Pictorial narrative and visual staging of antiziganist motifs (1848-1930)

Summary
 

Subproject 1 uses art and visual-scientific methods to analyze the significance of modern antiziganist pictorial narratives. It examines the continuity and transformation of long-established stereotypical motifs or subjects as well as new pictorial inventions that emerge in the context of social and cultural change. The focus is also on transmedial translation processes, i.e. cross-genre transfers that reveal an interaction between motifs, reproduction techniques and social upheavals. Painting, printmaking and commercial art as well as photography from Western and Eastern Europe will be analyzed.

Research questions

1. How can an openly accessible research environment be set up that does not affirm stereotypes and reproduce critical sources?
2. How can affected communities be included in the development of the research environment?
3. Center versus periphery: How do the centers look at the peripheries, and how are the peripheries mapped?  Conversely, how does the periphery look at the centers?
4. The modes of representation: type and person, or prop and object: To what extent can examples be found that reveal agency and self-determined representation?

Cooperations

In general, the connection between visual staging (SP 1, SP 3) and textual description of others and self (SP 2, SP 4, SP 5, SP 6) must be worked out. There are clear intersections between pictorial narrative and scenography (SP3) and between iconographic tradition and popular spectacle (SP 2). For the reception, transformation and popularization of antiziganist figures, e.g. as advertising media at international world exhibitions or as protagonists in early films, SP 1 will work closely with SP 2 and SP 3.

In addition, there is close cooperation with SP 6 and SP 4 to clarify the influence of anthropological-evolutionary ‘racial ideology’ on Expressionist artists against a colonial horizon. The modes of representation, type and person are also analyzed with regard to the new narratives of personal careers and intercultural contacts, so that there are great synergy effects between SP 1 and SP 5 with regard to agency and (political) self-representation.

SP 1 contributes to the co-operation of all subprojects by setting up the virtual research environment.

Conferences

Workshop: ‘Research data and knowledge systems’ in Marburg

Conference 3: ‘Transmedial image narrative and stereotype’ in Flensburg, together with SP 3

Research areas

Core research area: Germany and France

Additional areas: Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, England, Spain

Aims

1. Basic research: Antiziganist motifs from high and popular culture will be indexed, cataloged and evaluated in their structural entirety for the first time in order to ensure coherent individual art-historical analyses on this basis.

2. Provision of a digital research environment (multimodal database) that enables the mapping and evaluation of antiziganist images from paintings to pictorial advertising and ensures a systematic link with the materials and discourses of the neighboring disciplines involved (cooperation with SP 2-6).

3. Redefining the constitutive significance of the ambivalence of Zigeuner figures and narratives for modernism. Within art history, the interrelationships between the individual pictorial genres will be demonstrated. Not only will the transmission and translation of pictorial narratives in general be examined, but also specific aspects such as nostalgia versus belief in progress, center versus periphery and modes of representation: type versus person. 

Selected results

- Monograph on ‘Counter Archive. Research data management with stigmatizing multimodal data’

- Dissertation: ‘In the picture. Antiziganism and visuality’

- Virtual research environment for all sub-projects