Rationale

Viewed from a transregional perspective, the relationship between an object and its discursive embedding is influenced not only by history and institutions but also by culture, society, and the region itself. These interconnections call for a situated research and an interdisciplinary approach so that objects are considered in light of their complex contexts: environment, class, gender, race, economy, religion, academia, museum, etc. The term “objects” includes all expressions of the visual arts; however, viewed through the lens of their objecthood, objects are a stage for exploring transcultural references, negotiations, and impositions, raising important questions for a transregional art history. As in the case of pre-Columbian objects, most artifacts transgress modern conceptual categories of art, showing that received notions of art can be performed, imposed or rejected; in fact, their nomination points to the epistemic violence inherent to every history and instance of instrumentalization (musealization, iconization, scientification, narration etc.). These interwoven layers of possible approaches cannot be studied solely from a regional perspective. They are best analyzed by means of relational studies, using a dialogical approach focusing more on interconnectedness than on comparison. The theme, “Contesting Objects: Sites, Narratives, Contexts”, therefore, promotes a transregional exploration of the material and intellectual foundations of art historical research: How do different notions of art history bring different objects to light? How does art history identify itself through specific objects? How do certain objects challenge art historical discourses, and when do their presence demand interdisciplinary approaches? And most importantly: how can a transregional perspective with an emphasis on Latin America expand the scope of understanding the links between the object and its art histories in different social, cultural and ideological constellations?

Latin America from a Transregional Perspective

The Academy’s prism and location is Latin America from a transregional perspective. Working outward from there, artistic processes of exchange within the American continent will be analyzed from a transregional and transcultural perspective against the backdrop of the concurrent international entanglements and connections. Instead of merely describing and comparing artistic tendencies, the interconnectedness and the multitude of cultural and creative processes and strategies of appropriation, including contradictory modalities of translation and analogy or conflicting, nonlinear transfers, will be discussed. Such a transregional perspective can only be viable if research conducted in or on Latin American countries is brought into dialogue with discussions taking place elsewhere, within an international context, and vice-versa. This relational, dialogical approach forms the foundation of the Academy’s methodological framework. In that sense, a historiographical perspective is necessary to gauge the extent to which there can be a common conceptual and epistemological basis. This applies not least to terms such as “translocal,” “transregional,” and “transcultural.”

Contesting objects

Premised on the notion that the question of images also emblematizes important shifts vis-à-vis an art history oriented toward normative concepts of artwork, we ask what the question of objects brings to art history, both in terms of material and intellectual foundations, and especially in view of tangible experiences: How does art history imagine its object and how do objects create different art histories – open or not to transdisciplinary dialogues depending on the diversity of material culture? The historical scope of the Academy’s investigation is deliberately not limited to any one era and seeks to avoid all contemporary historical caesurae. Project descriptions should address one of the following thematic fields:

Sites: Objects are situated items, in that they also refer to diverse notions of space, place or site. Their scale invites us to consider artistic creations outside of institutional spaces like museums and galleries. For instance, how can we consider the aesthetic experience of urban contexts, both verbally and visually? How can we grasp the fragility of sites? And how do notions of inside and outside vary depending on transregional perspectives?

Contexts: While reproductions and presentation of artworks may have accustomed viewers to seeing them depicted without frames or a space surrounding them, the question of objects inevitably brings a complex ecosystem into play – an environment that is more permeable to societies and cultures surrounding them, and thus different from that of the white cube, for example. The focus is, thus, on the social and historical components that are indissolubly part of every object’s biography, both with regard to the context of their production and their reception. How do we reflect on these lived situations?

Display: Objects can be mobile. While some objects disappear or endure transregional encounters, others are rendered all the more visible. This dynamic engenders narratives that are conditioned both at the regional and transregional levels. How do we engage with these exposed objects? How do we react to the presence and absence of objects and their histories? How do we name them?

