Call for Papers: Materialising Loss, panel at CIHA 2024
Lyon , France
Centre de Congrès de Lyon
Paper proposals are currently invited for the session “Materialising Loss: Absence and Remaking in Art History” at the 36th Congrès du Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA) in Lyon, 23 – 28 June 2024, co-chaired by Francesca Borgo (University of St Andrews/ Bibliotheca Hertziana) and Felicity Bodenstein (Université Sorbonne). Proposals are due 15 September 2023.
The session examines what happens when, despite all our best efforts to conserve, protect, and make last, things disappear.
Paper proposals are currently invited for the session “Materialising Loss: Absence and Remaking in Art History” at the 36th Congrès du Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA) in Lyon, 23 – 28 June 2024, co-chaired by Francesca Borgo (University of St Andrews/ Bibliotheca Hertziana) and Felicity Bodenstein (Université Sorbonne). Proposals are due 15 September 2023.
The material turn in art history has reinstated a sensibility for the “thingness” of things (Brown, 2001), the properties of their constitutive materials (Ingold, 2007), and the activity of their matter (Miller & Poh, 2022; Latour 1991; Gell 1998; Bennett, 2010). More recently still, interest has extended beyond making and materials: processes of unmaking, deterioration, care, and preservation have become subjects of investigation, accompanied by growing critical engagement with conservation (Fowler, 2019; Fowler & Nagel, 2023) and increasing attention to the behaviour of matter across the deep time of geological history (Borgo & Venturi, CIHA 2019).
But what happens when, despite all our best efforts to conserve, protect, and make last, things disappear? Taking this question as its starting point, we invite papers that reconsider matter and materiality from an unusual point of view: the object’s loss or inaccessibility, and the practices undertaken to compensate for its absence, via physical replicas or virtual reconstructions. In centring itself on what has long been considered an epistemological endpoint in art historical studies – the disappearance of the original object – the session proposes a critical assessment of material and virtual remaking as site of art-historical knowledge. It asks how we might integrate that knowledge into the analytical methods of art history.
Looking at materiality from the seemingly paradoxical standpoint of absence reveals how much material studies takes for granted in terms of the object’s presence, permanence, and accessibility. Loss forcefully confronts us with the enabling operations and grounding conditions that go into writing material art history. It permeates everything we do, and yet it is distinctively undertheorized (Fricke & Kumler, 2022). What are the stakes of absence and reclamation? How does loss help us rethink the relationship between matter and form beyond the hylomorphic model? How do art historians deal with missing evidence, and how does its resurfacing or remaking change the canon and the narrative? Whose loss is worth talking about and why?
The threats of war, climate change and mass tourism give these questions a pressing relevance today, amplified by debates over sustainability, inclusion, and property rights. But art history seems sceptical of efforts to work against these risks: despite recent calls for ‘militant reproductions’ (Bredekamp, 2016), campaigns to widen the notion of originality (Lowe & Latour, 2010) and emphasize the seriality of the Classic (Settis & Anguissola, 2015), and appeals to the greater inclusivity of digital heritage (Terras, 2022; Michel, 2016), much of the discipline remains ambivalent about the remade, regarding it as ludic and nostalgic.
We live in a world in which heritage is constantly de- and re-materialised, formed and reformed in an unprecedented interplay between the material, immaterial, and neomaterial. And although the implications for objects and their histories are manifold, they remain largely unexplored. This session aims at remedying that imbalance, reflecting on the impact of physical loss on material art history and examining the value of remaking as historical method.
In the interests of crafting a more inclusive narrative of loss and remaking and of fostering exchange between scholars from different geographical and professional backgrounds, we especially welcome papers offering global perspectives.
Proposals are due 15 September 2023 and must be submitted via the CIHA platform. Instructions on how to submit your proposal can be found here.