Research project
Between Canon and Coincidence: using data-driven approaches to understand Art Worlds (BECACO)
Indigenous Latin American artifacts have attracted the interest of Europeans since the earliest moment of contact between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The ERC-funded BECACO project uses an innovative multidisciplinary framework to investigate the provenance of ethnographic and archaeological collections from the Indigenous Latin American world in European museums, focusing on the period 1850-2000. The project introduces the concept of Art World Patterns to reconceptualize provenance as the study of the socio-politico-historical conditions that facilitated the movement of cultural material. BECACO combines various data-driven methodologies to identify these patterns and apply quantitative analyses, network analysis and data mining to explore the promises and limitations of different data-driven approaches to provenance research.
- Duration
- 2024 - 2028
- Contact
- Martin Berger
- Funding
-
European Research Council (ERC)
-
Leiden University
- Partners
ERC, Leiden University, Museums (British Museum (UK), Musée du Quai Branly (FR), Ethnologisches Museum Berlin (DE), Museum der Kulturen Basel (SW), Weltmuseum Wien (AUT), Néprajzi Múzeum (HU), MUDEC Milano (IT), National Museum of World Cultures (NL), National Museums of World Culture (SE)).
Research questions
1. How can the concept of Art World Patterns help us rethink provenance as the large-scale study of object biographies and the socio-cultural-political historical conjunctures that shaped these?
2. How can a data-driven approach to provenance uncover and map out Art Worlds on a large scale?
3. How do museum collections inform us about the formation and functioning of the ‘Indigenous Latin American Art World’ (1850-2000), and how has this shaped ideas about Indigenous Latin America until today?
Decolonizing Collecting
Broader calls to ‘decolonize the museum’ have led to closer scrutiny of how the acquisition of objects was interwoven with museums’ historic involvement in the global Colonial project. The BECACO project will help explore the networks of institutions and collectors to create a much-needed understanding of the phenomenon of collecting Indigenous Latin American artifacts between 1850-2000. This understanding will lay a foundation to better understand how these networks continue to shape ideas about Indigenous Latin America until today.
Global Provenance
This project aims to rethink provenance studies, shifting the gaze from the local and incidental, to the global and structural.
Current provenance research is problem-oriented and often binary, i.e. geared towards determining whether or not an object was collected in an ethical way. Moreover, this type of research is highly localized, as museums only stick to institutional boundaries. Diachronic, cross-institutional, international studies of provenance are generally lacking.
There is a need to build on local studies and move from individual object and institutional histories, towards understanding these processes on a larger scale. In order to ground the current decolonial critique of museums, it is fundamental to more deeply understand the formation of these collections as a diachronic socio-economic-cultural-academic process.
Art World Patterns
Methodologically, the project will harness the innovative potential of data-driven approaches to provenance.
The project will use a multi-scalar approach that integrates qualitative and quantitative thinking, introducing the concept of Art World Patterns, i.e. where, when, and how objects moved; why certain objects were collected over others; how these trends shifted over time; and who the main actors involved in these processes were. Quantitative and data-driven methods will be employed to analyze the formation of collections over time.
The results from this project will focus on the creation of a network, and its subsequent quantitative and qualitative analysis. As said, these network analyses lead to the understanding and explaining of ‘Indigenous Latin American Art Worlds’.