Gabriel Spautz Vieira is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Archaeology.

More information about Gabriel Spautz Vieira

Current research

My research is part of the ERC-funded project BECACO – Between Canon and Coincidence: using data-driven approaches to understand Art Worlds.  The project will develop a novel interdisciplinary framework for studying the provenance of ethnographic and archaeological collections. Mobilizing the potential of data-driven methodologies, the project aims to create a diachronic, international, and cross-institutional understanding of the collecting of Indigenous Latin American Material in Europe between 1850 and 2000. By studying the collections of 12 museums in 9 European countries, the project will reconstruct how – through the formation of collections – the Indigenous Latin American Art World as it existed in Europe between 1850-2000 constructed an artistic, aesthetic, and academic discourse that shaped how Indigenous Latin America is represented in Europe until today.

Curriculum vitae

I obtained a Bachelor's degree in Archaeology at the University of Porto and, later, a Master's Degree in Archaeological Sciences at Université Paris 1—Panthéon Sorbonne.

For my first MA Thesis I  explored the world of the pre-colonial art market through the prism of exhibition catalogs. My aim during the project was to reassess the recent history of these collections, analyzing their ideological and aesthetic components in order to identify the underlying narratives of the representation of the Marajoara culture and the different "archaeologies" practiced in Latin America. For the second MA Thesis I focused on a specific collection, the Lions collection of Marajoara material culture, which belongs to the Musée des Amériques in Auch. It's the largest collection of its kind in France and I was the first to work with it. I'm carrying out a typological and iconographic study, as well as looking into the history of this collection and its provenance.

I aim to explore the intersection of Collection History research, Provenance Studies, and Digital Humanities during my PhD. I am particularly interested in the 'canonization' of non-Western art, the changes in aesthetical sensibilities towards pre-colonial objects during the last 200 years, and the role of the art market in our understanding of the past.

Office days

Monday to Friday