Presencing absence: The media afterlife of lost objects
The history of art, whether in antiquity or the present, is haunted by losses. The number of cultural and artistic artefacts that have not survived conflicts, environmental disasters and physiological decay is much greater than those still preserved today.
What sometimes persists, however, are a variety of media traces of these objects, presencing their identity through different forms. Not always considered art historical material – from casts to photographs, from tapestries to poetry, from virtual reality to AI – these recurrences carry analytical weight and raise important methodological and epistemological questions.
What role is played by ideological and critical stances in designing these new remediated replicas and memories? Which narratives do they support, and which do they conceal? How does the reception of these phantoms, crossing centuries, cultures and latitudes, change with reference to their public? Which are the most relevant methodological questions that emerge when engaging with these transient genealogies? Within this afterlife, which carries material, narrative, and critical traits, a new identity is forged for these items, which needs to be problematised by reflecting as well as on the – absent – presence of the mediated original.
This session welcomes contributions from transdisciplinary and transnational perspectives that address the recurrence of cultural objects, that have been lost and displaced, through alternative media forms. We look forward to the diverse perspectives contributing to our understanding of this important topic.
Session Convenors:
Camilla Balbi, Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences
Valentina Bartalesi, Archivio del Moderno, Balerna
Anna Calise, Iulm University Milan
Speakers:
Jann Matlock, SELCS (School of European Languages, Cultures, and Society), University College London (UCL)
Advertising Loss: the Afterlives of Miniature Portraits in Post-Revolutionary France, 1794-1805
This paper explores quite literally the “media afterlife of lost objects.” In the post-revolutionary decade, the French struggled to keep their hands on the portrait-objects that had become a crucial way of recalling departed, exiled, dead, and distant loved ones. My study of the Paris Petites Affiches (a widely distributed “Craig’s-List” of the 18th and 19th centuries) revealed that, in the post-revolutionary era, miniature portraits were the fourth most frequently named “lost” possession, following dogs, wallets, and watches. In analyzing the want-ads of 1794-1804, one finds that nearly four Parisians each month confronted the disappearance into the wind of their beloved’s portrait.
In the project from which this paper is drawn (including a contribution to Time, Media & Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France, edited by Iris Moon and Richard Taws, 2021), I explore the vast number of miniature portraits in major collections—the Louvre, Metropolitan Museum, Tansey, Wallace Collection, and Cognacq-Jay—that remain today unidentified and unidentifiable. At the height of the miniature-portrait era, from the 1780s through the Napoleonic Empire, as many as 90% of the miniature representations, and especially those showing women and girls, have become what I call “Nobodies.” While portrait miniatures—on lockets, snuffboxes, bonbonnières, and bracelets—were exchanged to seal alliances and express affections, the alienation of these works reminds us, paradoxically, how easily they were distanced both from their purposes of shared feeling and from their owners.
This paper takes up a specific aspect of this dispossession through a quantitative and qualitative study of the miniatures declared to be “effets perdus.” The ekphrastic traces of these objects allow us in many cases to imagine what the lost portrait resembled—and even to reconstruct details about its artist, subject, and owner. This study contributes to understanding the culture surrounding lost things that are deemed precious, as well the relation of portrait miniatures to broad anxieties about loss. Analyzing these miniature narratives in the press of 1794-1805, this paper details my quest to understand the attachments to which miniature portraits gave materiality.
Isabelle Wallace, University of Georgia
Fountains: Duchamp, Stieglitz, Caravaggio
Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is often described as the most important artwork of the twentieth century. And yet, as art historians readily admit, Fountain has been missing since the moment of its non-debut, lost, apparently, in the shuffle that followed its rejection from the exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists. In fact, for more than 100 years and for the entirety of its “public life,” Fountain has existed only in the form of its traces. The the first and most famous such trace is Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of the urinal,
which appeared in the second issue of The Blindman and served as Fountain’s first and only “exhibition.” Can this be chalked up to circumstance? And is the existence of Fountain’s photographic trace no more than a lucky break that has allowed the idea of Fountain to endure despite the object’s unexplained disappearance? As I will argue, Fountain’s absence and its endurance only in the specific form of a photograph was neither circumstantial, nor unanticipated, nor senseless, but instead a premeditated act essential to the object’s meaning. Drawing on the myth of Narcissus and the reflective fountain (fons) at its core, this paper argues that Duchamp’s Fountain is far more than a missing object; for, in addition, it is a provocation about the very phenomena of absence and loss—attributes the readymade established as the very heart of all works of art, as they gesture, like Narcissus, to something that is not and cannot be present.
