scholarly journals Le sommeil d’un mannequin: exploring material memory through film

Author(s):  
Laura Del Giacco

Le Sommeil d’un mannequin is a practice-based research project that examines the relationship between the female body and the body of the mannequin through creative methods of plaster body casting and experimental film. The film, Le Sommeil d’un mannequin, conveys the psychic experience of memory found in the unconsciousness state. Through the use of experimental filmmaking, this project speaks to the transformative power of memories and the interpretation of memory that is implied in the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud. Subsequently, this project bares importance to the study of material culture because it takes into account the human essence present in the fabrication and production of cultural objects. Applying Jules Prown’s method of object analysis uncovered the role of the mannequin to be more than just a cultural display of feminine identity.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Del Giacco

Le Sommeil d’un mannequin is a practice-based research project that examines the relationship between the female body and the body of the mannequin through creative methods of plaster body casting and experimental film. The film, Le Sommeil d’un mannequin, conveys the psychic experience of memory found in the unconsciousness state. Through the use of experimental filmmaking, this project speaks to the transformative power of memories and the interpretation of memory that is implied in the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud. Subsequently, this project bares importance to the study of material culture because it takes into account the human essence present in the fabrication and production of cultural objects. Applying Jules Prown’s method of object analysis uncovered the role of the mannequin to be more than just a cultural display of feminine identity.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 207-216
Author(s):  
Andreas Luescher

This paper examines the museum dedicated to Pierre Soulages and its relationship with Soulages, the city of Rodez, the Forirail Garden (which is the site of the museum), and the ideas and practices realised by Catalan architects Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta (RCR). The Musée Soulages is defined by the colour black and the luminous fluidity of steel as designed by RCR Arquitectes; it is also aligned with an environmental ecology that literally and figuratively represents the town of Rodez with its Notre-Dame Cathedral. The central thesis is that the Musée Soulages inducts the visitor into a role of active participation and exchange in an atmosphere of transcendental logic, and, ultimately, a new way to experience black as a colour rather than the lack of one. A visitor to the Musée Soulages becomes part of a theatrical event in which two actors —one French abstract painter, three Catalan architects—communicate in physical terms about the metaphysical environment, and the relationship between the scenographic and the tectonic in architecture. The Musée Soulages is a fascinating metaphorical representation of not only Pierre Soulages's character and his work, but also of the role of the built environment and material culture that is intertwined with the body of Soulages's expressive works. This essay focuses on the material and symbolic gestures created by Pierre Soulages and RCR Arquitectes to maintain and promote their particular world views, and examines the ways in which their expressive mediums and ideas are by turn harmonious and contradictory.


Author(s):  
Nicolette Makovicy

Nicolette Makovicy: Material Memories: On Remembering with Object and Body We live surrounded by cultural objects, either of our own making, or appropriated from other sources through purchase or gift. This article is an exploration of how our interaction with material culture can affect how we remember, and inquires into the wider implications this has on knowledge and memories which circulate in social relations and across generations. The specific object of study is handmade bobbin lace, its production and circulation in the central Slovak provincial town of Banská Bystrica and its surrounding villages. The author takes a critical stance towards the conventional notion that objects can act as analogues for memory, as illustrated by Aristotle’s memoria. Instead, the author attempts to explore what an approach which underscores memory as a spontaneous recall. The article first deals with the relationship between skill, an embodied form of knowledge which relies on the physical training of the body to perform precise movements, and the product of this knowledge, the lace, as a means of transferring craft knowledge between makers. It is argued that the body and the senses are indispensable to this transfer, the key to the understanding and memorization of knowledge being physical reproduction. The second part of the article deals with lace articles as an element of household décor. It is shown that lace articles, while all being spoken of as making permanent memories through their materiality, most often have shifting meanings attached to them determined by a frequent circulation between households. Finally, it is suggested that the emphasis on materiality is used by the informants as a discursive device in their attempts to ground themselves socially and historically. 