Agency: Objects are more than mere things: they are linked to narratives and have an agency on their own. Therefore, they may offer a critical counterpoint to abstract concepts and narrations, or be tamed by them; they may seem suitable for both critical and theoretical inquiries as well as positivist approaches. How can we discuss these different concepts of agency and their historiographic contexts?

Sensual approach: Objects appeal to a variety of senses, oftentimes challenging academic research, as they engage the researcher’s bodily experiences. This provides an intriguing counterpoint to the colonial obsession with visibility, for instance, in the context of modernism. How does art history engage with these different domains of the sensible?

History: Each object participates in an intertwining of multiple histories. They allow different approaches stemming from such disciplines as anthropology, political science, history of science, or art history to imagine different takes on how history and objects interact. How can we think of objects in relation to transregional histories without assuming a mere illustration or reflection but without also overestimating the agency of objects in the face of political forces?

Identity: Objects may also be linked to very different conceptions of identity if we think of Amerindian perspectivism, micropolitics or disembodied philosophies. How does art historical research navigate this multitude of concepts? Is it even important or desirable to have a common epistemological basis for how we comprehend objects?

The 5th Transregional Academy on Art and Culture in Latin America will be held as part of the DFK Paris’s research area, “Traveling Art Histories: Transregional Networks in Exchange between Latin America and Europe”. The four preceding Academies addressed the themes of “Modernism: Concepts, Contexts, and Circulation” (São Paulo, 2016), “Mobility: Objects, Materials, Concepts, and Actors in Art” (Buenos Aires, 2017), “Spaces of Art: Concepts and Impacts in and outside Latin America” (Mexico City, 2019), and “Plural temporalities. Theories and Practices of Time” (Bogotá, 2022).

Steering Committee

Luisa Elena Alcalá (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, UAM), Lena Bader (DFK Paris), Peter Geimer (DFK Paris), Anne Lafont (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, EHESS, Paris), Sharon Lerner (MALI Lima), Natalia Majluf (Independent Art Historian), Tristan Weddigen (BHMPI, Rome)

The funereal landscape took by the lens of Daniel Giannoni two decades ago [Figure 1], shows a good glance of the bodily experience any visitor c an have by walking amid the General Cemetery of Lima (known as of 1923 as Presbyter Matías Maestro Cemetery): it is a labyrinth of agglomerated mausolea and colu mbarium walls. Old marble statues can be discovered hidden behind a larger, newer construction erected there as if it had conquered the visual space for itself. Although the aspect of the cemetery was not always so disordered , the cemeterial space was in f act always contested. The following case can illustrate this.

The one year old infant, Carmen Florencia Luisa Francisca Loli, died on March 30, 1870, 62 years after the inauguration of the extra moenia General Cemetery of Lima. Since 1851 Limenean upper class found in the cemeterial empty plots a way to express their own social pretensions through the erection of sculptural tombs commonly known as mausolea. The mortuary city started to be rapidly populated by marble allegories and angels, as well as funerary architecture . Even though the spaces with best visibility were being progressively occupied, by 1870 the column of Carmen Loli could find a more than proper location in the left garden at the outer patio of the General Cemetery of Lima Being able to be appreciated from the outside as seen in a contemporary photograph [Figure 2], it managed to occupy one of the most privileged places. Nevertheless, nowadays is the Buenaventura Seoane’s funerary monument the one which can be found on that location, whilst the one of Carmen Loli has been moved to the front garden, with a symmetrical arrangement between them, almost as if in an antithetical position. Although Buenaventura Seoane died before the Carmen Loli, on March 15, 1870, his tomb does only appear there in 1871, 1871,1 replacing that of the infant.

At the heart of this case lies a twofold criterion of action: firstly, that the aspect of the cemetery was malleable and susceptible to being set in motion by means of the objects existing in it as a consequence of the fact that, secondly, the placement of a sculptural tomb was an act of social distinction. Even if the reason behind changing the above mentioned tombs’ location is not clear, this movement had to first be negotiated between the cemetery’s personnel who would rule on the availability of proper plots for each sculptural tomb, and the relatives requiring and buying the above mentioned spots that were among the most visible and desired. Within legal capabilities, all objects inside the cemetery were contingent.

