All Things Considered… Material Culture and Memory
9 – 10 November 2018, UCC
CASiLaC: ‘Memory, Commemoration and the Uses of the Past’ research cluster
Departments of French and Italian, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, UCC
Keynote speakers:
Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Iceland in the Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies
Nathan Mannion is senior curator at EPIC, the Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin
With performances from Sonia Boué and Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh
FRIDAY 9 NOVEMBER 2018
9.30 – 10.00 Registration, coffee (G06 – ground floor, Brookfield Health Sciences Building)
10.00 – 10.30Welcome from Professor Chris Williams (Head of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, UCC); Dr Martin Howard (Head of Languages, Literatures and Cultures) Dr Daragh O’Connell (Director of CASiLaC-Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures) and the conference organisers, Dr Chiara Giuliani and Dr Kate Hodgson.
10.30 – 12.00 Session A:
1. Objects of loss and absence(chair Kevin Cawley) Room 302, Brookfield.
Daragh O’Connell (UCC) “lor vanità che par persona”: Immateriality and Haptic Memory in Dante’s Commedia
Sarah Morton (Bath), Materiality, Memory and Mourning: The material and the symbolic agency of repatriated human remains
Chiara Giuliani (UCC), Rhinos and earrings: objects of absence and absent objects in Ali Farah’s Madre piccola and Scego’s La mia casa è dove sono
2. Image, Object and Memory in History (chair David Bowe) Room 303, Brookfield
Diarmuid Scully (UCC), Manuscript 700 in the National Library of Ireland: creating the memory of a British Ireland in a medieval English empire
Małgorzata Krasnodębska-D’Aughton (UCC), Object and identity: material expression of Franciscan ideologies in late medieval Ireland
David Ryan (UCC), On Return, Quagmires, Levity and Departure
3.Material culture in the60s and 70s: music, art and literature (chair Till Weingärtner) Room 304, Brookfield.
Déborah Laks (Paris), Junk memory: the 1960s between past and present
Elisabetta Rattalino (Libera Università di Bolzano), Learning from rural objects: Claudio Costa and Superstudio in 1970s Italy
Olga Campofreda (UCL), Jungen Werther by Pier Vittorio Tondelli: the universal meaning of Youth as told by a teenage room in 1977
12.00 – 13.00 Lunch (downstairs in Brookfield Café)
13.00 – 15.00 Session B:
4.Framing Memories:the role of photographs (chair Barbara Siller) Room 302, Brookfield
Sonia Wilson (Sydney), Orphan photos and identity practices in France
Rixt Bosma (Leiden NL, independent photography historian), Reflections on two-of-a-kinds: the historic photography collection of DOUBLES
Antonia Viu, Pedro Moscoso-Flores (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile), Press Clipping and Digesting in Latin American periodicals of the thirties
Crónán Ó Doibhlin (UCC), John Minihan: photography and the memorial
5. Material Culture, Local Encounters (chair Richard Mason)Room 303, Brookfield
Emma Bond (St Andrews), Re-creating the past through things: working through the sugar history of Greenock
Erik Anspach (ENSCI-Les Ateliers), Documenting Design: Hugo’s Sea and Historical Memory
Elaine O’Driscoll-Adam (UCC), Symbolic Objects: Placing the Past in the Present
David Couvidat (Paris), A publishers’ series as a space for preserving cultural heritage: a case study of the descriptions, photographs and drawings of objects in the ethnographic testimonials of “Terre Humaine” (1955-2015)
6. Heritage and Material Culture in Ireland (chair Sarah Baccianti) Room 304, Brookfield
Kelly Boyle (UCC), Music in the museum: the rise and fall of Ceol, the Irish Traditional Music Centre, 1999-2001
Peter McElhinney (Bradford), Gaelic Recovery – Recovery of Ulster’s Gaelic Material Heritage as a Resource for Contemporary Cultural Expression
Kerstin Fest (Freiburg), Things in the Novels of Tana French
Clíona O’Carroll (UCC), ‘Sometimes I feel like takin an axe and breakin it all up’: Mrs Cutler’s dresser, Bridgie Lynch’s shawl and why ‘material culture’ should be a consideration in all social and cultural investigation
15.00 – 15.30 Coffee (first floor social area, Brookfield)
16.00 – 17.00
Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir (University of Iceland)
Boxes in the Attic: The Family Archive in Autobiographical Writing
Chaired by Silvia Ross. Creative Zone, Boole Library (UCC Main Campus)
17.00 – 18.00
Nathan Mannion (EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum)
Migrating Memories: The Role of Objects in Shaping Contemporary Migrant Identities
Followed by a roundtable discussion with Nuala Finnegan, Clíona O’Carroll, Crónán Ó Doibhlin (UCC) and Daniel Breen (Cork City Museum) on curating, objects and memory.
