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- Convenors:
-
Mette Tapdrup Mortensen
(Greve Museum)
Louise Karlskov Skyggebjerg (Copenhagen Business School)
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- Stream:
- Everyday Life
- Location:
- Aula 28
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 April, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
Surrounded by thousands of objects, we tend to forget they tell stories of change. This is mirrored at museums, where the drama in the quotidian is often overlooked. In the session we explore and discuss changes in the materialities of everyday life - and its musealization.
Long Abstract:
Objects play a central part in our daily lives. But many of them are hardly ever noticed. Even though we often use them on a daily basis, we might not think of these thousands of everyday objects as parts of cultural practices. As something conveying insight into the multitude of relations between individuals and materiality and into the change of the everyday.
Museums and other institutions with collections have been working with everyday life for decades. But the challenge remain; how do we handle the changes and materiality of the quotidian in the context of collections? How do we track the often unnoticed changes in the seemingly stable objects around us? And in our relations with them?
With an outset in papers that focus on everyday life, changes and materiality we will discuss questions like: How do cultural institutions with collections represent, track and reflect often unnoticed transformations? How do we track relations between individuals and materiality? How can we make collection and dissemination strategies that don't favour symbolic and canonized objects over the quotidian and mass produced, the cheap and the short lived like toothbrushes, power outlets, and kitchen rolls? Or over the more long lived but still overlooked like parking spaces, the local DIY centre, and the bus stop?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 April, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
The article discusses the semiotics of the dowry chests in the past and in the presence, the relations they have with their owners and the role they play in the community. The dowry chests used are presented with the support of rich photographic material collected during the author's fieldwork.
Paper long abstract:
The source of the article are field researches and the author's museum queries regarding chests in eastern Poland. These are dowry chests, richly painted in floral motifs, produced in craft centers in the 19th and first half of the twentieth century. Originally, crate boxes were used to store the dowry of the bride, which she received from her parents.Currently, a large number of these artifacts have survived in eastern Poland in private homes and museums. However, today they have a different function. Even if they are "containers", they store completely different things than they were dedicated to. For example, some antique chests have been converted by their owners for commercial use - such as a meat smokehouse or container for cattle's food. In other houses, the chests are kept with reverence as an element of heritage or grandmothers or great-grandmothers family treasures . These chests do not only store objects, but above all, memories, stories, biographies of people and things. In museums, on the other hand, the same chests are put on display, exhibited as the most valuable works of folk art. The article discusses the semiotics of the crates in the past and in the presence, the relations they have with their owners and the role they play in the community. The dowry chests are presented in this aricle with the support of rich photographic material collected during the author's fieldwork, where found more than 200 dowry chests.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is an attempt at exploring the history of an everyday use utensil known as 'Handi' which is common in the Indian households. I will be situating its journey temporally as well as spatially within the Indian sub continent. I will discuss the changes in its technology and their relation to the socio-economic processes through time. My study is based on the archaeological deposits from the sites located in the Brahmaputra Valley.
Paper long abstract:
The 'Handi' is a very common everyday use vessel form found in most Indian households mostly made of steel or aluminum. The 'Handi' is a squat pot with carination in the mid section with a globular bottom. In my paper I would like to discuss the history of this everyday item through archaeological deposits specifically from sites located in the Brahmaputra Valley. I will be discussing its evolution through time and its socio-economic and cultural significance in the societies of the past as well as present.
Before the advent of metal, plastic and paper mediums ceramics played a very important role in the everyday lives of people across the globe. This is testified by the plethora of potteries that are found from pre-modern sites of human habitation. One of the most extensively recorded artefact in most archaeological excavations and surveys are the ceramics. This entails that the potteries play a very important role in the socio-economic processes of the pre-modern societies.
I would be discussing the history of the humble 'Handi' as reflected in the archaeological deposits of the Brahmaputra Valley dated to roughly 7th-15th centuries CE. The networks and linkages that exist between South East Asia and the South Asia as reflected through the shared technology of making this vessel form will be showcased. In fact, I will be showing through my study how this technology reached the Brahmaputra Valley after the 7th century CE and gradually dispersed to the rest of the Indian subcontinent. The aim is to historically locate a everyday 'mundane' commodity such as the 'Handi' and explore its journey across time and space.
