Seminar: “Objects as Wounds: Thinking Through Difficult Heritage”

How do we work with objects that carry the weight of traumatic histories? From Soviet material culture to Holocaust belongings to the entangled legacies of colonialism, museum professionals, scholars and artists are increasingly confronted with things that resist straightforward interpretation. These objects can become wounds, to use Roland Barthes’ metaphor, they unsettle and demand ethical accountability. This seminar responds to this challenge and brings together perspectives from art history, semiotics, museum and memory studies to explore the issues around such difficult objects. We will discuss what it means to exhibit, interpret, and engage with materiality whose histories are contested or deeply painful. What responsibilities does the researcher bear? What can art do that scholarship cannot? What institutional frameworks shape our encounter with these objects? And what does it mean to think through an object rather than simply about it? These questions will be the object of presentations by Rosa Anna Di Lella (MUCIV - Museo delle Civiltà), Gaia Delpino (MUCIV - Museo delle Civiltà), Julie Deschepper (Utrecht University) and Mario Panico (University of Bologna, KNIR), followed by a collective discussion with Maria Bonaria Urban (University of Amsterdam, KNIR).

RSVP

Secure your spot at KNIR by sending an e-mail to secretary knir.it
For the livestream, please register here.