Hana Buddeus, Katarína Mašterová, Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences
Absenting Copies: Josef Sudek’s Unpublished Photographic Book Project
In the history of photography, it is now widely recognized that the concept of the original is contingent on specific factors and can shift over time. Scholars have increasingly explored themes such as ubiquity (Blaschke), and dissemination (Batchen). Photographs are often viewed as “unfettered” entities (Henning), existing “always there, but not there” (Batchen). Boris Groys argues that digitalization has radically transformed the relationship between an original and a copy, suggesting to “re-territorialize a copy.” But what happens when the intended copy never materializes, and only the original vintage prints remain?
Our proposed case study stems from these questions to address a rediscovered collection of 260 photographs by Josef Sudek. These images were created for a book documenting Prague’s St. Vitus Cathedral. The project began in the early 1940s during the Nazi occupation, when patriotic imagery of historical monuments subtly served as a form of resistance. However, the shifting political climate after the war resulted in the book’s publication being canceled. Although the preserved collection of prints showcases Sudek’s aesthetics, its intended purpose—as a widely disseminated book illustrated with photomechanical reproductions—was never realized. This example shows how the absence of the copies alters the photographs’ agency and questions their status as originals.
Giorgia Ravaioli, Università degli Studi di Torino
Presencing the absent city: temporal and heritage constructs in Paolo Monti’s photographic survey of Bologna
Photography scholarship has long interrogated the medium’s complex relationship with temporality, emphasizing its ideological potential to construct allochrony through the crafting of photographic archaisms and futurisms. This engagement—often shaped by politically charged narratives—appears prominently in the history of photographic campaigns documenting monuments and sites, where conservation efforts, aimed at forestalling imminent loss, are critically tied to the discursive production of heritage, imbued with cultural and economic capital. Since the mid-19th century, large-scale surveys such as France’s Mission Héliographique and England’s National Photographic Record Association demonstrate how specific temporal orientations emerge not only from the semiotics of their images but also from their circulation and deployment as “image-objects” (Edwards 2012) in public domains.
This paper examines the interplay between documentary photography and heritage value through a case study from Italy: Paolo Monti’s 1969 photographic survey of Bologna’s historic center, commissioned by Superintendent of Monuments Andrea Emiliani. Across more than 8,000 images, Monti crafted a sanitized, quasi-metaphysical vision of the city by stripping the urban landscape of contemporary elements—such as street signs, cars, and advertisements—to make visible the (absent) presence of a bygone Bologna, untouched by modern life. This aesthetic manipulation aligned with a new urban preservation agenda, advancing a “return to origins” ethos that framed the historic center as an “integral monument” in deliberate opposition to post-war urban renewal pressures and modernist interventions.
Reading Monti’s photographic survey in this light underscores the performative dimension of what is, in essence, a “photographic event,” whose artistic and documentary significance is inseparable from a critical examination of the politicization of architectural conservation.
Kimberly Cassibry, Wellesley College
A Tale of Two Architectural Models and the Lost Roman Arch from Verona
Architectural models, through their miniature scale and three dimensions, recreate buildings as objects that can be collected, mobilized, and experienced spatially in new settings. The ancient arch at Verona, which disappeared from 1805 to 1932, offers an opportunity to consider 1) their mediation of an imperial monument’s absence and 2) their changing ideological entanglements.
Prior studies have outlined the arch’s biography: constructed in honor of the local Gavii family in the first century CE; deconstructed under French occupation in 1805; reconstructed in a riverside park in 1931-32. Although Renaissance histories of Roman architecture illustrate this arch as exemplary, my research shows that it did not feature in the canon of architectural models that became popular international collectibles during the era of the Grand Tour. Instead, it was the arch’s disappearance and reappearance that inspired two ideologically distinct models that have thus far not been considered together.
Commissioned in 1810, a wooden model materialized an antiquarian’s outrage. This is an early example of what I call “protest replication,” aiming to preserve knowledge before memory fades and reclaim heritage destroyed by outsiders. In the 1930s, a plaster model of the recomposed arch was created for Mussolini’s nationalistic exhibit about ancient Rome (Mostra Augustea della Romanità, 1937-38). The models are now displayed, respectively, in Verona’s archaeological museum and Rome’s Museum of Roman Civilization. These two replicas, along with the full-scale stone one in the riverside park, will help demonstrate the changing polemics of presencing absence.