In the light of this procedure, the physical emptiness of the future burial plot was seen as a stage to display a social projection of the living world. Among the cemeterial terrain’s affordanc es a concept coined by James Gibson for possible actions that the environment’s properties offer the humans to carry out 2 their visual capabilities, i.e. their commercial offer for placing an object to be publicly seen, are most longed for; but they are not exhausted there: they invite relatives, friends, or visitors to take care of the place once it is inhabit ed by the dead . The terrain’s value wa s based on the relational aspect that could be built on it. Therefore, the growth of the mortuary population across time forced the cemetery’s constant renovation, constructing more columbarium wall sniches and preparation of the field for the erection of new fun erary monuments.

In terms of periodification, the General Cemetery of Lima was built in 1808, and, as it was mentioned above, it was only in 1851 the first three mausolea were erected. The next temporary milestone occurred in 1870 with the first land expansion was conducted.
A hiatus occurred in the old section, then, as burials took place only in the new space for about a decade, with very few exceptions. Therefore, the temporal limit proposed for this investigation lies in 1870. In the years after, and back to Daniel Giannoni’s photograph [Figure 1], it shows part of the results of a densifying growth that surpassed the administration of the cemet ery It probably started to develop during the decade s of 1880 and 1890, when the privileged plots with the best visibility begun to be scarce.

This investigation posits a chronology of the mausolea, while paying special attention to the internal social dynamics above discussed. The variable of time is required and necessary because, otherwise, all mausolea, being then imported mostly from Italy, would have remained no more than curious and peripheral copies of a more original and organic European artistic impulse. The sudden appearance of these funerary works in Limenean ground was only possible thanks to the Peruvian liberal market reforms implemented since 1845-1846 in the context of the guano age state’s fiscal bonanza. Overall, each of these pieces of sumptuous merchandise was used as an opportunity to
stage mourning on a larger scale by means of utilizing and reinventing the cemeterial architecture aspect. An emphasis on the beautification of the General Cemetery of Lima was rapidly developed in the literary sources at the expense of the funereal meditation that originally accompanied the foundation of this mortuary establishment: “The funereal appearance […] has almost vanished”, can be read in a 1872 newspaper. Materially and discursively, the space was transformed into a comfortable one for bourgeois socialization.

Daniel Vifian López holds a master’s degree in Latin American Studies (Major) and Art History (Minor) from the University of Bern , Switzerland (2017-2020) and a bachelors degree in Art History from the National Major University of San Marcos, Lima Peru (2007-2011). His research focused on 19th century public art, specifically sculptural monuments, both state funded and privately commissioned.
He co edited the open access academic journal Kaypunku, Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinarios de Arte y Cultura specializing in art history, during the years of 2015 and 2016. Currently he serves as research assistant for the interregional project “Entre el adorno y el decoro en las iglesias de Buenos Aires, Lima y Santiago, siglos XVIII y XIX”, conducted by the Adolfo Ibañez University, Santiago de Chile.

Celia Rodríguez Tejuca is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art department at Johns Hopkins University, where she studies early modern Latin American art and visual culture. She is currently the 2023-2025 Andrew W. Mellon predoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art). She received her MA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2019 and her BA (summa cum laude) from the University of Havana (Cuba) in 2015. Before arriving in the United States, Rodríguez Tejuca lectured on Latin American Art and Art of the Twentieth Century at the University of Havana. In Cuba, she also served as chief editor of the journal Cine Cubano, and film curator at the independent film festival Muestra Joven of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry. Her research has been supported by the John Carter Brown Library, The Huntington Library, the Decorative Arts Trust, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome.

