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To close the academic year, the Material and Visual History Working Group hosted a fantastic workshop entitled Where the stones lie: between historical practices and spatialities. The event has been an incredible moment to discuss, study, and observe many different kinds of stones from a historical, material, but also anthropological point of view. The discussion was extremely rich, thanks to the quality of the papers and the fantastic job of the discussants who backed and enhanced the discussion.
The main goal of the workshop was to re-root the extracted materials in their original contexts (geological, environmental, technical, social), to underline the fact that historical study of these materials cannot avoid contextualising them: each Earth material is linked with a specific local environment which gives meaning to it. The group reflection worked really well in an inspiring interdisciplinary atmosphere.
The presentations covered most continents, from Eastern Europe to Mexico, from Corsica to South East Asia. The workshop ended at the Opificio delle pietre dure to learn about the stone carving and inlaying techniques developed in Florence through the centuries. Lola Cindric and Alexandre Claude introduced the tour, and the stone restorers Federica Cappelli and Francesca Toso gave us detailed explanations about the techniques and the stone’s uses.
The tour in the Museum del Opificio concluded this wonderful workshop, but this was just the first stepping stone, so await the next ones!
Speakers: Miruna Achim; Elisa Andretta; Dominique Brancher; Caroline Callard; Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi; Lola Cindric; Alexandre Claude; Kyria Grieco; Adam Mezes; Claire Sabel; Margherita Trento
Discussants: Paula González Fons; Lauren Kassell; Gabriele Marcon; Igor Melani; Francesco Montuori; Jakub Ochocinski; Jennifer Oliver; Ewa Zakrzewska; Solveig Vanniez-Salvesen.
A special thanks to the co-organisers of the event, Alexandre Claude and Leonardo Ariel Carrió Cataldi, to the institutions which financially supported it (EUI; CNRS; LARHRA), but also to the EUI staff, especially Francesca Parenti, for facilitating the organisation, and Federica Cappelli and Francesca Toso for the museum tour.