Archishman Sarker, School of Arts and Aesthetics Jawaharlal Nehru University
Resurrecting ‘absence’: Iconoclasm of memory and the media legacy of the Bamiyan
The atrocious destruction of the two giant Buddha statues in March 2001 in the Bamiyan valley, central Afghanistan— a UNESCO designated world-heritage site, by the Taliban, gained international spotlight as it was a deliberate large-scale assault on global cultural memory. The entire Bamiyan complex, with more than nine-hundred caves, many of which were profusely decorated with mural paintings: all of which not archived in colour photography, also suffered considerable damages. Since then, the ‘Bamiyan Buddhas’ have lent itself as a trope and topic to numerous photo articles, TV shows, news broadcasts, documentaries and feature films across the world. This paper aims to present a selection of different depictions of the ‘Bamiyan Buddhas’ in media representations and reproductions— from sculptural replicas, photographic archives, news broadcasts and TV shows on international and South Asian media, to music videos like ‘Yaar-e Bamyani’ by the Afghan pop singer Aryana Sayeed, novels such as ‘A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom’ (2020), documentaries like ‘The Boy who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan’ (2004), and ‘Giant Buddhas’ (2005), and feature films such as‘Ram Setu’ (2022)— in order to scrutinise an aesthetics of ‘absence’ — which becomes an underlying factor that connects media reproductions across different geographies, cultures and time periods. This allows us to better understand how ‘public memory’ is selectively formed and sustained, depending on cultural, racial, religious and economic contexts. Such an understanding will also help inform policies on heritage reconstruction, accessibility, and socio-cultural relevance and relatability of objects and heritage.
Margherita Fontana, Università degli Studi di Milano
Beyond Simulacra: The Disorienting Aesthetics of Ito Meikyū by Boris Labbé
The paper addresses the issue of remediating absence across different times and cultures by analysing a recent artistic VR experience, Ito Meikyū, by French intermedia artist and animator Boris Labbé. Awarded with the Venice Grand Immersive Prize in 2024, the piece stimulates deep reflections on the (re)mediation of Japanese culture, at the same time challenging the “norms” of virtual reality. Ito Meikyū, which literally means “thread labyrinth”, does not aim to “teleport” the viewer into another dimension. Instead, without explicitly naming them, it brings the viewer into contact with three important topoi of Japanese visual and literary culture: the technique of fukinuki yatai, a unique form of architectural slicing typical of Japanese art that allows the viewer to see the interior of structures, and two Heian period classic texts, The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book.
The experience acts as a disorientating device, forcing participants to travel solely through their gaze, engaging in a visual act of concentration as they follow a string through analogue media. The experience touches on perhaps the most offline elements – architecture, weaving and craft – simultaneously displaying and deconstructing them. Through a close analysis of the work, accompanied with a digression into Labbé’s visual investigations in his films and installations, our discussion will explore how Ito Meikyū demonstrates that virtual reality is not only a medium for creating simulacra of “elsewhere’” but also a tool for critically engaging with heritage and culture.
With this experimental artwork, Labbé pushes the boundaries of VR language, working on some of the desires that lie at the heart of this (not so new) medium: the ability to recreate inner (emotional) spaces to enter, the possibility of generating other worlds that unfold beforeour eyes, and the freedom to move within a space that may resemble a closed net or labyrinth rather than an infinite map open to exploration.
Wendi Xiao, Institut de recherche en Musicologie (IreMus) – CNRS – Sorbonne University
Echoes of a Digital Nostalgia: Aesthetic Remnants of Lost Objects as “Virtual Media” in Vaporwave Music
As a music-visual style, vaporwave has developed into a mature online subcultural aesthetic since the 2010s. Its artistic vision aims to reimagine lost media artifacts from the 1970s and 80s by sampling and distorting sonic relics from early analog and digital technologies — such as retro cassettes, Muzak, 8-bit audios, and VHS tapes — alongside recreations of East Asian consumer culture icons during the Japanese asset price bubble (e.g., vintage anime stickers, Shōwa-era neon signs, and pixel-style cityscapes). Through this approach, vaporwave creates a soundscape that is nostalgic, ethereal, and hauntingly surreal. Rather than attempting to restore a lost world of past prosperity, vaporwave seeks to uncover the unrealized artistic potential within these “lost objects,” crafting a “hyperreal” yet critically “non-actual”virtual space. Through this process, how does virtualization reveal the hidden essence of a lost object—an expressive vitality that the “actual world” obscures, alongside its irreplaceable role in our spiritual lives？
This study, grounded in Deleuze’s theory of the “virtual” and his discussions on Bergsonian memory-time models, analyzes vaporwave music cases and my compositional experiences to explore the construction mechanisms of “virtual media” and its aesthetic tension in contemporary music. We conclude that “afterlife” does not signify an aesthetic object’s depletion or end within a stratified temporality; rather, as “virtual media,” these objects surpass the spatiotemporal constraints of processes of actualization, engaging dynamically with our inner experiences and nostalgia complex. They emerge as autopoietic, self-articulating, and ontologically generative entities —where “virtual absence” paradoxically achieves intensive presence.