Paper short abstract:
Vis-à-vis to Wixaritari colorful image, the xikuri seems an ordinary garbing element, often addressed poorly by museums. Under a closer look, this female cloth headset, reveals as a precise sign of cultural change and preservation. Its versatility constructs side by side to the notion of femininity.
Paper long abstract:
Wixaritari(1), also known as Huichols, inhabit the highlands of eastern Mexico and were long time subjects of a called "traditionalist" and "isolated" character promoted throughout the XX century. Consequently, their material culture was widely integrated in many ethnographic collections around the world. Ritual objects and paintings, as well as daily life instruments and clothing exposed offer to the visitors an idea of Wixárika living and cosmogony. Nevertheless, the interest of specialists to grasp the symbolic dimension of Wixárika world, has provoked a deflection of scientific interest from more ordinary objects of simple manufacture. The case of the xikuri is emblematic of this last. It is the most typical female cloth headset worn every day. Its portability adds up to its multifunctional capacities making it a perfect female tool. In contrast, in museums is exposed as a bare decorative element. This museographic void confronted to Wixárika communitarian life appears as an odd contradiction. The xikuri is one of the most important allies for Wixárika women in household and other economic activities. Its material flexibility seems to draw level with its technical versatility, offering furthermore some clues to contemporary wixárika femininity. This paper intends to expose through how the materiality of the xikuri discloses relevant both as a solution for daily women activities and as a symptom of cultural change.
(1) Wixaritari is the plural from of wixárika.
Paper short abstract:
Can a collection of materials be used to track changes in 20th century everyday life? Inspired by Georges Perec and his eye for the ordinary, changes in everyday life is explored through the lens of three 'non-things' from such a collection - a spectacle frame, a broken nail and a piece of concrete.
Paper long abstract:
"How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? [...] How are we to speak of these 'common things'?"
One answer to these questions asked by the French author Georges Perec could be to explore changes in 20th century everyday life through everyday objects like the ones preserved in a collection of materials at a technical university.
Among hundreds of things in the collection, you find spectacle bows of light titanium from the 1990s throwing light on the connection between materials development and fashion. There is a broken nail molded in zinc telling war stories of shortage, experimenting and failure, and a concrete sample contributing to the history of the concrete jungle of many cities.
In the paper, I use these objects as a lens through which I track and explore changes in everyday life in all its ordinariness. I look at what kinds of histories of the past we can tell, when we use such objects as inspiration and sources. Do they merely function as symbolic objects illustrating histories we already tell? Or, do they offer something new to the study of the ordinary?
In addition, I discuss, whether the concept of 'non-things' (inspired by studies of non-places and non-events) could be a fruitful way to describe such objects, we normally do not pay much attention to and seldom preserve at museums.
Paper short abstract:
The train trestle crossing Keltic Drive in Sydney River in Nova Scotia changed from a non-place associated with morning commutes to place expressing rivalries between local secondary schools. This paper examines the controversy surrounding the painting of the trestle, a local rite of passage.
Paper long abstract:
In the booming economy of the post-war years, Canada underwent an infrastructure upgrade, including the establishment of a national highway system. This coincided with the suburbanization of both large metropolitan centers and smaller cities. One such upgrade was a train trestle crossing Keltic Drive in the community of Sydney River, built to span the new road leading to the new bridge spanning the eponymous river, a road which lead to the new secondary school accommodating the growing suburban population. Within a decade, the major employers of the area—the steel plant and the coal mines—announced their imminent closures and the region entered a period of decline. Within that context, the trestle bridge, an anonymous and utilitarian piece of design under which students travelled every day, began to be painted, first employing little more than graffiti and subsequently performing elaborate, planned, and sanctioned designs. It marked not only institutional affiliation but individual passages, from send-offs to beloved administrators and teachers to spontaneous shrines marking the untimely death of youth in the community. The practice continued until the end of the last decade, when concerns over liability shut down any official approval, although it has continued sporadically ever since. This paper examines both the history of the controversy surrounding the painting of the trestle and the negotiation of the idea of 'tradition': within a region whose economy has largely switched to the touristic marketing of both natural landscape and traditional (musical) practices, how does the community reconcile a counter-hegemonic non-legal practice?