Juliana Robles de la Pava holds a PhD in History and Theory of the Arts from the
Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Her doctoral
thesis was focused on developing a material ontology of photography, taking as a
conceptual framework the interdisciplinary studies on artistic materiality and
contemporary theories of the New Materialisms, the Ontological Turn and Critical
Posthumanism. She also holds a master’s degree in Curatorial Studies in Visual Arts from
the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) and a bachelor’s degree and
professor of Arts from the University of Buenos Aires. She teaches at the same university
in the Department of Arts in the courses: Studies on Photography and Historiography of
the Visual Arts. She has been a fellow of the National Council of Scientific and Technical
Research of Argentina and obtained a doctoral fellowship from the Bunge y Born
Foundation and the Espigas Foundation at the Getty Research Institute. She works as a
researcher at the Centro de Investigación en Arte, Materia y Cultura IIAC-UNTREF.
Juliana was awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Centre
for Advanced Study, inherit. Heritage in transformation at the Humboldt – Universität zu
Berlin for 2024. She is author of several articles in academic journals and co-editor of the
book The depth of surfaces. Studies on photographic materiality (2022).

Elena Nustrini, MA, is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Arts,
Berlin. In her doctoral dissertation (as part of the DFG-funded project “A Critical
Art History of International and World Expositions: Decentering Fashion and
Modernities”, supervised by Miriam Oesterreich), she investigates the transregional
artistic exchange in the visual arts that took place at national and international
exhibitions both in Europe and Latin America in the second half of the
19th century. In particular, her research focuses on the genre of Realism in
Argentina and Italy in a comparative approach and specifically on the role of
landscape representations in the construction of political and artistic identities in
the context of both the consolidation of ‘national’ states and the cosmopolitan
“exhibitionary complex” (Bennet).
Nustrini graduated in 2022 with a master’s thesis on botanical drawings and still life
paintings by the Dutch artist Albert Eckhout. There, she examined the role of art in
the process of appropriation of the colony of Dutch Brazil (1637-1644) focusing
on the assimilation of colonial botanical drawings into the art of Dutch still life
paintings, as well as on how botanical epistemological observations on the so-called
„New World” were used by the colonizers to legitimize European superiority by
means of a ‚naturalization’ of economic exploitation processes.
Nustrini studied art history, Italian literature, philology, and linguistics at the Free
University of Berlin, the Università degli Studi di Milano Statale (Italy), and Trinity
College Dublin (Ireland) and was awarded a scholarship from the
Deutschlandstipendium and the German National Academic Foundation.
Her academic research fields are the art history of collections and exhibitions in the
19th and 20th centuries, Argentinian art history, 19th-century art in a global context,
art and colonial knowledge and practices, as well as botanical prints and drawings
of the 17th to 19th century.

Born in Belém, Brazil, 1997; lives in São Paulo, Brazil. Researcher on History of Art and Architecture. PhD in Art History from the University of Lisbon, Portugal, with academic exchange at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. He obtained his BA in Architecture and Urbanism by the University of Pará, Brazil, in the city he was born and grew up in, Belém, in the Western region of Brazilian Amazon. Currently, Nunes is a postdoctoral researcher in History of Art and Architecture at University of São Paulo, Brazil, and in the project “The Amazon Basin as Connecting Borderland: Examining Cultural and Artistic Fluidities in the Early Modern Period” funded by the Getty Foundation, developed in a partnership between Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Equador; and Universidade de los Andes, Colombia. He is a guest lecturer at Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil, in courses about Brazilian baroque and contemporary art from the Brazilian Amazon.

Focusing on the impact that the experiences of mobile legal actors and other mediators from New Spain’s colonial administration and bureaucracy had on the changing intellectual ecologies in early modern continental Europe, its legal practices, and visual cultures, Linda’s paper examines selected artistic and notarial drawings and pictographs present in legal and juridical documents from Spain’s Italian territories and its colonial settlements in the Americas. Acknowledging the commonalities and differences in historical conditions and contexts between these jurisdictions, she explores the micropolitics of these visuals and their roles in shaping legal decision-making processes in courtroom settings. When put into dialogue, what valuable insights do these visuals offer into the sensory realm of the plural legal worlds at the edges of the Empire? Which reciprocal dynamics can be observed, and what do they reveal about the status and contestation of pictorial images and writing within these legal spheres around 1600?

