Pictorial narrative and visual staging of antiziganist motifs (1848-1930)
Summary
Sub-project 1 uses art and visual-scientific methods to analyse the significance of modern antiziganist pictorial narratives. It examines the continuity and transformation of long-established stereotypical motifs or subjects as well as new pictorial inventions that emerge in the context of social and cultural change. The focus is also on transmedial translation processes, i.e. cross-genre transfers that reveal an interaction between motifs, reproduction techniques and social upheavals. Painting, printmaking and commercial art as well as photography from Western and Eastern Europe will be analysed.
Research questions
1. How can an openly accessible research environment be set up that does not affirm stereotypes and reproduce critical sources?
2. How can affected communities be included in the development of the research environment?
3. Centre versus periphery: How do the centres look at the peripheries and how are the peripheries mapped? Conversely, how does the periphery look at the centres?
4. The modes of representation type and person, or prop and object: To what extent can examples be found that reveal agency and self-determined representation?
Cooperations
In general, the connection between visual staging (SP 1, SP 3) and textual description of others and self (SP 2, SP 4, SP 5, SP 6) must be worked out. There are clear intersections between pictorial narrative and scenography (SP3) and between iconographic tradition and popular spectacle (SP 2). For the reception, transformation and popularisation of antiziganist figures, e.g. as advertising media at international world exhibitions or as protagonists in early film, SP 1 will work closely with SP 2 and SP 3.
In addition, there is close cooperation with SP 6 and SP 4 to clarify the influence of anthropological-evolutionary ‘racial ideology’ on Expressionist artists against a colonial horizon. The modes of representation type and person are also analysed with regard to the new narratives of personal careers and intercultural contacts, so that there are great synergy effects between SP 1 and SP 5 with regard to agency and (political) self-representation.
SP 1 contributes to the co-operation of all sub-projects by setting up the virtual research environment.
Conferences
Workshop: ‘Research data and knowledge systems’ in Marburg
Conference 3: ‘Transmedial image narrative and stereotype’ in Flensburg, together with SP 3
Research areas
Core research area: Germany and France
Additional areas: Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, England, Spain
Aims
1. Basic research: Antiziganist motifs from high and popular culture will be indexed, catalogued and evaluated in their structural entirety for the first time in order to ensure coherent individual art-historical analyses on this basis.
2. Provision of a digital research environment (multimodal database) that enables the mapping and evaluation of antiziganist images from paintings to pictorial advertising and ensures a systematic link with the materials and discourses of the neighbouring disciplines involved (cooperation with SP 2-6).
3. Redefining the constitutive significance of the ambivalence of gypsy figures and narratives for modernism. Within art history, the interrelationships between the individual pictorial genres will be demonstrated. Not only the transmission and translation of pictorial narratives in general will be examined, but also specific aspects such as nostalgia versus belief in progress, centre versus periphery and modes of representation: type versus person.
Selected results
- Monograph on ‘Counter Archive. Research data management with stigmatising multimodal data’
- Dissertation: ‘In the picture. Antiziganism and visuality’
- Virtual research environment for all sub-projects
Prof. Dr. Peter Bell
Philipps-Universität Marburg
Professur für Kunstgeschichte und Digital Humanities
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Prof. Dr. Melanie Ulz
Universität Regensburg
Professorin für Historische Bildwissenschaft
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