Wastework: 15-17 March 2023, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome
How did the apparent formlessness of this discarded matter – the residues, the shavings, the piles – generate new ideas for forms or find new life through changes in state engendered by slaking, burning, distilling or casting? What disposal flows led household waste – egg shells, stale bread, stove ash – to enter the space of the studio as artistic material or cleaning product?
Wastework foregrounds waste as the material expression of practices of ordering and classification by which people adjudicated between collection and disposal, wanted and unwanted, salvation and loss. In reimagining the discarded past, we intend to test the usefulness of contemporary formulations – secondary product cycles, material fatigue, metabolic flows, sustainability, recycling – while also proposing new typologies and categories.
The Lise Meitner Group at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History is pleased to announceWastework, the first international conference devoted to waste in the early modern workshop. From 15-17 March, historians of art, architecture, science, and the environment will gather at the Hertziana alongside local chefs, activists, and artists. Together, we will consider acts of disposal, displacement, removal, and abeyance – in short, the getting rid of unwanted things — and the consequences these carry for the study of early modern material culture, from stale bread erasers to dyehouse effluents.
