Paper short abstract:

Fabio Gygi is fascinated on one side by the ontological commitments we make by making distinctions between inside and outside, and on the other by the practice of collecting and how accumulations of things embody notions of order, taste, and passion.

Paper long abstract:

Fabio Gygi joined SOAS in 2013, where he is Lecturer in Anthropology with reference to Japan. He wrote his MA thesis on the ways in which the experience of materiality in the trenches of the First World War shaped artistic practices in the interwar years and how war experiences were represented and forgotten. This interest in the ways in which 'mind' gets stuck in 'matter' led him to pursue PhD research on hoarding in Japan and, more recently, in the West, with a particular focus on how hoarding has been translated into a disorder of the mind on one side, and how domestic interiors and their decoration have become points of contention on the other. He is fascinated on one side by the ontological commitments we make by making distinctions between inside and outside, and on the other by the practice of collecting and how accumulations of things embody notions of order, taste, and passion.