Conversation
It’s a Match! Elise Misao Hunchuck and Ines Weizman on Carved Stones
Organized by Anna-Maria Meister, Anna Luise Schubert and the Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects”
Rather than lectures, this event series is a staged conversation, clash or celebration of two people with two distinct positions. Sometimes a blind date, sometimes a fierce competition, sometimes a surprising counterpart, or the perfect fit, in these matches the two speakers will first each present their perspective on a given theme or project, to then discuss divergences or conflations with the audience. From fiery disagreements to harmonious affirmations, the conversation series organized by the Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects” aims to refract perspectives on historical narratives as well as reconstruct creative processes.
This session brings together Elise Misao Hunchuck and Ines Weizman, who will both trace history from and around carved stones. Markers of past and future disaster in one case, and a marker of culturally coded networks and spaces in the other, they serve as points of departure to construct and build scalarly layered histories.
The tsunami stones of Japan stand at the edges of historical inundation, carved by communities who survived catastrophe to speak to those who had not yet arrived. They warn, memorialise, and instruct. Beneath the ground they demarcate, paleotsunami deposits hold a second archive: horizontal, unintentional, stratified—and incomplete. In her talk, Elise Misao Hunchuck traces the development of an Incomplete Atlas of Stones through two forms of carved inscription: one designed to resist time, the other to transform through it.
Tsunami stone monument (開墾碑), Yoshihama, Ōfunato, Iwate prefecture, Honshu, Japan. The inscription records the 1896 Great Sanriku tsunami, memorialies the villagers lost in the earthquake-tsunami, and the decision to rebuild on higher ground. Elise Misao Hunchuck, December, 2025
Architecture, like sculpture, begins with the art of looking at matter. In Maillol’s La Méditerranée this looking begins in the hand, with a small clay figure folded into itself. Enlarged into limestone, Carrara marble, and bronze, the work carries nested stories of modelling, scaling, carving, casting, and material translation beneath its composed surface. Unpacking them reveals not a linear genealogy, but a sequence of material and spatial displacements through which this sculpture becomes an archive. Followed by Ines Weizman into a vanished interior of Weimar Republic Berlin, La Méditerranée preserves traces of rooms, gestures, and historical worlds no longer available to view.
Biographical notes
Elise Misao Hunchuck is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer, and editor who thinks about landscapes and collects stones.
Ines Weizman is Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the Royal College of Art and founding director of the Centre for Documentary Architecture.
In Maillol’s Garden. Photograph by Irmgard Fritsch, 1927.
08 June 2026, 5:00pm
Florence
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut
Via dei Servi 51
50122 Firenze
To attend the talk in person no registration is necessary.
To participate online via Zoom please register here
Further information
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