Event organised by the Visual and Material History working group
Dr Chonja Lee will join the EUI for a twofold event: a workshop to reflect on the current state of material culture history, and a lecture about her ongoing research on European printed Cotton Textiles for West Africa in the 18th and early 19th Centuries, and on a New History of Style and Media.
In her lecture, 'In Search of Switzerland’s Material and Visual Cultures of Slavery: A Transcultural Study of Textile Designs', she will discuss the characteristics of a material and visual culture of slavery and how it manifests in Switzerland, a country that had no official colonies. Saidiya Hartman has foregrounded the problem of the archives of enslaved people, their anonymity and the ways in which they have systematically been excised from historical records. Against this backdrop, art history is pivotal to contemporary engagements with visual and material legacies of slavery.
This presentation introduces a new research project that develops an image - and object-based database as a central outcome of sustained work on Switzerland’s long-neglected entanglements with slavery and its afterlives. Identifying and bringing to light the visual and material culture of enslavement is considered as important as analysing new forms of care, mediation, narration, and counter-narration in museum displays and artistic projects.
Picture caption: La Traite des N*s, Déville-lès-Rouen, Girard manufactory (?), 1820 ca, roller-printed cotton, 132 × 79.5 cm, Swiss National Museum, LM-171652 (detail).
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