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The "Making Things Speak" workshop investigated objects and their agency — how they are transformed (or not) by their uses and contexts and how they impact human lives. The past twenty-five years have seen a proliferation of writings tracing social practices of exchange and consumption through the objects of material culture. This has added to an already existing body of literature in museology and art history focusing on the objects themselves, their production, and their exhibition.

Following objects across the boundaries of Europe and the Middle East, the workshop brought together perspectives from museology, art and architectural history, and social history. By combining object-based and social-based approaches, the aim of this workshop was not only to explore the tension between objects as exhibited and as everyday pieces, but also to discuss how the line separating the two is constituted, crossed, and conceived of.

Schedule: 

Thursday, June 23
Keynote Lecture
7 pm 
Ernst J. Grube (Professor Emeritus, Università degli Studi, Venezia), From the Fatimid Treasuries of Cairo: A Thousand-Year-Old Rock Crystal Ewer from the Edmund de Unger Collection

Friday, June 24
Biographies of Things
10 am — 10.30 am 
Welcome by Stefan Weber and Toufoul Abou-Hodeib

10.30 am — 11 am 
Gerhard Wolf (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz), Talking Boxes and Singing Vessels: Towards a Poetics of Receptacles

11 am — 11.30 am
Gisela Helmecke (Museum für Islamische Kunst), Some Remarks about a Biography of Objects in Museums

11.30 am — 12:00 Avinoam Shalem (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), For Your Eyes Only: The Objective Condition

12.15 — 1.15 pm
Discussion
Moderator: Birgit Meyer (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam / Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin 2010/11)

Consuming Things
2.45 pm — 3.15 pm
Toufoul Abou-Hodeib (Fellow of EUME 2010/11), A Tale of a Phonograph: Foreign Objects in a Late Ottoman City

3.15 pm — 3.45 pm 
Hester Dibbits (Meertens Institute (KNAW) / Netherlands Open Air Museum), Exotic Commodities in a Dutch Fishing Village, 1650–1800

3.45 pm — 4.15 pm 
Amanda Phillips (Max Planck Fellow, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz / Museum für Islamische Kunst), Ottoman Goods in Ottoman Houses: Theme and Variation

4.30 — 5.30
Discussion
Chair: Tamer el-Leithy (New York University / Fellow of EUME 2010/11)

Saturday, June 25
Museums and Collecting

10.30 am — 11 am 
Stefan Weber (Museum für Islamische Kunst / Member of EUME), The Biography of Things — Things of Biographies: The Trajectories of Objects in Time, Space, and Society

11 am — 11.30 am 
Eva Troelenberg (Max Planck Fellow, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz / Museum für Islamische Kunst), Museum Narratives and the Eloquence of the Aesthetic: The Case of the Mshatta Façade

11.30 am — 12.00
Nabila Oulebsir (Université de Poitiers, CRIHAM / CRIA-EHESS), Museums and Collections in European and Non-European Contexts: Transcultural Transfers in the Mediterranean

12.15 — 1.15 pm 
Discussion
Chair: Fadi Bardawil (Fellow of EUME 2010/11)

Architectural Things and Things in Architecture
2.45 pm — 3.15 pm
Margaret Graves (University of Edinburgh), Model and Microcosm: Architecture and the Miniature

3.15 pm — 3.45 pm 
Christian Sassmannshausen (Freie Universität Berlin), Les mauvais sujets de Tripolis: Social Things and the Display of Conflicting Identities

3.45 pm — 4.15 pm
Hannah Baader (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz), The Votive Object: Making Things Speak and Act

4.30 pm — 5.30 pm 
Final Discussion
Chair: Manan Ahmed (Freie Universität Berlin)