Workshop
Eva Maria Troelenberg: Machinery Rooms of the Mediterranean. An Introduction
&
Pujan Karambeigi: Photography and the Making of Persepolis
Erich Friedrich Schmidt, “Vertical View of the Site of Persepolis,” altitude of 2,440 meters, April 20, 1936.
Photography and the Making of Persepolis (Pujan Karambeigi)
At Persepolis, the monument was produced through contested techniques that determined what could be transmitted, reconstructed, and seen. Beginning with André Godard’s graphic translations and Paul Coremans’s serial observation of material change, this workshop traces how casts, plans, samples, and photographs located the monument’s identity across transformations of matter, medium, and time. It then follows photography from Erich Schmidt’s aerial construction of Persepolis as an architectural whole to the Tilias’ assembly of archival and comparative images as evidence for reuniting displaced fragments, showing how photography mediated among archaeological site, art-historical object, and reconstructed monument. Across these episodes, Persepolis emerges as a module of the prefabricated museum: a past made materially present, visually coherent, and internationally available.
Machinery Rooms of the Mediterranean, 1800 - present (MEDMACH). A Research Project (directed by Eva-Maria Troelenberg)
The research project “Machinery Rooms of the Mediterranean – Images and Visual Archives of Movement and Acceleration, 1800-present” (ERC) looks at the history of the Mediterranean based on images created around infrastructures and machineries of movement and acceleration that characterize the industrial and post-industrial age, for instance airports, train stations, motorway bridges, industrial ports, and engine-driven ships.
Such sites of movement are also productive sites of visual analysis, as they are connected to the very aspects that render the Mediterranean an emotive, politically relevant place: migration, colonization and decolonization, the relation between Europe, the Islamic world and further global connections, environmental and economic crisis. This project emphasizes the epistemic value of images and image archives: the period after 1800 is not only characterized by increasing industrialization and mass mobility. It is also the period when technologies of the visual enhance the distribution and circulation of images on a global scale. Images thus become perfect carriers of transnational and transregional knowledge. The image-based approach of MEDMACH therefore cuts across the divisions of fragmented national histories, and provides a basis for a nuanced, yet connective history.
Biographies
Eva-Maria Troelenberg is currently Professor of Transcultural Studies in the Art History Institute of Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. She was previously head of the Max-Planck-Research Group “Objects in the Contact Zone – The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things” at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – MPI, as well as Professor for Modern and Contemporary Art History at Utrecht University. She also held visiting professorships or teaching assignments at Universität Zürich, LMU Munich, as well as the universities of Vienna and Heidelberg. Her main fields of interest include the historiography, perception and collecting histories of Islamic arts, transcultural museum histories, and art histories of the Mediterranean after 1800.
Eva-Maria Troelenberg is Principal Investigator of the MEDMACH project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), 2023-2028. The aim of MEDMACH is to consider, analyze and discuss entangled histories of the Mediterranean after 1800 through images of movement: infrastructures and machineries of acceleration such as airports, train stations, motorway bridges, industrial ports, and engine-driven ships. These sites are often overlooked in overarching narratives of the region. The Mediterranean after 1800 typically appears either in decline or romanticized, therefore this ‘machinery room’ has never been at the center of attention. However, these sites of movement are connected to all the aspects which make the Mediterranean an emotive, politically relevant place today: migration, colonization and decolonization, the relation between Europe and the Islamic world, environmental and economic crisis. Conceptualizing the modern and contemporary Mediterranean through its ‘machinery rooms’ of movement will provide a basis for a differentiated, yet connective history. This history will be based on images and image archives: After 1800, images are increasingly made for distribution and circulation. They are thus entangled with the ambivalent notions of movement and acceleration. They are also ideal carriers of transnational and transregional knowledge. MEDMACH will work with a visual approach to establish a new, systemic historical understanding which is urgently needed in current debates on travel, transit, migration, environment, and cultural encounter.
Pujan Karambeigi is a PhD candidate in Art History at Columbia University. His dissertation, Pre-Fabricating the Museum: UNESCO and the Infrastructure of World Art, 1945-72, examines how decolonization and nation-building reshaped art-historical expertise through artistic training, museum practice, and heritage preservation. Bringing together art history, media studies, and critical museology, he focuses on how institutions contribute to the making of aesthetic judgement.
Karambeigi’s scholarly research has appeared in ARTMargins and is forthcoming in several anthologies, while his criticism has been published by The Nation, Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Art in America, and Mousse Magazine, among other publications. His research has been supported by the Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art, the Buell Center, the International Mellon Travel Fellowship, the G.A.S. Foundation Fellowship, the Frieda B. and Milton F. Rosenthal Art History Fellowship, the DAAD, and the German National Merit Foundation.
29 October 2026, 11:00am
This event will take place in Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai.
Notice
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