Mapping dissonant objects. Religious material agencies across Italy, the Iberian Peninsula and the Holy Land

In the last decade, the relationship between materiality, religion, and religious agency has become a central concern for historians, anthropologists, museum studies scholars, and cultural heritage specialists alike. Despite the considerable fragmentation and epistemic divisions among these academic fields, concepts, and bodies of scholarship, material things have increasingly been understood as integral to the social, political, and spiritual dimensions of religion, both in the past and in the post-secular present.
This workshop project aims to address the relationships between religious and material agencies from a groundbreaking interdisciplinary perspective by situating the different epistemic polarities that structure their multiple entanglements within the paradigm of “dissonance.” The project thus seeks to redefine the concept of dissonant objects at an analytical level by uncovering and empirically mapping the relationships, tensions, and interdependencies among museums and archives; objects and writings; presence and absence; materiality and immateriality; and present and past.
Against this challenging conceptual background, individual objects, material ensembles, and dissonant collections from Italy, Spain, and the Holy Land - together with their multiple intermedial translations and associated spatialities-constitute a meaningful field of investigation for this workshop project.
For further information on the project, please visit mapdisob.hypotheses.org.