Linda is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She specializes in the art, architecture, visual, and material cultures of early modern Europe and the Atlantic world, with a special focus on exchanges between Italy, the Spanish Empire, and the Americas. Sitting at the intersection of art history, legal history, and the history of empires, her work engages with visual legal cultures, the role of paintings and drawings within colonial and institutional mediascapes, and the visual worlds, material techniques, and visual literacies of notaries and legal practitioners. She is currently a doctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, where she is affiliated with the research group “Italy in a Global Context.” Her research has previously been supported by the Newberry Library, Villa I Tatti, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation’s History of Art Institutional Fellowship at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. A former fellow of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation’s transatlantic ERP Scholarship Program, complementing her academic training, Linda has worked for various collections of European Renaissance and Baroque art, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée du Louvre, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresden, and the Harvard Art Museums. She holds a B.A. in art history from Tuebingen and M.A.s in the same field from Utrecht and Harvard Universities.

Churches, convents, monasteries, and chapels in Cusco city and the region were enriched with Jesuit-origin artworks. The Regional Archive of Cusco preserves documents detailing these transfers, as do the recipient parishes’ inventories kept in the Archbishop’s Archive of Cusco, noting Jesuit origins of paintings, sculptures, silverware, and various objects. As an example of this forced displacement, we can highlight works from the parishes of Chinchaypujio, Rondocan, San Pablo, and even distant places like the Lima Sagrario. Other scholars have treated this topic lightly, possibly interested in the spread of the works. However, in this presentation, I will focus on the transgression of these paintings in the indigenous context far from Cusco and the Jesuits.

The Marangani church provides a particular example to study this forced dispersion of artworks, as having a larger number of Jesuit-origin canvases allows us to reconstruct their intended functionality and observe their documented displacement. Utilizing sources such as the Junta de Temporalidades, parish books of Maranganí, and notarial protocols, along with the iconographic analysis of these nine paintings, I will demonstrate evidence of this forced movement as a phenomenon reminding us that the church has always been a space in contention.

Photographer and Historian by vocation with more than 10 years of experience documenting Peruvian heritage. I have won numerous photography awards and have contributed to distinguished academic publications such as “El Púlpito de San Blas” by Manuel Gibaja, “Tesoros de la Catedral del Cusco” “Pintura en Hispanoamérica 1550-1820” from El Viso editions, “Tesoros del Templo de Nuestra Señora de Belén” as well as publications from Banco BCP’s editorial fund. My commitment to academia is reflected in my participation in two artcongresses where I have presented groundbreaking investigations.

Through an in-depth analysis of the construction, decoration, and use of these two colonial convents, I argue that the convent was an inhabitable object designed by the nuns for ritual practice. Accordingly, the convents were not isolated islands, but rather their construction and use transformed each into the center of an intricate web of local and global connections, as the nuns navigated their participation in the Spiritual Economy.

Katherine Mills is a PhD candidate in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She is currently writing her dissertation on Cusqueñan convents in Seville, Spain with the Harvard Doctoral Finishing Grant. The Thoma Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship and the Porter Travel Award provided the financial support for her doctoral research.  In 2014, she received a master’s degree in the “Advanced Studies, the History of the Spanish Monarchy, 16^th-18^th c.” from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her master’s thesis received the highest honors and has since been published in an article with her adviser María José del Río Barredo.  A native of California, Mills graduated in History of Art and Architecture from Harvard College in 2011 with high honors. In addition to her academic work, Mills co-hosts a podcast with José Araneda Riquelme, titled “Las cosas tienen vida” to bring objects, their entangled histories, and the historians who study them to a broad public.

