Eleonora Pistis 1, Mattia Biffis 2 , Victor Claass 3
1 Columbia University - New York (United States), 2 University of Messina (Italy), 3 Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), Paris (France)
Sujet en anglais / Topic in english
Recent art historical scholarship has rightly emphasized that many of the current debates on materiality are, in fact, also debates on mobility. As outlined in different ways in the works of Christopher Heuer, Alina Payne and Jennifer Roberts, among others, it is especially when an artwork is in motion that its status as a material object––a three-dimensional thing with its own weight, size and facture, and with its distinct material component––is led to emerge. In other words, it is especially when in motion that the material features of an object can be properly detected and analyzed. Drawing on the previous work of such theorists as Bill Brown, Jane Bennett, Arjun Appadurai and many others, these studies offer now new approaches to think critically about the active relationships between matter and space, opening new ways for articulating the meaning of the material in a transnational perspective. Transdisciplinary by definition, these studies also create a new ground for approaching matter and materiality in a more empirical, one could even say more ‘materialistic,’ way.
