherein critics had treated him as an ahistorical painter. Kaufmann has contributed toward a critical revision of Arcimboldo’s oeuvre as a whole by placing it back within the context in which Arcimboldo lived and painted, including his connection with the ...
Paula Diehl takes an interest in political symbols and their usage in political ceremonies as well as in everyday life. Proceeding from an empirical study she conducted in the United States in 2014, she notes that the usage of political symbols plays several roles. The individuals she surveyed own several everyday objects bearing political ...
Camille Richert is preparing a dissertation around the notion of labor in Contemporary Art. Starting from the principle that our age has been altered by some major technological changes, she takes an interest in artists who are sensitive to the tools, materials, and products of the new forms of work—to things but also to ...
Considering a rocket as a gigantic thing, this object refers us back to the history of science and technology. But Elsa De Smet also describes it in industrial and political terms. Then, before being something really constructed, it was a prominent fantasy and, necessarily, a representation—in its own way, a “still life.” Laurence Bertrand Dorléac Technological ...
Prudence Bidet studies the albums of Yoko Ono, who mixes everything together: music, politics, and autobiography. Less studied than the rest of her creative work, these singular objects, especially her first solo albums, contain strong symbolic charges while displaying her desire for liberation. In her fourth album, in particular, Feeling the Space (1973), she ...
In drawing up an inventory of images and things in the nineteenth century, Manuel Charpy shows us how bourgeois domestic interiors ended up resembling still lifes, with curios, assembled in a certain order, accumulating there as within a picture. A painted or photographic portrait of a collector was, in this regard, edifying: his acquisitions ...
