Erika Riccobon is a PhD candidate at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies.

More information about Erika Riccobon

Erika is a PhD candidate at LIAS (Leiden Institute for Area Studies) and her project is fully funded by The Hulsewé-Wazniewski Foundation (HWS). Erika is interested in the design, trade, and consumption of Chinese material culture in early modern Europe. Her project focuses on silks and papers made in eighteenth-century Guangzhou and Suzhou for the European markets, where they were used for the furnishing of the interior space. More specifically, Erika studies wallpaper sets, as well as wall hangings, curtains, and screens, and how they were incorporated, manipulated, and re-invented by artists in eighteenth-century Italy.

The project –titled The Interior Space as a Picture– investigates the multiple design practices revealed by these artworks, offering a polyvocal perspective on the making and re-imagining of Chinese silks and papers circulating in Europe at the time. By challenging a purely decorative understanding of rocaille ‘wall art’, the project aims to highlight the intersections between methods of interior design and the Enlightenment’s encyclopaedic impulse as visualised, for instance, through botanical and zoological pictures.

Erika received a Research Master’s degree in Asian Studies and a pre-Master’s degree in South and Southeast Asian Studies from Leiden University. Before her studies in the Humanities, she worked for over four years in the luxury fashion industry as a designer in South Korea, France, and Italy. Erika’s background in the creative arts has helped her develop an analytical approach which pays attention to practices of making and historical forms of design thinking.

Keywords

design thinking- visual culture studies - cultural analysis - picture theory - material culture studies - global history