Event—Center for Renaissance Studies

Visualizing the Archive: Senses and Silences

A workshop to help researchers understand and find connections between what evidence from the past has remained to us and what has been lost.

Description

This workshop begins by examining archival “silences,” and by attending to the deliberate or unintended erasures in archives. But beyond documenting absence and violence, we draw on new methodologies that allow scholars to visualize, hear, see, and imagine the past with fresh eyes. What has not survived becomes as such a generative practice that allows us to imagine the past in new ways. The workshop will draw on diverse disciplines’ approaches to objects as well as ephemeral, written and oral remains to form meaningful sensory, affective, aesthetic, socio-political, and other possible connections between what has remained to us and what has been lost. From food to lost objects, we will explore methodologies focused on finding the visceral and the visual in the early modern archive.

Tarih-i Yeni Dünya, el-musemma be hadis-i nev, Turkey, c. 1600 (VAULT Ayer MS 612)

Hore intemerate Virginis Dei genitricis Marie secundum usum ecclesie Romane. Paris, 1515 (VAULT Wing ZP 539 .H2216)