Prehistories of the Installation seeks to explore case studies in a material culture of immersion and theatricality. It does so by focusing on interiors and scenographic arrangements, an area of work that has suffered much under a traditional focus on the autonomous media of painting, sculpture and architecture. Installation spaces, sometimes interwoven with a cultural practice of ceremonies, iterations, games and performances, were often on the peripheries and thresholds of official spheres dedicated to the contemplation of art objects, such as the exhibition, the urban monument and the museum. The project pores over and contextualizes phenomena that existed before the apogee of installations in curated exhibition spaces, and for which no stable language of “installation criticism” was at hand. A research team will ask questions about the meaning of mixed-media art, theatricality and immersive forms in installations, interpreting the key role played by them in public and private cultural life, and working to obtain three important results: (1) a critical examination of mechanisms of spatiality, movement and presence in installations, with particular regard to a series of cases from France, Spain and Italy from the Ancien Régime to the interbellum, (2) an account of immersive and theatrical recourses that articulated eighteenth-century Iberian ecclesiastical interiors, and (3) a novel focus on illumination technology, interior design and varied “theatrical” solutions for domestic settings around 1900, from “Wagnerian” total spaces to artists’ studios. 

Image: Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, Scenograpahy for Tristan und Isolde, La Scala, Milano, 1900.

Workshops: Mirades ciutadanes. Relacions entre experiència urbana, espectadoria, lluita de classes i visualitat en el món hispànic (1870–1930). December 16-17, 2021