2021 ◽  
pp. 097168582110159
Author(s):  
Sital Mohanty ◽  
Subhasis Sahoo ◽  
Pranay Kumar Swain

Science, technology and human values have been the subject of enquiry in the last few years for social scientists and eventually the relationship between science and gender is the subject of an ongoing debate. This is due to the event of globalization which led to the exponential growth of new technologies like assisted reproductive technology (ART). ART, one of the most iconic technological innovations of the twentieth century, has become increasingly a normal social fact of life. Since ART invades multiple human discourses—thereby transforming culture, society and politics—it is important what is sociological about ART as well as what is biological. This article argues in commendation of sociology of technology, which is alert to its democratic potential but does not concurrently conceal the historical and continuing role of technology in legitimizing gender discrimination. The article draws the empirical insights from local articulations (i.e., Odisha state in eastern India) for the understandings of motherhood, freedom and choice, reproductive right and rights over the body to which ART has contributed. Sociologically, the article has been supplemented within the broader perspectives of determinism, compatibilism alongside feminism.


Antiquity ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Mila Andonova ◽  
Vassil Nikolov

Evidence for both basket weaving and salt production is often elusive in the prehistoric archaeological record. An assemblage of Middle–Late Chalcolithic pottery from Provadia-Solnitsata in Bulgaria provides insight into these two different technologies and the relationship between them. The authors analyse sherds from vessels used in large-scale salt production, the bases of which bear the impression of woven mats. This analysis reveals the possible raw materials used in mat weaving at Provadia-Solnitsata and allows interpretation of the role of these mats in salt production at the site. The results illustrate how it is possible to see the ‘invisible’ material culture of prehistoric south-eastern Europe and its importance for production and consumption.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Mônica Machado

Esse artigo objetiva refletir sobre as representações sociais das favelas cariocas em registros midiáticos ao longo os últimos anos, o crescente movimento do Favela-tour e seus paradoxos, bem como as suas implicações conceituais. Em seguida reflete sobre as experiências do turismo cultural do Museu de Favela, com destaque para o processo de criação do hotsite Museu de Favela Tour como dispositivo que faz circular o capital cultural comunitário. Todas essas noções associam-se aos pressupostos teóricos da cultura material, como um campo da antropologia que estuda as correlações entre objetos e inventários socioculturais e avança para o estudo da sub-linha da pesquisa da antropologia digital, onde as relações entre sujeitos sociais e tecnologias são imaginadas como reelaborações da sociabilidade que precedem a essa tradição e se predispõem a revelar as contradições sociais já dispostas na cultura.Social narratives about slum in Rio:the cultural-tourism in favela museum and digital activismAbstract This article aims to analyse favelas in Rio and also the media records about this issue, arguing that the Favela-tour concept can be seen as paradoxal process. Then will be debated Favela Museum’s cultural tourism heritage, highlighting the process of creating the Favela Museum Tour’s hotsite as a way of spread the favela’s legacy. All these notions are associated with the theoretical frame of material culture as a field of anthropology and links between socio-cultural objects and inventories. This research is called digital anthropology where the relationship between social and technology subject are imagined as re-workings of sociability that precedes this tradition, where the digital technologies are predisposed to share the social-cultural contradictions.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alanna M. M. McKnight

In amplifying the contours of the body, the corset is an historical site that fashions femininity even as it constricts women’s bodies. This study sits at the intersection of three histories: of commodity consumption, of labour, and of embodiment and subjectivity, arguing that women were active participants in the making, selling, purchasing and wearing of corsets in Toronto, a city that has largely been ignored in fashion history. Between 1871 and 1914 many women worked in large urban factories, and in small, independent manufacturing shops. Toronto’s corset manufacturers were instrumental in the urbanization of Canadian industry, and created employment in which women earned a wage. The women who bought their wares were consumers making informed purchases, enacting agency in consumption and aesthetics; by choosing the style or size of a corset, female consumers were able to control to varying degrees, the shape of their bodies. As a staple in the wardrobe of most nineteenth-century women, the corset complicates the study of conspicuous consumption, as it was a garment that was not meant to be seen, but created a highly visible shape, blurring the lines between private and public viewing of the female body. Marxist analysis of the commodity fetish informs this study, and by acknowledging the ways in which the corset became a fetishized object itself, both signaling the shapeliness of femininity while in fact augmenting and diminishing female bodies. This study will address critical theory regarding the gaze and subjectivity, fashion, and modernity, exploring the relationship women had with corsets through media and advertising. A material culture analysis of extant corsets helps understand how corsets were constructed in Toronto, how the women of Toronto wore them, and to what extent they actually shaped their bodies. Ultimately, it is the aim of this dissertation to eschew common misconceptions about the practice of corsetry and showcase the hidden manner in which women produced goods, labour, and their own bodies in the nineteenth century, within the Canadian context.


