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Co-organised Workshops

13 November 2025 | 10:00 am – 6:00 pm | LG 2C-D Room 229 BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg

Railway Representations in Imperial-Colonial Contexts
Decoding Visual Epistemologies in the Mediterranean and Beyond

Shraddha Bhatawadekar (HHU) | Turgut Saner (BTU) | Eva-Maria Troelenberg (HHU)

A Joint Workshop organised by ERC-Research Group MEDMACH, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and Institute for Building History and Art History, Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg (BTU).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Concept Note and Detailed Programme of the Workshop

 

27-28 May 2025, Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence

Red Corridor. A Mediterraneo Nero / Black Mediterranean Workshop

This gathering was the fourth workshop forming part of Black Mediterranean/Mediterraneo Nero, a joint project between Professor Avinoam Shalem of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and Professor Alina Payne of I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, in collaboration with Professor Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Professor of Transcultural Studies/Art History at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and her ERC-sponsored project Machinery Rooms of the Mediterranean 1800–present. Images and Visual Archives of Movement and Acceleration. The event was organized with the assistance of Lori De Lucia (I Tatti).

The Black Mediterranean project is generously supported by the Getty Foundation through its Connecting Art Histories initiative.

Link to the program.

 

7 March 2025, Columbia University New York
Workshop organized by Avinoam Shalem and Eva-Maria Troelenberg

Aestheticizing Petroleum. An exploratory Workshop 

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20-21 June 2024, Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg
Workshop organized by Martin Knoll, Roland Wenzlhuemer and Eva-Maria Troelenberg.

Mountains dis:connect 

20-21 June, Mountains dis:connect - global dis:connect

From the perspective of art and cultural history, mountains have not only been an important subject of visual practices, from landscape painting to (travel) photography, they have also been understood as sites that can be highly charged with national, cultural and religious symbolism. Inspired by these neighbouring fields, global history is currently discovering mountains as sites where global entanglements manifest themselves and emphasise how deeply embedded local and regional processes are in global webs of connections and (potentially conflicting) interests.

For long, high altitudes have not played a particularly prominent role in the study of global history. The field’s focus rested firmly on sites and structures whose role in global connectivity was instantly recognisable. Mountains and mountainous regions were often considered obstacles that had to be negotiated, crossed or circumvented, as natural borders, as impassable territory, as hide-outs and retreats, as watersheds and rain shadows. In short, mountains and high altitudes were long regarded as disruptive elements in an otherwise globalising world.

This workshop seeks to integrate the connective and the disruptive perspectives on the role of mountains in globalisation. With its innovative focus on dis:connection, it identifies mountains as sites where connecting and disconnecting processes intersect, and where they create a powerful tension with regards to regional changes.

Conference report – Argyrios Sakorafas: https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-151487

Programme_Mountains-disconnect.pdf (globaldisconnect.org)

While not part of the research agenda of MEDMACH, this workshop, co-organized by MEDMACH PI Eva-Maria Troelenberg, looked into questions closely related to the main queries of our project, such as the image practices and policies that go along with constellations of connectivity and disconnectivity within and across a geo-historical reference frame. The MEDMACH team followed the workshop as part of a larger research trip that lead along one of the main Alpine railway crossings towards the port of Trieste.

 

12-18 May 2024, Columbia Global Center Nairobi / Mombasa

Workshop organized by Avinoam Shalem, Alina Payne and Eva-Maria Troelenberg

The Red Corridor and the Wider Mediterranean: Histories of Global Commercial Desires and Image Making

This workshop takes its cue from the specificness of the geographical axis of the Suez Canal as the linking zone between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean and aims at discerning its historical trajectory. Yet, it also broadens its scope from the Suez Canal artificial strip to the wider fluid space of the ‘Red Corridor’ that leads through and around the Red Sea, redefining the region between the Eastern Mediterranean, East Africa and the Indian Ocean along the pathways, agencies, and sites of global commercial desire.

The workshop gathers a range of scholars (historians, art historians, archaeologists) to discuss the histories of the ‘Wider Mediterranean’ by focusing on the Red Sea as the connecting path. It aims to investigate (1) the mobility of goods and people along this corridor while linking the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean into the Mediterranean, (2) the role that the east African coast and the Hijaz took in providing new connections into Africa and Asia, and (3) the visual politics of the colonial and modern eras involving the project of the Suez Canal and other infrastructure projects in the region.

This gathering is the third workshop forming part of Black Mediterranean/Mediterraneo Nero, a joint project between Professor Avinoam Shalem of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and Professor Alina Payne of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, in collaboration with Professor Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Professor of Transcultural Studies/Art History at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and her ERC-sponsored project Machinery Rooms of the Mediterranean 1800-present. Images and Visual Archives of Movement and Acceleration. It is made possible with support from the Getty Foundation through its Connecting Art Histories initiative and co-sponsored by the ERC project MEDMACH.