Paper short abstract:
The vast significance of water has been the subject of discussion for many cultures and has been examined in the multitude of different ways. The paper is a social and cultural examination of the water culture and its material objects, wells. I will focus on water, its everyday experiences and people’s memories in terms of water culture and its present value. From this point of view, I will compare the cultural and social significance of wells and argue that the exterior surface of these material objects bear personal marks that are an important part of local culture in Kyrgyzstan. Furthermore, there is an anthropological investigation into how the villagers organise themselves in regard to the water, water supply and water traditions.
Paper long abstract:
In my presentation, I will focus on people’s everyday objects such as wells in terms of their material culture and present social value. I shall compare their cultural and social significance and argue that the exterior surface of these objects bear personal marks that are an important part of local culture and everyday life. This observation aims to make people more sensitised to their everyday objects (or their ancestry) and furthermore establish the prospective value of these objects for society, local art and culture as a whole. Firstly, I will argue that the introduction of water mains in the households of Kyzyl-Oi would result in more than just the wells losing their functionality. I will explore how their functionality has changed in overtime and how noticeable the changes have been. Furthermore, I will focus on the wells in Kyrgyzstan and its everyday experiences with them in terms of their water value, water supply and water traditions. Secondly, I will try to explain that the way people think about these objects and what they connect to them shapes their perception and thus their understanding of them. The objects, with their surface markings and individual parts embody the thoughts of the local people and thus are an important part of local culture. As examples I will use photos of wells that I have taken myself (photos of marks, scratches, holes, flakes) and the discolouration of the well’s surface. The objects are linked to personal associations, which are to be understood as personal reflections on the perception of the objects. By employing this idea, we arrive at a new view on people’s perception; how they look at, recognise and describe objects. Only when we consider both perspectives, we can understand the objects in their entirety.
Paper short abstract:
Reykjavík´s city center is going through a lot of changes on its built environment. One part of the change is that old houses are moved from their original location. The aim here is to explore how it affect some of the resident's place attachment.
Paper long abstract:
Reykjavík´s city center has gone through various changes over the years. Recent years, major changes have occurred. New houses have been built and some of the old houses, even listed houses, are moved from their original location to make space for the new ones.
We have seen lively public discussions and disputes about various sites in Reykjavík´s city center - in the media and on various blog sites - talking questions of conservation and revitalization. But how does the change affect the public, the locals?
How does it affect them when houses which have always been there are moved to another location and are no longer there?
In this study few residents of the city were interviewed so their voice could be heard and taking in to an account in the debate.
The objective is to explore the ways the locals relate to the buildings and sites and how, and if, the change affects their place attachment focusing on old listed houses that are moved or need to be moved to make room for new buildings.
What is the relationship between the research participants and the center of their hometown? How does the change affect them and why?
Is it because of their values, or their aesthetic experience and does the visibility of the house in the surroundings matter?
Houses are integral part of the city, so when new houses are built or old moved the whole place change, with unavoidably disturbance on the resident's place attachment.
Paper short abstract:
The paper will analyse three methods of presentation of the modernist housing architecture in the City of Zlín, CZ. It will bring the comparison of a "redbrick" museum, a small exposition in one of the blue-collar houses and an exceptionally "in-vivo" presentation of still inhabited houses.
Paper long abstract:
In last few years I was a part of a research group of an applied project focused on the City of Zlín, Czech Republic. Zlín is a modernist company city with large residential areas with almost 2.000 of houses for the families of married employs of the company. The standardised minimal houses were built mainly during the 20's and 30's of the 20th century as a part of a paternalistic policy of the Baťa shoe company. One of our aims was to study the changing modes of using the houses during the 20th century in wider context of variable social, political and economic systems.
One of the key moments in the history of Zlín was the coup d'état in 1948. The activity of Baťa company was kept from this moment on just in unofficial memory. The description of Zlín as an example of modernist and capitalist success came back to discourse after 1989. The residential areas became a part of this revived myth and later gained the status of historic heritage, so they are under historic protection.
The proposed paper will analyse ways, in which this architectural heritage is presented in Zlín today. This analyse should answer following questions: How is possible to present a house as an object (and a witness) of a continuously changing society and consequently as a part of an everyday life of its contemporary as well as former inhabitants? What are the meanings connected to the houses in different types of expositions or presentations?