Letter of Seminar
A work of art is only active if a certain number of conditions are met, implying the collaboration of various actors, not least the public. Alexis Anne-Braun raises here the question of restorative practices in art, as well as the ethical issues they present, through the concept of artistic activation found in the writings ...
Annette Becker is known for her fine knowledge of wars and genocides. She is now studying the conditions under which they are being exhibited in museums that have preserved traces thereof. Such museums have become sites of both commemoration and mourning. Especially since the 1990s, a bit everywhere in the world and there, too, ...
Museums are not self-evident entities. David Guillet, who has experience thereof, reflects on the status of things—drawings, for example—whose complexity, materiality, and multiple qualities, as well as their diversity of significations, he wishes to grasp. He isolates problems without concealing the limits encountered by visitors when offered only a linear path through a museum’s collections. ...
An ethnologist and anthropologist, Mélanie Roustan has investigated the hold objects have over people (her book was published in 2007). She offers us a thorough analysis of things that were sacred for reasons that differ greatly from what, once they have entered museums, defines them for us. The case of eighteenth-century tattooed and mummified ...
Christian Joschke invited us, during this seminar, to make the connection between avant-garde movements, on the one hand, and the practice of gift-giving and the social sciences’ take on the circulation of goods and assets, on the other. In doing so, he pointed out a peculiar development. In the 1930s, and again in the ...
