Belvedere Lecture 2024: MONDAY, 23 september, 5-6 PM
Frans-Willem Korsten (Leiden University): From dry milling lakes to the production of sugar: internal and external colonialism and the issue of legal and historical irresponsibility
Starting in the early modern period, and in the course of just a few centuries, a so-called plantation culture has come to dominate the relations between humans and their environment, leading up to what Donna Haraway called the Plantationocene. This type of cultivation was not developed especially for the colonies. In the Netherlands, for instance, the dry milling of lakes in the 17th century resulted in commons being turned into the private property of investors who would then rent out the neatly cut up polders to those who had to work the land. More broadly, juridically speaking, the appropriation of land was covered by a tactic of enclosure, as Sylvia Federici proposed: a certain amount of land was marked off from the rest and declared property. When, then, a few European nations engaged in what was to become a colonial endeavor, Europe’s internal form of colonialism was exported to colonies elsewhere. There, likewise, European newcomers brutally created tangible and juridical fences that indicated: “This is now property.” The windmills that facilitated the dry milling of lakes, the legal definitions that facilitated the constitution of property, the machines that made the production of sugar possible, they are all examples of what Bernhard Siegert called ‘cultural techniques’. Such techniques take humans up in a loop. They are not techniques that humans consciously use, but media that redefine human subjectivity. As such they pose problems of (ir-)responsibility, both legally and historically. These, in turn, have their implications for a decolonial reconsideration of history.
After the lecture, there will be a reception.
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past lectures
Belvedere Lecture 2023
Caroline van Eck (University of Cambridge): Architectural Grotesques in 16th-century Florence
Renaissance Florence offers a particularly rich variety of three-dimensional grotesques, appearing on doorways, windows, and façades, in fountains, pedestals and armour. They occur particularly in liminal situations, both spatial, as in window frames, but also when they cross boundaries between disciplines, as in the architectural/sculptural objects created by Michelangelo and his followers. In my talk I will start with grotesque designs by Michelangelo, to move on to grotesques in façades and window frames, as well as fountains and hybrid objects by his followers Buontalenti and Ammanati. This group of grotesques does not lend itself very well to current readings of these figurations in terms of the corpus of 16th-century theories produced by Vasari, Ligorio, Lomazzo, Paleotti or Borromeo, because these theories are mainly based on the pictorial grotesque figuration inspired by the rediscovery of the Domus Aurea, not the three-dimensional masque variety of today’s talk. But also because that body of thought is normative and aetiological: normative because it attempts to regulate grotesque design, and aetiological because of its tendency to relate contemporary grotesques to Vitruvius and Roman art. Instead, starting from patterns of visual similarities, I will consider the relation of grotesque architectural ornament to contemporary armour; and I will consider the suggestion of a second skin, as well as the duplication and sometimes triplication of masque features in one grotesque in the light of anthropological work on masks by Franz Boas and Philippe Descola.
Belvedere Lecture 2022
Sven Dupré (Utrecht University): The Art and Nature of Glass – A Material in the Early Modern History of Knowledge
Today, glass is ubiquitous, from window glass to tableware, and from eyeglasses to glass fibres. I am currently writing a history of glass, and in this lecture, I will reflect on the opportunities of a focus on one material – glass – in writing the history of knowledge. Such a history cuts across the worlds of art, science, craft and technology, and across the various properties of glass as a material: its malleability when it is hot, its translucency and brilliant colours, its transparency which allows us to look through it, and its fragility and brittleness. One theme is how important imitation has been to the development of glass; not just the imitation of historical glass and techniques, but the imitation of nature. The visual qualities of translucency, light and colour just mentioned were the most important elements in the description of gemstones as well as in the description of their imitations in several crafts, especially glass-making, since Antiquity. However, the other way around, the art of glass-making had a major impact on our knowledge of nature. In this lecture I will show how the making of glass is closely intertwined with the way we experience and know the world. Without glass we would live in a different world, and certainly understand it less.