1970 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-31
Author(s):  
Samin Gheitasy ◽  
Leila Montazeri ◽  
Simin Dolatkhah

The dramatic text defines, to some extent, the structure of the work but the type of performance and the physical approach to the text can represent different meanings. The body of the actor, as a means of conveying concepts from the text to the audience, can be effective in creating different interpretations and meanings of the text. Since eons ago, directors have used the body of the actor with different approaches, and the application of body on the stage has always been underdoing changes. Anne Bogart is one of the few directors who is less known in the Iranian theater despite possessing the most updated and well-known methods of practice and performance in the world. Using her viewpoint method, she brings live and dynamic bodies to the stage; bodies that are able to convey the hidden meanings of the text to the audience in the most suitable way. The overall purpose of this research is to find the relationship between the dramatic text and the performance with the centrality of the body with a sociological view toward the body. To this end, by presenting Foucault's theories, the researchers defines the role of the body in the society and its extent of effectivity and impressibility. Finally, this study explores the implications of this role in each element of Aeschylus’s The Persians, and it shall show how Bogart beautifully represents them using the bodies of her actors during performance.


2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-262
Author(s):  
Steven L Foy ◽  
Collin W Mueller

Scholars have increasingly noted mechanisms by which religion may be detrimental to one’s health, but few have explored how individuals understand linkages between religious involvement and adverse health. Using data gathered from telephone interviews with Protestants and Catholics in North Carolina and South Carolina, we explore how individuals understand the role of religious moral failure in shaping health consequences. When asked to discuss the relationship between religion and health, 23 respondents described experiences or beliefs regarding how failing to meet the expectations of their religion corresponded with a range of reduced mental and physical health outcomes. Findings underscore the need for additional research on the role of religious involvement and life course experiences in shaping expectations that health declines result from moral failure.


2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Nina Sosna

This article discusses the role of the technical in V.A. Podoroga's project of studying the literature worlds as archives of human experience. On the level of content, among many other components of these worlds he distinguished working and non-working machines, “gizmos” and various optical devices, including the mechanic eye, camera, mounting, etc. Formally, the action of these machines can be assessed as alienation, though in the context of modern media studies and exploration of the perspectives of anthropology, they can also be described as a problematic contact zone between the human and non-human, with a bias towards breaking the already historically disrupted bodily-affective interaction with the “outside”. Studies of Andrei Platonov's show the most radical interaction with the technical, in this case causing dissimilation of the human. However, even for this “inhuman” material, Podoroga chooses a form of human-measured approximation and distancing, which allows defending the position of an active researcher, observer, anthropologist. His efforts produce a kind of reconstruction, which at a certain time distance reveals the “seams”, “folds”, “cuts”, “plexuses”, “gaps” that formed at once the experience of the body and experience of writing. This is how the components of literature worlds are extracted, and from them “a picture of the universe can be deduced”. Although an external position to technics is considered to be the only guarantee of the human, even if it is strange, symptomatic, seizure-like, a different understanding of the technical is possible. Without claiming that a “machine” can assemble components in the absence of the observer's (reader's) comprehension ability, it seems nevertheless possible to relate the technical to more general principles: the methods of dispersion and gathering that form the form, the principles of intervalization and binding the heterogeneous, and most importantly, the principle of generating conditions for detecting an event. Then it will be necessary to clarify the relationship between techne and literature in the broader sense of poiesis, in the process of which elements can be formed from the indivisible “compressed”.


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