Chaired by Patrick Crowley. Creative Zone, Boole Library (UCC Main Campus)
18.00 – 19.00
Wine reception in the Creative Zone
Performance by Sonia Boué ‘Hung to Dry’, introduced by Helena Buffery
20.15 Conference dinner at Luigi Malones, Cork.
SATURDAY 10 NOVEMBER 2018
09.00 – 11.00 Session C:
7. Museums and community engagement (chair Catriona McAllister)Room 302, Brookfield
Jennie Morgan (Stirling), ‘The Human Bower’: Exploring Heritage-Futures through a Participatory Research-Arts Event
Martin O’Connor, Eileen Hogan (UCC), Crowdsourcing things and the collective memory: curatorial experiences of the Sir Henrys @ UCC Library exhibition
Sarah Baccianti (QUB), Getting handsy with the Vikings
Chris Clarke (UCC), Recalling ‘Selective Memory’: the archive as a site of artistic practice
8. War, memory and material culture(chair Dónal Hassett) Room 303, Brookfield
Taylor Soja (Washington Seattle), Fleeting, Fake Trenches on the British Home Front: the Active Service Exhibition of 1916 and the 1918 “Feed the Guns” Campaign
Hannah Wilson (Nottingham), The Materialisation of Sobibor Death Camp: Artefacts, Narratives and Representation
Agata Zborowska (Warsaw), The life of things in post-war Poland. Material culture and the experience of Migration
9. Fetish objects in Italian literature & cinema(chair Francesco Lucioli)Room 304, Brookfield
Nicole Maniero (Cambridge), Between fetishes and prostheses: the objects in Italo Calvino’s ‘L’avventura di un fotografo’
Martina Piperno (UCC), The memorial role of the car in Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000), Shoah survivor
Vincenzo Lisciani Petrini (La Sapienza, Rome), The keys to the mysterious beyond. The role of things and objects in Dino Buzzati’s works
Mark Chu (UCC), A Micron’s Tolerance: the quest for the Grail of perfection?
11.00 – 11.30 Coffee (first floor social area, Brookfield)
11.30 – 13.00 Session D:
10. Transnational narratives and material culture(chairCéire Broderick) Room 302, Brookfield
Derek Duncan (St Andrews), Uncurated objects: global narratives, local presences
Catriona McAllister (Reading), Where did we come from? Historical memory, nationhood and the museum in Argentina
Natalia Sassu Suarez Ferri (St Andrews), “Since they can’t put Venezuela in their suitcases, they take mosaic tiles from the airport”: Kinetic Art and Material Culture in the Time of Migration
11. Objects of domesticity – objects of desire(chair Martina Piperno)Room 304, Brookfield
Ombretta Frau (Mount Holyoke College), Cursed desire. Ill-fated heroines and their quest for Jewelry in 19th century Italian short stories
Bethan Bide (Middlesex), Unravelling sartorial memory: investigating the capacity of historical fashion objects to transmit and evoke memories in museums
Regina Sexton (UCC), Curious things of the hearth: the case of oatcake harden’ stands
13.00 – 14.00 Lunch (downstairs in Brookfield Café)
14.00 – 16.00 Session E:
12. Commodity culture and mass-produced objects(chairRola Abu Zeid-O’Neill) Room 302, Brookfield
Annie Cummins (UCC), Playing with desire: the growth of Kidult culture
Heather Laird (UCC), 1916 Memorabilia: Owning the Rising
Kate Hodgson (UCC), From animal to animated: objects in La Belle et la Bête
James Cuffe (UCC), Objects in chains: commodifying dissent
13.Relics: Belief, ceremonyand private memory (chair Tatsuma Padoan) Room 304, Brookfield
Kathy Curnow (Cleveland State), Autobiography through objects and ceremony: memories of a sixteenth-century West African Monarch
Johanna Carvajal Gonzalez (Aix-Marseille), Museum: A place to rest in peace. The relics of Erika Diettes
Nathalie Crouzier-Roland (Bordeaux Montaigne), Books of copied documents as elements of the material culture and the memory of urban communities in Guyenne (13th-15th centuries)
Halle O’Neal (Edinburgh), The materiality of memory in Buddhist Palimpsests
16.00 – 17.00 The Cultural Relevance of Parnell’s Walking Stick: poetry reading by Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, introduced by Daragh O’Connell. Coffee and concluding remarks. G06, Brookfield.
17.00 End of conference