The study of ecclesiastical material culture challenges essentialist notions of religious artifacts and exhibits the diversity of historical actors and complexities of transcultural processes. An object’s biography and its social agency can be analyzed through its spatial and material context, as well as through the narratives registered on documentary pieces, which often prove the contesting quality of these artifacts. The surviving material culture of several chapels enables an intertwined ethnohistorical analysis of religious practice and aesthetics. Ecclesiastical artifacts, in the Andes, may seem enclosed in the catholic sphere of ritual and sacredness, but their biography often exhibits tensions and negotiations proper of their transcultural context. A special focus on certain types of artifacts – devotional images of saints and ritual vessels (such as monstrances, holy chalices, keros and aquillas) – will allow to systematize results, observing their agency in the creation of new religious forms. The bodies of Virgins and Saints, formed often by transregional materials, serve as vessels for the expression of local religious beliefs and the development of heterodox rituals. Vessels for the holy mass rituals are also conceived as bodies that dialogue with other significant ritual objects proper of Andean cultures, serving as artifacts which express power struggles, social structures and material agencies.

Camila Mardones Bravo is a Chilean historian with an interdisciplinary background. She studied Hispanoamerican Literature and Art History at Universidad de Chile and recently defended her doctoral thesis in Medieval and Early Modern History at Universität Hamburg. She has been devoted to the study of art, religion and transcultural phenomena in the Viceroyalty of Peru for over a decade and dedicated her dissertation to the research of Andean parishes through ecclesiastical material culture, local economies and indigenous adaptations and appropriations of Catholicism. Camila is creator of the project Letras de antaño, a series of workshops for a wider dissemination of viceregal literature. She collaborates currently in the project “Espacios sacros entre la recursividad y la heterodoxia: análisis comparativo de las estrategias pastorales y visuales en los templos del sur andino colonial”, directed by Dr. Agustina Rodríguez Romero, Universidad Tres de Febrero (Argentina) and was recently awarded a John Carter Brown Library Short-Term Fellowship to be held during 2024. Camila lives in Hamburg with her family and forms part of the Andean folklore dance group Kantuta Hamburg.

Daen Palma Huse is a researcher and curator. He is currently conducting doctoral research at University College London, funded through the AHRC by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, and most recently supported by a Thoma Foundation Art of the Spanish Americas Travel Award. He has previously received a travel scholarship of the ARTES Iberian & Latin American Visual Culture Group and CEEH Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica. Daen completed his MA in Art History at UCL and holds an MA in Art & Politics from Goldsmiths. He is Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and is the recipient of the International Relations Prize 2011 for best BA dissertation within the department of Political Science at The University of Birmingham. Daen is founder and editor of the arts publication The Protagonist and has collaborated with The National Portrait Gallery, The Wallace Collection, Leighton House Museum, Leica Gallery West Hollywood and the Embassy of Mexico in the United Kingdom.

The primary purpose of these copies, purchased during pilgrimage, was to traverse distances and render the same image accessible in remote locations. Consequently, their connection with the miraculous statue in Trapani was not only conveyed through visual similarity but also through the inclusion of the city’s coat of arms or inscriptions. Nevertheless, certain copies underwent transformations, taking on new identities, origin narratives, and journeys. For instance, the alabaster replica housed in the Colegio de Santo Tomás de Villanueva in Zaragoza is revered under the title of Nuestra Señora del Rescate. This veneration is rooted in the belief that it was miraculously ‘rescued’ from the hands of a Muslim in Algiers by a Trinitarian monk. Under this new identity, the Madonna reached Peru and Bolivia, where several oil paintings attest to her veneration. Drawing upon the various iterations of the Madonna di Trapani, this paper explores how copies of miraculous images gained agency and conveyed power as they journeyed from their place of manufacture to distant sites. It places particular emphasis on the role of resemblance between the original and the replica in facilitating this process. By examining the diverse contexts these copies entered after departing from Sicily, this study highlights their crucial role in forming religious, political, and economic connections across the vast expanse of the Spanish Empire.

