Paper scraps, metal filings, wool shearings
dismantled sets, spoiled rags, animal blood
How did these ostensibly worthless by-products of art and industry avoid the flames of the kitchen hearth or the sweep of the apprentice's broom to spark ingenuity, generate new forms, and propel further acts of creation? Wastework moves beyond the well-researched category of spoliation, foregrounding waste as a material expression of the practices of ordering and classification by which people adjudicated between collection and disposal, wanted and unwanted, salvation and loss. Authors follow the afterlives of spent books and soiled textiles, peek behind the curtain of machine theatre, and venture into the smith's foundry and the chemist's laboratory.
Bringing together research from historians of art, architecture, science, and the environment, this volume examines acts of disposal and reuse and the consequences these carry for the study of early modern material culture. Drawing from the fields of discard studies and Eco materialism, contributors test the usefulness of contemporary formulations-secondary product cycles, material fatigue, metabolic flows, sustainability, recycling-while also proposing new categories with which to re-imagine the discarded past.
AUTHORS: Francesca Borgo is Lecturer at the University of St Andrews and Principal Investigator of the five-year Lise Meitner Group Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History at the Bibliotheca Hertziana Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome. Ruth Ezra is Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, where she specialises in the material and visual culture of early modern northern Europe. She is most curious about techniques and materials, workshop practices, and feedback loops between process and form.
SELLING POINTS: .
Innovative and interdisciplinary approach to themes little covered by studies .
Investigations of objects and aspects of material culture that touches on topics very much alive in today's cultural debate (eco-materialism, sustainability, reuse, global studies
) .
Charts the inaugural results of the scientific research project Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History of the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, one of the most important institutions for Art History and research in Italy and Germany
38 colour, 31 b/w illustrations
Edited by:
Francesca Borgo,
Ruth Ezra
Imprint: Officina Libraria
Country of Publication: Italy
Dimensions:
Height: 240mm,
Width: 165mm,
ISBN: 9788833672793
ISBN 10: 8833672794
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 12 May 2025
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
1. Francesca Borgo e Ruth Ezra, The Work of Wast – Introduction 2. Vittoria Di Palma, The Promise of Waste 3. Daniel M. Zolli, Spazzatura and the Virtue of Making Do 4. Victoria Addona, Early Modern Machine Theater and the Reuse of Ingenious Things 5. Carlo Scapecchi, Follegram: A Netherlandish Method to Recycle Wool Shearings in Sixteenth-Century Florence 6. Vitale Zanchettin, Walking on Waste: Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) and the Legacy of Venetian terrazzo 7. Anna-Claire Stinebring, The Crying Bride: Wastefulness and Playfulness in Netherlandish Genre Scenes 8. Lucy Razzall, “Nothing but a thin painted Past-board”: Substance, Surface, and Paradox in Early Modern England 9. John Gagné, Rags and Riches: The Paper Workshop’s Suppliers before Industrialization 10. Lisa Coulardot, Waste, Innovation, Efficiency: Jean Hellot and Dyestuffs in Eighteenth-Century France 11. Justin Abraham Linds, “Efficacious Fermentation”: Making Value from Rot on Eighteenth-Century Indigo Plantations 12. Stephanie O’Rourke, Subterranean Flows, from the Volcano to the Coal Mine 13. Marco Armiero, Afterword Acknowledgments Index Image Credits
Francesca Borgo is Lecturer at the University of St Andrews and Principal Investigator of the five-year Lise Meitner Group Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome. Ruth Ezra is Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, where she specialises in the material and visual culture of early modern northern Europe. She is most curious about techniques and materials, workshop practices, and feedback loops between process and form.
