Art Histories / Catastrophes / (Heritage) / Ecologies [AC(H)E]

The project considers art history in and of the Anthropocene, from a disciplinary and trans-disciplinary perspective. This includes a rethinking of its methodologies, objects and fields of inquiry on the one hand, and on the other questions its potential contribution to save the planet, a precarious environment of human/non-human cohabitation, the biosphere and technosphere. The project participates and positions 
itself in the ongoing foundation and elaboration of eco-art history as part of a collaborative effort and as an open agenda, intertwining conceptual and empirical work. It draws on and goes beyond the paradigm shifts of recent decades in art history and the humanities, regarding notions of image, object, matter, space, time or labour.

The new global horizon of art history, its transcultural agenda, the overcoming of hierarchies and fostering of dialogue between subfields, such as European, Latin American, Islamic, East Asian or African art histories, is a pre-condition for an environmental and eco-critical approach. Art history as it is understood in this project considers all visual media and modes of imaging, as well as design and architecture (including urbanism and landscape). The confrontation and interrelations of representations, mediatisations and material manifestations is a core interest of the project. It generally addresses the future of the past(s) and is thus less oriented towards the reconstruction of artistic creation or the ‘making’ of artefacts, but rather concerned with the history and actual state of monuments or artefacts of all kinds. This embraces conservation history, theories and practices, as well as the politics or touristification of heritage. Heritage is meant by the ‘h’ in brackets of the title. Indeed, the AC(H)E project aims at a collaboration between art history and heritage studies, as well as with stakeholders of heritage and site management under the conditions of the ecological crisis. The plan is to integrate this in an overarching concern for environments. On a conceptual level, the project confronts the discussion of European intellectual history, in which ecological and aesthetic theories are intertwined in multiple ways, with a critical discussion of actual discourses in a transcultural or global perspective (theories of restoration, notion of living matter etc.) and in various systems or practices of knowledge (for example, indigenous cultures). 

AC(H)E is concerned with historical and contemporary disasters and catastrophes, such as earthquakes, pandemics, volcanic eruptions, and floods. This requires field work in catastrophic and post-catastrophic sites, participation in debates on the sustainable reconstruction and transformation of urban centres and landscapes, and the rethinking of the role of monuments and artefacts as part of the scenario of a territory, for example shaped by agricultural, pastoral, and tourist-led economies, which are vulnerable to and harmed by catastrophes and the ecological crisis in general (or in particular). The project is also concerned with the impact of practices (and politics) of ‘care’ and the role of imaging (photography, digital media and visualisations) in the promotion or public staging of post-catastrophic environments. It considers challenges of heritage-making or remaking and community engagement, highlighting tensions between symbolic value, institutional intervention, and local memory.  By analyzing historical dynamics and temporalities of construction, destruction, and reoccupation or reconstruction, the project emphasises the entanglement of human and non-human actors, the adaptive strategies of communities, and the layered social, cultural, and ecological histories or presences. It thus also allows a research-driven, active engagement of art history, for example regarding heritage (in the broadest sense) at risk or in the direction of an ecology of images, for instance in the public sphere, in social and other media.

The project outline traces the general horizon of the work of the AC(H)E scholars in their individual or joint research, in the form of case studies in dialogue with each other.

Members

Marian Berthoud
Catastrophising the City: Baroque Architecture and Urban Planning in Spanish Sicily,  c. 1669–1759 

Saida Bondini
Urban and Artistic Responses to Post-disaster Scenarios (1450–1650). Novelty, 
Memory, and Cyclicity

Chiara Capulli
L’Aquila 1703: Lost, Demolished, Rebuilt

Ráhel Gyöngyvér Györffy
Ruptures, Post-traumatic Architecture and Topographies of Memory: Between Suppression, Remembering and Reassessment

Katherine Mills The Artists of Crisis: The Construction and Reconstruction of Cuzco, Peru  

Parul Singh Making, Unmaking, Remaking: Heritage Spaces in Ayodhya and Banaras

Lunarita Sterpetti Behind the Volcano: Place, Ecology and Heritage on Vesuvius’ Skirt  

Nils Jonas Weber
The Quarantine Island: Quarantine Architecture and the Legacy of Post-Pandemic Heritage in the Mediterranean 

Associated Project

Annette Hoffmann and Gerhard Wolf
The Southern Caucasus Regions: Heritage, Landscape and Narratives