Nora Guggenbühler is a PhD student in art history at the University of Zurich. In March 2020, she was awarded a four-year research grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) for her dissertation project, titled Traveling Mary: Multiplication and Dissemination of Miraculous Images of Mary in the Hispanic World. Her research centers on the circulation of copies of miraculous images of the Virgin Mary within the Spanish Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, emphasizing their crucial role in expanding and consolidating networks of Marian cult sites across the early modern Catholic world. From 2021 to 2022, Nora was a visiting scholar at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Previously, she spent two years as a Predoctoral Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome and three months as a resident at the Istituto Svizzero in Palermo in the fall 2020. Nora received her MA in art history and German language and literature from the University of Zurich in 2018. Her master’s thesis explored the artistic and liturgical display of early Christian body relics from Rome in the context of counter-reformation Switzerland.

Gabriela Germana Roquez is an independent Peruvian scholar. She received her bachelor’s degree in art history from Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru, and her doctoral degree In History and Criticism of Art from Florida State University. She specializes in modern and contemporary Andean art with emphasis on Indigenous and rural aesthetics and their critical relationship with the global art context. Her research interests cover decolonial theories, visual sovereignty, feminist theories and gender studies, critical studies of race and ethnicity, and theories of circulation and regimes of value. From 2019-2021, she was Visiting Assistant Professor in Contemporary Art History at the University of South Florida. She has published in the journals Arts, Athanor, The Journal of Curatorial Studies, Illapa Mana Tukukuq, Artesanías de América, Anales del Museo de América, and in edited volumes and exhibition catalogs. Germana has also worked as researcher and curator in different museums in Lima and has developed several independent curatorial projects in Peru and the United States. Currently, she is a member of the Museo de Arte de Lima’s Academic Committee, and a research member of the project “Linking the sacred: spiritual currents in Latin American and Caribbean art of the 20th century, 1920-1970” of the Cisneros Institute of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is also lecturer at the M.A. program in Museology and Cultural Management at Ricardo Palma University and is co-editing, with Lesley Wolff, the special issue of Arts “Rethinking Contemporary Latin American art.”

Johannes Gebhardt is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Art History at the University of Leipzig, where he received his PhD in 2018. In 2022/2023 he was Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies /Museo Nacional del Prado Joint Fellow (Postdoc) in Florence and Madrid. His research focuses on early modern art from a transcultural perspective, with a particular emphasis on cult images, art theory, materiality and, most recently, on blood. Johannes is the author of the book, Apparitio Sacri–Occultatio Operis. Zeigen und Verbergen von Kultbildern in Italien und Spanien (1600–1700): the first systematic investigation of moveable altarpieces, highly popular early modern devices for the staging of cult images. He has received fellowships from the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Düsseldorf. Johannes studied Art History at the Universities of Leipzig, Passau, and Toledo.

My book project, titled Ancha Ñaupa Pacha (The Most Ancient Time/World) studies the relationship between Andean Pre-Columbian built landscapes and the development of the global archaeological imagination between the 16th and 19th centuries. I explore how pre-Columbian material culture became part of the Early Modern global histories of antiquity, connected to the Biblical and Classical traditions. I argue that this process was parallel to the invention of the overarching archaeological concept of the ‘Ancient Americas.’ Thus, I also study the long-duration of a series of archaeological-antiquarian ideas. To do so, I analyze historical and archaeological arts and literatures as creative and artistic practices that invented and developed long-duration myths, tropes, and concepts about the pre-Columbian past.

Juan Carlos G Mantilla is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at California State University Fresno. He works across literary and art history with a focus on precolumbian and early modern material culture and nature. His research has received the support of the SSRC, Freie Universitat Berlin, Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin, the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Bard Graduate Center and the JCB Library. His recent work has been published in Vistas, Verso, Telar, Relating Continets, and National Epics.